Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power (61 page)

Despite the wholesale importation of Western arms and organization by the North Vietnamese, the Americans quickly learned that their own military—free, individualistic, superbly supplied, expertly equipped, eager for decisive battles of shock—was not static. Rather, the American armed forces evolved throughout the war and proved superior to the North Vietnamese, despite horrendous supply lines, the absence of clear-cut fronts and battle lines, restrictive rules of engagement that nullified traditional Western preferences for decisive battle, and domestic opposition.

No American army in 1944 would have fought the Germans in France without permission to cross the Rhine or to bomb Berlin at will. Japan would have won World War II had the United States simply fought in the jungles and occupied towns of the Japanese empire, promising not to bomb Tokyo, mine its harbors, attack its sanctuaries, or invade its native possessions, while journalists and critics visited Tokyo and broadcast to American troops from Japanese radio stations. Neither Truman nor Roosevelt would have offered to negotiate with Hitler or Stalin after the successful Normandy landings or the devastating bombing campaign over Tokyo in March 1945. GIs in World War II were killed in pursuit of victory, not in order to avoid defeat or to pressure totalitarian governments to discuss an armistice. In war it is insane not to employ the full extent of one’s military power or to guarantee to the enemy that there are sanctuaries for retreat, targets that are off limits, and a willingness to cease operations anytime even the pretext of negotiations is offered.

The American military itself did not react well to these Orwellian impositions on operations. The number of rear-echelon troops soared— somewhere between 80 and 90 percent of all soldiers who went to Vietnam never saw real combat. One-year tours of duty ensured that many green recruits would be killed in the first months of combat only to have the survivors sent home when they were battle-wise and more likely to be effective leaders in teaching others the nature of staying alive in the field. The military often turned Vietnam into an American bureaucratic nightmare: “The Military Assistance Command staff directory was more than fifty pages long. It included a chief of staff, two deputy commanders and their staffs, a deputy chief of staff for economic affairs, two deputy affairs, a staff secretariat, and three complete ‘staff groups,’ a general staff, a ‘special staff,’ and a ‘personal staff’ ” (R. Spector,
After Tet,
215).

Sometimes the insistence to fight openly and directly in battle still only took on the semblance of the traditional Western war—shock battle, direct assault, overwhelming firepower—without the accompanying corollary of seizing and holding property. Blasting apart the enemy with superior fire and advancing with disciplined landed infantry was entirely in the European military tradition of Alexander the Great and Charles Martel. Taking and then abandoning real estate that was captured at great cost was not. On May 10, 1969, for example, General Melvin Zais, commander of the 101st Airborne, unleashed his troops against the infamous “Hamburger Hill” (Hill 937). In a horrendous firefight, involving direct assault on the ridge, his men suffered fifty-six dead while killing more than five hundred of the enemy. When responding to vociferous attacks at home from politicians over the apparent waste of American lives in that ten-to-one exchange—the hill was abruptly abandoned after capture— Zais inadvertently summed up the entire Western way of war and why it did not necessarily always lead to strategic victory in Vietnam:

That hill was in my area of operations, that was where the enemy was, that’s where I attacked him. . . . If I find him in another hill . . . I assure you I will attack him. . . . It is true that hill 937, as a particular piece of terrain, was of no particular significance. However, the fact that the enemy force was located there was of prime significance. (G. Lewy,
America in Vietnam,
144)

A limited war that ignored the capture and protection of land, and in essence sought to avoid the defeat of an often corrupt South Vietnam, rather than to achieve victory over a battle-hardened communist army of North Vietnam—whether wisely for necessary reasons of avoiding a larger conflict, or in error due to trumped-up fears of Soviet and Chinese intervention—was a referendum on American political wisdom, not a true litmus of Western military power. Few, then and now, doubt whether America could have won the Vietnam War; many remain unsure whether it should have.

Who
Lost
the
War?

Despite recent arguments to the contrary, the media in themselves did not lose the Vietnam War. Journalists did not snatch political defeat from military victory. Rather, they only contributed to the collapse of American power and resistance, by accentuating frequent American blunders and South Vietnamese corruption, without commensurate attention paid to North Vietnamese atrocities, the brutal history of communism in Asia, and the geopolitical stakes involved. Their ability to sensationalize relatively minor American setbacks and exaggerate modest communist victories often helped to turn public opinion and thus give them undue influence with American politicians who directed the course of the war.

Yet ultimately, the American military command itself forfeited the war, despite brave soldiers, good equipment, and plentiful supplies. The top echelon lost the conflict because they accommodated themselves without imagination to the conditions of political audit and scrutiny that made it difficult, but not impossible, to win. Conservatives and principled liberals were correct in their assessment of the absurdity of the prevailing American strategy: the former demanding Americans fight to win any war they undertake, the latter insisting America could not fight to win, given the political situation, and so should not fight. Once the nation understood the conditions under which the war was deemed necessary to be fought, and the cost required to fight it that way, it determined it was not in their interest to pay it. The military could have easily won the war it wanted to fight, but did not know how to fight the war that it was asked to win—a war that was nevertheless winnable with daring and ingenuity. So instead, they bombed incessantly and unwisely—seventy tons for every square mile in Vietnam, five hundred pounds of explosives for every man, woman, and child in the country—without ever learning why hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese were fighting on behalf of a murderous communist dictatorship that would soon enslave their country and ruin its economy. A realist of the Bismarck school, without regard to human suffering or the misery of the Vietnamese under communism, would argue that it was not in the geopolitical interest of the United States to expend such vast amounts of its manhood and capital on a relatively insignificant country, which, left to its own as a communist dictatorship, would probably become as likely a nuisance to its communist neighbors as it was to America—when the real shift in the Cold War meant the struggle was no longer over mere land, but about global economics, technology, and mass consumer culture.

If it was not the intention of the media and press people who sent home their biased and often one-sided reports to apprise America of the inconsistency of its own politicians and military command, the result was nevertheless sometimes just that. The long-held Western tradition of free speech and self-critique ultimately did not ruin America despite the ruination of its cause in Vietnam. The communists won the war and lost the peace, massacring their people and destroying their economy—all in a closed and censored society. America, despite its propensity for self-loathing, lost the war and won the peace, its model of democracy and capitalism winning adherents as never before, with its reformist military emerging stronger, not weaker, after the ordeal.

The record of Vietnam—books, motion pictures, official documents—remains a nearly exclusive Western phenomenon. Antiwar activists criticized this monopoly of information even as they themselves published and lectured in a free society and thus contributed to that very dominance of Western publication. The communist version of the war, when it did appear in print or video, was immediately subject to skepticism. Few doubted that publication of such information was not free, and the government that controlled the dissemination of knowledge was not credible. In contrast, at various times the American government and its critics were duplicitous, but rarely at the same time on the same issue. In that marketplace of conflicting accounts, most observers sensed that freedom was the guarantor of the truth, and so looked for veracity anywhere but in North Vietnamese, Chinese, or Russian accounts. The American experience in the Vietnam War—whether noble or shameful—remains an almost exclusively Western story.

WAR AMID AUDIT, SCRUTINY, AND SELF-CRITIQUE

While the manner of civilian audit, dissent, and self-critique during the Vietnam War was different from Western past practice, it was nevertheless hardly new in spirit. Pericles (“Squill-Head”) was ridiculed on the Athenian stage in the same manner that General Westmoreland (“Waste-More-Land”) was pilloried on American campuses. Pericles, not Westmoreland, branded the foreheads of his captives and was attacked by Athenian critics for doing so. Jane Fonda dallied with her nation’s enemies, precisely as did Athenian rightists who fawned over Sparta in the closing months of the Peloponnesian War. Plato, remember, in a near treasonous outburst, called the great victory at Salamis a mistake that had made the Athenians worse as a people.

To Aeschylus, war was but “the food of Ares.” Sophocles saw it as “the father of our sorrows.” Even the imperialist Pericles could dub it “an utter folly.” “They make it a wasteland and call it peace,” said Tacitus of the Roman army’s conduct in colonial wars. The stuff of Western history, drama, oratory, poetry, and art—Brueghel, Goya, and Picasso—has always been frank criticism of contemporary conflict and often of the absurdity of war in general. Euripides’ dramas, staged before nearly 20,000 voting Athenian citizens, reflect the evolving understanding of the human and material costs of battle during the Peloponnesian War. Three decades of plagues, coups, destruction of neutral states, and disaster at Sicily were far more similar to Vietnam than to World War II. Euripides’
Trojan
Women,
presented not long after the Athenian slaughter of the Melians (415 B.C.), chronicles how the innocent wives, mothers, and children of the Trojans, not just soldiers, suffer the consequences of war. The comic playwright Aristophanes also wrote several plays
—Acharnians, Peace,
and
Lysistrata—
that ridicule the endless traffic in war charges that the profiteer and the megalomaniac are more interested in themselves than in the citizens. While a Spartan army marched through the countryside of Athens, the Athenian populace watched its own citizens denigrate the policy of forced evacuation and continued war with Sparta.

The conduct of Jane Fonda, Tom Hayden, and the Berrigan brothers may have been treasonous, but not to such an extent as the medizing Greeks, who in 480 B.C. joined the Persians at Salamis. Press conferences in Saigon—known as the Five O’Clock Follies—may have been acrimonious and characterized by endless charges and countercharges, but they were no less vehement than the near physical altercations that took place between Themistocles and his coadmirals on the eve before Salamis, or the hangings and near open war between the Spanish and Italians hours before the fight at Lepanto. The media may have destroyed the reputation of General Westmoreland, but no more so than the gossipy Athenian Assembly did to the hero Themistocles, who was exiled and died abroad, shunned at home. The criticism of the Vietnam War ruined Lyndon Johnson, but the storm of dissent in the Peloponnesian War led to Pericles being fined—and eventually worn out, sick, and dead before the third year of the twenty-seven-year-old conflict was over.

Just as there were no North Vietnamese dissidents in Washington protesting their own soldiers’ slaughter at Hué, so Xerxes, like the Politburo in Hanoi, brooked neither dissident nor audit. Again, remember the fate of the dismembered Phoenician admirals at Salamis or poor Pythius the Lydian, who all mistakenly believed that they could reason with the Great King. It remained a truism that a Greek at Salamis, a Roman at Cannae, a Venetian at Lepanto, an Englishman at Rorke’s Drift, and Americans at Midway and Vietnam all could vote and speak as they pleased—and this was not true of Persians, Carthaginians, Ottomans, Zulus, Japanese, and Vietnamese. Even autocrats like Alexander or Cortés commonly responded to critics among their staff and soldiers in a way that Aztec and Persian emperors were not accustomed.

Lyndon Johnson may have been destroyed by his domestic critics, but millennia earlier even the autocrat Alexander the Great did not escape the scrutiny of Western contrarians. The philosopher Diogenes, when asked by Alexander what he wished, purportedly replied that the king move out of his sunlight. Alexander was no doubt a thug and a dangerous man, who for a time derailed Western freedom, but he was an amateur autocrat compared to the Persian Achaemenids. He was far more likely to be arguing with his Macedonian generals than was Xerxes with his satraps, far more likely to be attacked in the Assembly Hall by a Demosthenes—and far more likely to be told to move out of the way on a street corner by a philosopher than was Darius at the court in Persepolis. Hernán Cortés, who gave his king a subcontinent and ships of precious metals, was nevertheless largely shunned and ostracized in his old age, his past daring and killing more an object of vituperation from clerics, censure from bureaucrats, and lawsuits from former colleagues than cause for lasting praise and commemoration from the Spanish crown.

Throughout the ordeal of Vietnam, the Congress and the president were at odds over the conduct of the war, as various generals were paraded before Congress to testify, even as congressional representatives and senators were ordered to the White House to give an account of their “disloyal” votes. But unlike Roman republicans, few American generals had their own separate military commands. American senators were rarely interfering on the field of battle. Squabbling and running to the press in Vietnam paled before the confrontation between the consuls the night before Cannae. L. Aemilius Paulus and the reckless C. Terentius Varro, elected officials both, despised each other, and so their plans for their shared army worked at cross-purposes. Fabius Maximus, whose strategy finally turned the tide of the Second Punic War, for a time was the most unpopular man at Rome, dubbed a coward for his tactics of delay. The achievement of Charles Martel at Poitiers was often ignored by later chroniclers largely because he was demonized by the church as a confiscator of ecclesiastical lands.

In the midst of his conquest, Cortés was branded a criminal by Diego Velázquez, governor of Cuba. His sojourn in Mexico City itself was interrupted when Pánfilo de Narváez arrived in Vera Cruz with a writ for his arrest. Father Bernardino de Sahagún had little good to say about his own countryman, Hernán Cortés, but wrote with empathy about the natives whom the conquistador slaughtered. For all of Cortés’s “official” letters to Charles V, we receive a somewhat different story from his contemporaries. Bartolomé de Las Casas thought the Spanish treatment of the Indians abominable, and so wrote in detail about the sins of the conquest. By the time of his death, Cortés was largely ignored, unappreciated, severely criticized in print, and in need of money. In contrast, what little we know of the critics of Montezuma come from Spanish, not Mexican, written sources. While Spaniards criticized Cortés in his success for his hubris and cruelty, Aztec lords turned on Montezuma only for his failure to eject the Spanish from Tenochtitlán. No Aztec wrote or criticized the decision to kill thousands of innocents on the Great Pyramid.

John Colenso, bishop of Natal, and his daughters devoted their lives to apprising the British public of their government’s cruelty toward the Zulus. In turn, the British press issued sensational and often inaccurate news about Isandhlwana, convincing the public to muster unnecessarily large relief contingents, but also to question whether it had all been necessary in the first place. Few careers—not Chelmsford’s or that of his successor, Sir Garnet Wolseley—were enhanced by the fighting. The Colensos were about as active on the Zulu behalf during the war and as critical of British inhumanity as American antiwar activists were sympathetic to the North Vietnamese.

The Japanese read of Midway as a great victory; wounded sailors were confined to hospitals to ensure the news of the disaster never reached the public. Admiral Yamamoto alone created the flawed plan and felt no need for much discussion and brooked no dissent. All this was in contrast to a wild American public discourse in which sensitive details of the intelligence of the battle were leaked to newspapers before the fighting had even begun. American strategy was debated in open meetings called by Admiral Nimitz, and the results sent to Washington to be ratified or rejected by an elected government. Ho Chi Minh, though a professed communist, was far more kindred to the Japanese militarists than he was to the Americans.

Vietnamese often turned to American academics, religious figures, and intellectuals in attempts to nullify American power that their own army could not. When the communist campaign to denigrate the Americans and sanctify the North Vietnamese reached the world stage, it was no accident it did so largely through Western, rather than communist or Third World, media. “American puppets” and “running dog capitalist warmongers” may have sounded neat on American campuses, but they were not the vocabulary of truth, and so were not what convinced the American public to call an end to their war in Vietnam. The
New York
Times
and
60 Minutes
alone could do what
Pravda
and the
Daily Worker
could not: prevail on the American people that the war was unwinnable and unjust. To the North Vietnamese, the loud-speaking, confusing, and fractious Americans—William F. Buckleys and Jane Fondas alike—were not so much evil or good as they were insidious.

What, then, are we to make of this final tenet of Western military practice, this strange 2,500-year-old habit of subjecting military operations to constant and often self-destructive political audit and public scrutiny? Can anything good come of a volatile Western citizenry that dictates when, where, and how its soldiers are to fight, even as it permits its writers, artists, and journalists freely and sometimes wildly to criticize the conduct of their own troops? Surely in the case of reporting the Tet Offensive and the Vietnam War—whose vehemence and absurdity make it a pivotal case study of the entire wisdom of allowing dissent and open attacks on the military—cannot the argument be made that the public license lost a war that America could have won?

If the conduct of an unbridled media and constant public scrutiny of even the most minute military operations harmed the American effort in Vietnam, it is equally true that the institutions and process of that self-recrimination helped to correct serious flaws in American tactics and strategy. The United States military in Vietnam under General Abrams from 1968 to 1971 fought a far more effective war than it had between 1965 and 1967, largely as a result of dissent in and out of the military. The bombing of 1973, far from being ineffective and indiscriminate, brought the communists back to the peace table through its destruction of just a few key installations in North Vietnam. Nixon’s so-called Linebacker II campaign was far more lethal to the war machine of Hanoi than the much-criticized indiscriminate Rolling Thunder campaign years earlier. If in 1965 the Johnson administration had no idea what was at stake in Vietnam, or what would evolve as the ultimate rules of engagement, by 1971 the Nixon government understood precisely the American dilemma. As a result of the antiwar sentiment and the freedom of dissent, Nixon knew only too well the nature of the quagmire that he was in.

More important still, Tet was not a single battle, nor was Vietnam in and of itself an isolated war. Both occurred on a worldwide canvas of the Cold War, a much larger global struggle of values and cultures. In this context, the license of the West, while it was detrimental to the poor soldiers who were asked to repel the Tet Offensive, had the long-term effect of winning, rather than forfeiting, American credibility. To defeat the West, it is often necessary not merely to repel its armies but to extinguish its singular monopoly over the dissemination of information, to annihilate not merely its soldiers but its emissaries of free expression.

This more insidious component of Western military practice, the supposedly astute and tenacious communists of North Vietnam never understood. Instead, they were confused about America in Vietnam, condemning its administration but careful to avoid blanket criticism of its people; damning its military but praising its intelligentsia; ecstatic over the slanted reporting of the news but occasionally baffled and hurt when an honest story emerged about the nature of their own thuggish regime; smug in American television’s broadcast of the “liberation” of Saigon, furious at the later coverage of the boat people. If the perplexed North Vietnamese were gladdened that the
Washington Post
could say worse things about its own military than they did communists, and if they were curious why an American movie star could pose in Hanoi on an artillery battery rather than put on a patriotic play at Carnegie Hall—and still come home without a prison sentence—they were equally furious when asked about the nature of the 1976 “free” elections, and surprised at the few brave reporters who finally told the world of the communist holocaust in Cambodia.

This strange propensity for self-critique, civilian audit, and popular criticism of military operations—itself part of the larger Western tradition of personal freedom, consensual government, and individualism— thus poses a paradox. The encouragement of open assessment and the acknowledgment of error within the military eventually bring forth superior planning and a more flexible response to adversity. The knowledge that military conduct is to be questioned by soldiers themselves, to be audited and scrutinized by those outside the armed forces altogether, and to be interpreted, editorialized, and often mischaracterized by reporters to the public can ensure accountability and provide for a wide exchange of views.

At the same time, this freedom to distort can often hamper military operations of the moment, as Thucydides himself saw and Plato feared in the
Republic—
and as was the case of the Tet Offensive in Vietnam. In Vietnam due to frankness and hysteria in place of reasoned and positive assessment, America may have prolonged its agony and lost battles in the field, but surely not the war against communism. Had America been as closed a society as was Vietnam, then it may well have won the battle but lost the war, much like the Soviet Union, which imploded after its involvement in Afghanistan—a military intervention similar to America’s in Vietnam in terms of tactical ineptitude, political denseness, and strategic imbecility, but a world apart in the Russians’ denial of free criticism, public debate, and uncensored reporting about their error. How odd that the institutions that can thwart the daily battle progress of Western arms can also ensure the ultimate triumph of its cause. If the Western commitment to self-critique in part caused American defeat in Vietnam, then that institution was also paramount in the explosion of Western global influence in the decades after the war—even as the enormous and often bellicose Vietnamese army fought for a regime increasingly despised at home, shunned abroad, and bankrupt economically and morally.