Max Hastings' latest book must have been a challenge to write, as so many books have been written about the Vietnam War already. Hastings has a reputation as a right-winger - Private Eye calls him "Hitler" - yet he has tried very hard to produce an even-handed account of the conflict, and how it affected all the nations involved. This is creditworthy of itself, as, like he says of French and American historians of the subject, they:
"...write as if it was their own nation's story. Yet this was predominantly an Asian tragedy...around forty Vietnamese died for every American".
Instead of a bare chronology, Hastings sets out to answer the question: "What was the war like?" And in this, he succeeds very well.
Digressing somewhat, I need to provide some personal reflections. I spent the Vietnam war years in the comparative safety of Southport, Lancashire, and, in a sense, aged along with the conflict. I was 25 when Hastings, on his own admission, lost his nerve and joined the ignominious helicopter- borne evacuation of the US embassy in Saigon in 1975. Like most of my contemporaries, I was affected by the music, art and culture of the late 60s and early 70s, and when the Vietnam War ended, I felt as if something integral to my life had vanished. Even with my nascent political consciousness, I recognised that to be a merciful thing.
Not everyone felt like that. In the late 70s, I asked a merchant seaman ("Jack"), whom I knew had sailed to Viet Nam many times during the war, what he thought of it all. His answer startled me:
"I loved it!".
In brief, Jack had done very well out of the war, making money hand over fist, delivering cargoes to the South Vietnamese regime. Living in New Zealand at the time, he had, he claimed, beaten up many anti-war students, whom he saw as trying to end his lucrative lifestyle. He nurtured an abiding rancour for opponents of the war:
"Peaceniks and reporters - they ruined a good war!"
I leave the reader to form his or her own opinion of the underlying morality (or lack of it) of Jack's views, but we'll hear from him again later.
Returning to the book, Hastings begins with the inescapable fact that the history of the Vietnamese people has not been a happy one. They have known occupation by the Chinese (1000+years; finally kicked out 1426), the French (1883 - 1953), and numerous Emperors and warlords before the USA arrived to "help" defend South Vietnam against communist aggression. The USA might have noticed that this was a people who would not take kindly to foreign interference. Some voices in the US administrations recognised this, but were ignored.
One noticeable absence from the impressively comprehensive list of authors at the end of the book is that of
John Pilger. This is surprising, as Pilger was a frequent commentator on Vietnam, during and after the war. In fact, Pilger was evacuated from the U
S Saigon embassy in 1975 at the same time as Hastings. Pilger has written much about the war and its aftermath, and it is curious how Hastings nowhere quotes him. Nonetheless, John Pilger is a conspicuous absence in Hastings' book, perhaps because he is less "objective".
Not that Hastings is any the less scathing about American "assistance" to South Viet Nam than Pilger. He acknowledges that the US intervention was justified by what would now be called "fake news" -
the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, where North Vietnamese torpedo boats had supposedly attacked a US spy ship (they hadn't) and that the "helpful" landing of US Marines at Da Nang in 1964 happened without the prior knowledge of the South Vietnamese government. Pilger describes this as an "invasion", but then, this is not about him.
Where Hastings excels is in his depiction of combat, both on the ground and in the air and in relating his descriptions to the overall strategy of both sides. He recognises that both sides fought well at times and disastrously badly at others. The North Vietnamese supremo is recognised as
Lee Duan (not the then elderly Ho Chi Minh), an implacable and utterly ruthless member of the Politburo who authorised the 1968 Tet Offensive, which was a military disaster for the Viet Cong, if a political victory for the North Vietnamese cause. Nor does Hastings spare US commanders who, in his words, often:
"...exhibited folly of Crimean proportions". Hastings makes it clear that both sides were pitiless in their destruction of the environment and its impact upon civilians. The NVA and NLF pillaged villages for food supplies; the Americans destroyed whole areas of jungle and crop growing land with Agent Orange.
Hastings is scrupulously fair when it comes to the atrocities that were committed by both sides. The Viet Cong were merciless in their treatment of civilians they considered traitors, but, says Hastings, their atrocities were not featured in the Western press, whereas US and South Vietnamese atrocities were. Anyone who took an interest in the war remembers
the naked little girl scorched by napalm, the Viet Cong soldier
shot in the head by Saigon's police chief during the Tet Offensive and the ongoing atrocity that the US administration never realised caused them the most international and domestic opprobrium: the bombing of North Viet Nam. The poet,
Adrian Mitchell, summed up this (largely ineffective but expensive and murderous) campaign in his classic poem
"To Whom it May Concern":
"You put your bombers in, you put your conscience out,
You take the human being and you twist it all about".
Adrian Mitchell, along with the legion of poets, writers and musicians who opposed the war in Vietnam, is another curious absence from the book. I can appreciate that Hastings wanted to write a strictly political and military history, but, as I know myself, the reaction to the war led to a huge surge in what was called the "60s counter-culture", with the appearance of the hippie movement in western countries and great numbers of anti-war demonstrations. The war influenced the writing of poems and lyrics which were often masterly in their attacks on the war. Who can forget the lines in the song by
Country Joe Macdonald? :
"Be the first one on your block
To have your boy come home in a box"
When Joan Baez sang
"We Shall Overcome" in the 60s, it was a protest against the war in Vietnam as well as part of the struggle for Civil Rights in the USA. Hastings would probably say (rightly, if not relevantly) that such dissent would not have been tolerated in North Viet-Nam, but the poems, songs and protests gave focus and encouragement to all who opposed the war. As Jonathan Steele comments, in
his Guardian review of Hastings' book:
"Most of those who protested against the war from the start saw it for what it was: an imperial effort to control the destiny of a small and distant country that was no threat to Americans, even if it “went communist” or came under Russian or Chinese control."Relating to the question of Viet Cong atrocities, I recall Tariq Ali being questioned about them after the so-called
Battle of Grosvenor Square, in 1968. He said this by way of reply, as far as I can remember:
"We dismiss them (VC atrocities) as irrelevant. The French Resistance committed what may have been thought atrocities, but it was the cause that mattered"
He had a point. As any Marxist would say: there is a difference between the violence of the oppressed and that of the oppressor. And Herbert Marcuse did say that there is a difference between Red Terror and White Terror; between defending an old order with violence and the overthrowing of that order. In the case of Viet Nam, I believe the whole issue to be irrelevant; the war itself was an atrocity that could have been avoided. John Pilger has said that had the US not intervened, Vietnam would have become an independent Marxist non-aligned state, as was Yugoslavia; Hastings says this is a mistaken view, as the North Vietnamese leadership were committed Stalinists; I say that anything would have been better than this horrible conflict.
The American justification for this disaster was that they were "helping" the South Vietnamese defeat Communism. When US troops went into action, post-1964, they came to form a generally low opinion of the ARVN (South Vietnamese troops). The bulk of the fighting fell upon the American soldiers and marines, and they referred to their allies as "dinks" and "gooks" - the same words they used for their VC and NVA enemies.. They forgot that they, the US troops, would serve a fixed-term tour of duty and then go home, back to "The World" on "The Great Big Bird to Paradise". And let's not forget: the Viet Nam War ended for the US military on
March 29, 1973, when the last combat troops left altogether.The ARVN, on the other hand, however much they suffered and fought, had nothing to look forward to but more fighting, as long as the US continued to support the South Vietnamese regime. No incentive there. But it is remarkable how some ARVN formations continued to fight well after the American withdrawal, as Hastings, to his credit, makes clear. Even when things fell apart in 1975 and the PAVN (People's Army Of Viet Nam) drove on Saigon, some South Vietnamese formations fought with the utmost gallantry, while most ARVN units disintegrated alongside them. It has taken a right-of-centre Englishman to publicly acknowledge their doomed bravery.
There are villains in this book a-plenty: Richard Nixon, who kept American troops in Viet Nam, even when he knew the war was lost. 21 000 troops were killed while he procrastinated about their withdrawal. Lee Duan, who drove his people to suffer and to be slaughtered for the cause in which many did not believe. While young North-Vietnamese died in their thousands fighting in the south, Lee Duan's children were safely attending university in Moscow. The driving force behind the NVA/Viet Cong war effort owed more to nationalist motives than international Communism. As one ex-PAVN soldier said recently on TV:
"We weren't fighting for Karl Marx, but to drive out all foreigners". But, thankfully, there are heroes and humanitarians: the North Vietnamese prison guard who lost two relatives in an American bombing raid on Hanoi, yet still shook hands and wished well to US prisoners of war who were released two days later. The boxer, Muhammad Ali (not mentioned in the book), who refused military service and risked imprisonment for his stand -
"No Viet Cong ever called me nigger". And the unbelievably courageous helicopter pilot, Hugh Thompson, who rescued Vietnamese civilians at risk of being murdered during
the My Lai massacre, 1968, and who "raised hell" for years afterwards about this crime committed by Charlie Company.
This is a long, powerful and disturbing book, which I recommend to anyone interested in post-WW2 history. it provides insight and information into the actions and motives of the prime movers in the conflict. My only (mild) criticism is that I would have liked to see further insight into the motivation of the fighters on both sides, and what underlying factors drove the NLF and NVA in particular on to so many sacrifices. I think I can provide some insight here, with another anecdote from Jack the sailor, mentioned above.
Again in the late 1970s, Jack was talking about an incident during one of many US "search and destroy" missions in Viet Nam. A group of GIs happened upon an old drinks vendor and demanded coke to drink. The old man refused, presumably because he wanted payment. One GI raised his rifle and gave the old man "two in the chest". Jack was smiling as he told me this, and he clearly approved of the GI's action. He saw no problem with this killing, as, said Jack, the GIs were fighting for the freedom of the old man's country. The contradictions and immorality of this view were completely lost on Jack. Anyone seeking to understand how the United States alienated so many Vietnamese can learn something from Jack's brief anecdote.
Was anything learned from the US debacle in Viet Nam? The USSR learned nothing, as the world saw when they invaded Afghanistan. The resulting war, and eventual withdrawal, became known as "Russia's Viet Nam". We British, of course, beat many imperial retreats post-WW2. None, happily, were as bloody and destructive as Viet Nam and Afghanistan - although every bit as inglorious. As for the USA, let's fast forward to the early noughties. After the invasion of Iraq, I clearly remember seeing on TV a black GI haranguing a group of Iraqi women:
"We are here for your f-----g freedom!"
Plus ca change.
