Vietnam. Max Hastings
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unleashed on innocents in the path of armies, was as ghastly in the second century AD as in the twentieth. An attacker set afire by burning oil poured from the walls of a medieval city suffered as terribly as one who fell victim to napalm. Looting, rape, black markets, casual violence towards civilians and prisoners, are inseparable from all conflicts. The 1939–45 cities of Europe hosted as many girls for sale as later did Saigon – recall London’s ‘Piccadilly commandos’. In times gone by, however, little was said to folks back home about such sordid manifestations. Film footage authorised for public screening excluded images that were deemed demoralising, because explicit.
In the new revelatory mood of the 1960s, however, suddenly the world witnessed nightly on prime-time TV the excesses and uglinesses perpetrated by US and South Vietnamese forces. Among images that inflicted special injury upon American purposes were that of Saigon’s police chief shooting a Vietcong prisoner during the 1968 Tet offensive; and of a screaming child, running naked in her agony after falling victim to a 1972 napalm strike. Hanoi released no comparable snapshots of cadres executing indigenous opponents by burying them alive, nor of Vietcong being mown down in unsuccessful assaults. Instead, it broadcast only heroic narratives, together with heart-rending footage of devastation inflicted by capitalist air power. The visual contrast between the war-making of a superpower, deploying diabolical technology symbolised by the B-52 bomber, and that of peasants clad in coolie hats or pith helmets, relying for mobility upon sandals and bicycles, conferred a towering propaganda advantage on the communists. In the eyes of many young Western people, Ho Chi Minh’s ‘freedom fighters’ became imbued with a romantic glow. It seems quite mistaken to suggest, as did some hawks fifty years ago, that the media lost the war for the United States. But TV and press coverage made it impossible for Westerners either to ignore the human cost or to deny the military blunderings.
Hours before I myself, aged twenty-four, flew to Saigon for the first time, I sought advice from Nicholas Tomalin, a British Sunday Times reporter. He gave me the address of the Indian bookshop on Tu-do Street which offered the best rate for changing dollars on the black market. Then he said, ‘Just remember – they lie, they lie, they lie.’ He meant the US command, of course, and he was right. Like many other Western writers then and since, however, Nick ignored the important point that Hanoi did the same. This does not render acceptable the deceits perpetrated by MACV (Military Assistance Command Vietnam) and JUSPAO (Joint US Public Affairs Office), but it provides a context often absent from judgements upon the so-called ‘credibility gap’.
Moreover, although American and South Vietnamese spokesmen peddled fantasies, MACV seldom barred reporters from getting out there and seeing for ourselves. In a fashion unmatched in any conflict before or since, free passage was accorded on fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters to journalists and photographers, many fiercely hostile to their carrier’s cause. Relative American openness, contrasted with the communist commitment to secrecy, in my view constitutes a claim upon a fragment of moral high ground. The egregious error committed by US statesmen and commanders was not that of lying to the world, but rather that of lying to themselves.
In modern Vietnam collectivist economic policies have been largely discarded, yet the legitimacy of its autocratic government derives solely from its victory in 1975. Thus, no stain is permitted to besmirch that narrative: few survivors feel able to speak freely about what took place. This opacity has been amazingly successful in defining the terms in which Western as well as Asian writers address the war. While it is unlikely that US archives still conceal important secrets, many must be locked in Hanoi’s files. Liberal America has adopted an almost masochistic attitude, which has distorted the historiography as surely as do jingoistic works by conservative revisionists. I recently asked one of the most celebrated correspondents of the war era, ‘If peace demonstrations had been permitted in Hanoi, how many people would have shown up?’ He replied unhesitatingly, ‘None. The North was 100 per cent behind the struggle.’
This seems heroically naïve: most normal human beings crave escape from an experience that is inflicting grief and hardship on themselves and loved ones. Many of those in the West who opposed the war made a well-founded assessment that the US was doing something unlikely to succeed, employing grievously haphazard violence. Some then went a step further, adopting a view that if their own nation had embraced a bad cause, the other side’s must be a good one. Yet the Hanoi politburo and National Liberation Front caused the South Vietnamese people merely to exchange oppression by warlords and landlords in favour of even harsher subjection to disciples of Stalin. Democracy allows voters to remove governments with which they are dissatisfied. Once communist rule has been established, however, no further open ballot is indulged, nor has been under Hanoi’s auspices since 1954.
In conducting its war effort, the Northern politburo enjoyed significant advantages. Its principals were content to pay an awesome price in human life, secure from media or electoral embarrassments. They could suffer repeated failures on the battlefield without risking absolute defeat, because the US had set its face against invading the North. By contrast, when the South lost once, its fate was irreversible. There are significant parallels between the Vietnamese communists’ struggle and the Soviet Union’s 1941–45 war effort: Stalin yoked patriotism, ideology and compulsion in just the fashion emulated by Ho Chi Minh and Le Duan a generation later. Beyond peradventure the communists proved more effective warriors than the soldiers of Saigon, but it seems prudent to hesitate before anointing them the good guys in this saga.
Much of the narrative below depicts cruelties and follies, yet within the big canvas many individuals, Vietnamese and American, of all ages and both sexes, military and civilian, behaved decently. I have sought to tell stories of such people, because it is mistaken to allow virtuous endeavour to vanish into the cauldron of bomb blasts, brutalities and betrayals from which most accounts of the war are served up. I decided not to conduct primary political research: US archives have been trawled by scholars for decades; exhaustive accounts exist of the Western participants’ decision-making, notable among them those of Fredrik Logevall. Ken Hughes’ 2015 rendition and analysis of the White House tapes have established an almost incontrovertible record about the thinking and decision-making of Nixon and Kissinger that ended in the January 1973 Paris Accords, and supersedes much of the self-serving narrative presented in the participants’ memoirs. However, I have spent many hours studying testimony in the US Army’s Military Heritage and Education Center at Carlisle, Pa., and the US Marine Corps’ Archive at Quantico, Va. I have also accessed online material from Texas Tech University’s Vietnam War Study Center at Lubbock, and conducted almost a hundred interviews with survivors of all ages and both sexes, American and Vietnamese. Thanks to the indispensable aid of Merle Pribbenow, I have read many thousands of pages of translated Vietnamese memoirs, documents and histories.
Any historian such as myself, publishing a 2018 study of Vietnam, should acknowledge a debt to the recent Burns-Novick TV documentary series, which around the world has reawakened consciousness about this epochal struggle. I hope that my own work conveys something of the enormity of the experience the Vietnamese people endured over three generations, from the consequences of which they remain unliberated to this day.
MAX HASTINGS
Chilton Foliat, Berkshire, and Datai, Langkawi, Malaysia
May 2018
* Described, along with other experiences of conflict, in the author’s 2000 memoir Going to the Wars.
Note on Styles Adopted in the Text
Viet Nam is represented thus by its own people; in the interests of accessibility, however, I sustain the Western custom of using Vietnam, just as I render Ha Noi, Sai Gon, Dien Bien Phu, Da Nang and Viet Cong as single words.
The Vietnamese language makes extensive use of tone marks. I omit these in my text, but in the bibliography and index all proper names are appropriately accented.
Vietnamese names are commonly triple-barrelled, with the family name coming first, and I have adhered to this convention. Many Westerners are bewildered