Thoughts on the Vietnam War
Trip Start
Jul 15, 2007
1
137
195
Trip End
Jul 16, 2008
Loading Map
Map Options
Show trip route
Hide lines
Ho Chi Minh City,
Vietnam
Friday, March 14, 2008
Today we visited the War Remnants Museum, which was formerly called the War Crimes Museum. More proof that, especially when the victors are Communists without a free press to contend with, the winners write the history.
The exhibits included a wide range of military hardware, including American tanks, howitzers, bombs, mines and aircraft. There was a room devoted to information on the many journalists killed during both the French and the American Wars. (The first from 1947 to 1954, the second from 1965 to 1975.)
Among the exhibits were one on the My Lai massacre and another on Operation Ranch Hand, the spraying of the chemical dioxin as a defoliant to deny the North Vietnamese forces jungle cover
Info plaque
. There is some epidemiological dispute about the effect of Agent Orange on Vietnam veterans in the United States, but it seems clear that it has had terrible effects in Vietnam, in particular causing severe birth defects. I thought of the guy begging at the Notre Dame Cathedral nearby, who had no arms and only two vestigial hands attached to his shoulders. My country probably caused that deformity. This is not a comfortable thought. One room at the end of the tour was devoted to the antiwar movement in the United States. There was a photo of a massive protest on the Washington Mall during the Nixon Presidency. As a high-school student in roughly 1970, I was at that protest with my father.
Should I feel proud that I protested against the war? I certainly don't feel proud. My views have changed a lot since 1970, and I think the guys who fought in the heat and mud of Vietnam are the heroes, not protesters like me. More than thirty years later, I find myself uncharacteristically unsure about what the American experience in Vietnam means. The lessons of Vietnam are anything but obvious, unless you are very firmly installed at one end or the other of the political spectrum.
My first thought is that the war was fought on the American side without a war-winning strategy
American artillery
. Secretary of Defense Robert Macnamara, formerly the CEO of Ford, was utterly arrogant and incompetent as a military leader. President Johnson was famous for micro-managing the war, to the point of picking individual bombing targets. We had no strategy to win the war, just the mistaken belief that it was smart to trade one American death for ten Vietnamese deaths. Robert Macnamara surely never read Clausewitz. The purpose of war is not to kill the enemy, but to destroy the enemy's ability to continue to fight. Since we never even tried to do this, we killed huge numbers but came nowhere close to a successful resolution.
The military technologies we had available were terribly destructive but woefully imprecise. Carpet bombing of targets in both North and South Vietnam caused huge numbers of civilian deaths. Napalm was a terrible weapon, but likewise did not distinguish between soldier and civilian, between intended target and collateral victim.
Much of the conventional wisdom about Vietnam is certainly wrong. For example, Walter Cronkite's conclusion at the time of the Tet offensive in 1968 that the war was lost was completely wrong
French tourists
. Tet was a complete defeat for the Viet Cong, who were never again a serious battlefield force, and a major blow to the North Vietnamese Army, who did almost all the fighting post-1968. (If you want a powerful perspective on the American War, read The Sorrow of War, a superb novel by a North Vietnamese soldier.) Learning "the lessons of Vietnam" requires empathy, but also an understanding of contingency. We know how terrible the war was, the millions of deaths in Vietnam, the 55,000 American soldiers killed and many more wounded. What we cannot know is how terrible the alternative might have been, had we not chosen to counter the Communists in Southeast Asia. Would Laos and Cambodia still have become Communist? Would Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge still have killed one to two million Cambodians? Would Thailand or Malaysia have become the next battlegrounds between Communism and the West? (Malaysia did not finally put paid to their own Communist insurgency until the mid-1980s.)
After the war, anyone associated with the Saigon government was sent to a re-education camp, often with their whole families. Post-war life was bleak, as the Communist government failed to deliver jobs or growth. The economy was stagnant. Only with the Doi Moi free-market reforms in the late 1980s did the economy turn around and begin to grow
Antiwar protest 1970
. Vietnam is now the world's #2 exporter of rice, likewise coffee. The Socialists won the war, but capitalism is winning the peace. Power remains concentrated in the hands of the Party elites, but at least individuals have enough to eat, and the educated have the possibility of better-paying jobs. Vietnam even has a stock market.
Would life for ordinary people have been better if the South had remained independent? Looking at the example of the two Koreas (the North poor and savagely repressive, the South rich and free), it is tempting to conclude that a free South Vietnam would have been similarly prosperous. But the North was determined to conquer the South at any cost. Absent a war-winning strategy, a free South Vietnam was not a realistic outcome.
Young people have little emotion about the war. While they pay lip service to the courage of those who fought, they want to move forward. They resent the government's grip on power and the corruption of the party elites. Several said to us that they sometimes wished that everyone who was born before the war would die or retire. Interestingly, North Vietnam's brilliant commanding general Vo Nguyen Giap, still alive at age 96, seems more genuinely beloved than Ho Chi Minh, whose image is everywhere, including on every piece of currency.
