Vietnam An epic tragedy, 1945-1975

DEEP INSIDE Max Hastings's monumental "Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy" sits a minute story that captures the essence of the book. As combat heated up in 1964, Hastings relates, Communist operatives strongarmed growing numbers of South Vietnamese peasants into the guerrilla force fighting to overthrow the United Statesbacked government in Saigon. For many young draftees, it was a soul-crushing experience, just as repugnant as conscription into the government's army would have been if its recruiters had gotten there first. "You always criticize the imperialists," the father of one conscript lashed out at the Communists, "but you are even worse. I want my son back." Hastings sees the Vietnam War in much the same way as that anguished villager. In his telling, it was a conflict without good guys, an appalling conflagration in which the brutality, cynicism and incompetence of the United States and its South Vietnamese ally were equaled only by the wickedness of their enemies, leaving the hapless bulk of the Vietnamese population to suffer the consequences. "If America's war leadership often flaunted its inhumanity, that of North Vietnam matched it cruelty for cruelty," Hastings contends. It's a depressing but also curiously refreshing and mostly convincing way of thinking about the war. All too often, as Hastings points out, historians have treated it as a morality play pitting the forces of justice against the forces of repression. Sometimes revolutionaries wear the white hats as they struggle to overthrow a corrupt South Vietnamese regime and rid their nation of American invaders bent on controlling its destiny. In other accounts, Saigon and its partner in Washington valiantly defend a flawed but democratically minded South Vietnam from Communist forces determined to subject it to Stalinist tyranny. Hastings is hardly the first to suggest something more complicated. But the strongest tendency among chroniclers inclined to paint in shades of gray - the filmmaker Ken Burns's recent PBS series on the war is a striking example - has been to credit all sides with fighting sincerely for principles that made sense to them. Hastings goes in a darker direction, finding rough parity not in the validity of the goals for which the rivals fought but in their insensitivity to the staggering destruction they wrought. A British journalist and prolific military historian who once reported on the war, Hastings indicts the United States with passion and engaging snark but mostly reinforces old critiques. Although American forces often fought effectively on the battlefield, Hastings asserts, those successes proved irrelevant because Americans failed in the more important and far more delicate task of cultivating a South Vietnamese state capable of commanding the loyalty of its own people. It was as if the United States used "a flamethrower to weed a flower border." Through vivid accounts of battle and suffering, Hastings shows that the American war machine devastated the society it intended to save, using enormous firepower that did more to demoralize the South Vietnamese population than to defeat the Communists. Sheer destructiveness also hurt the war effort in the eyes of the American and global publics, who, Hastings writes, were prepared to support the war "only if there was some proportionality between forces employed, civilian casualties incurred and the objective at stake." Hastings finds any number of American civilian and military leaders guilty of errors and misdeeds, but he reserves special venom for President Richard Nixon and his top foreign policy aide, Henry Kissinger. Even though both men understood that the United States could no longer achieve its objectives in Vietnam after 1968, Hastings argues, political calculations led them to keep fighting for another four years, at the cost of 21,000 American lives, only to agree in 1973 to a peace deal that they knew had no chance of sticking. The book also excoriates the South Vietnamese. Rejecting recent scholarship suggesting that leaders in Saigon may have had more legitimacy than often supposed, Hastings berates them as corrupt autocrats reliant on the United States and uninterested in the welfare of their people. Nguyen Cao Ky, for one, was "remote as a Martian" from his nation's vast peasantry when he served as prime minister from 1965 to 1967. As for the South Vietnamese military, Hastings sympathizes with ordinary soldiers and acknowledges that they sometimes fought well. But he dismisses most of their officers as inept careerists with scant regard for the hardships faced by their troops. For all that, Hastings's judgment falls most harshly on the Communists. Drawing on new sources from Vietnam and recent studies of Hanoi's decision-making, he condemns America's adversaries as ruthless ideologues willing to spill any amount of blood to conquer the South. Ho Chi Minh, often romanticized as an amiable nationalist, was in fact a merciless despot who inflicted "systemic cruelties" on his people. Even worse was Le Duan, the little-known zealot who displaced Ho in the early 1960s as North Vietnam's chief warlord and climbed a "mountain of his people's corpses" to final victory over the South in 1975. That victory ended three decades of war but also brought new waves of repression and deprivation for the Vietnamese. Hundreds of thousands rendered their verdict on the new order, Hastings notes, by risking their lives to flee, often in rickety boats. Those who stayed behind, he adds, made their opinions clear when they quickly embraced the West after the regime, confronting the failures of its iron rule, finally relaxed its grip in the late 1980s. The main problem with Hastings's focus on the human toll of the war is his tendency to underplay the motives that led all sides to consider it worth waging. The result is sometimes to flatten decision makers into callous villains and everyone else, both soldiers and civilians, into victims. On the American side, for example, we learn little about the geopolitical calculations that led presidents from Harry Truman to Richard Nixon to fixate on the need to stop Communist expansion in Southeast Asia. Nor does Hastings have much to say about the pervasive anti-Communism that drove so many Americans to back intervention. On the other side, Hastings only skims the surface of the economic and social injustices that fueled the rebellion against the South Vietnamese government and made Communism a plausible, if not broadly appealing, path for the nation's development. To be sure, Hastings acknowledges that the Communists "worked with the grain of rural society," catering more successfully than the Saigon government to the everyday grievances that fueled unrest. But he never nails down how much importance to attach to this observation, instead emphasizing Hanoi's reliance on violence, coercion and propaganda to achieve victory. Hastings could have written a more complete account by addressing these themes in greater detail. Actually, closer attention to the big ideas that drove each side might have reinforced his central point by underlining how much damage was done in the name of competing ideologies that meshed poorly with the needs of Vietnamese society. But Hastings is hardly wrong to place the emphasis on consequences rather than motives. In fact, he deserves enormous credit for helping us, half a century after the peak of the fighting, to see beyond old arguments about which side was right. What is visible when the blinders come offis indeed no pretty sight. Americans, Hastings says, failed in the task of developing a legitimate South Vietnamese state.

*Starred Review* Forty-three years after North Vietnamese tanks smashed into Saigon and the "official" American presence in South Vietnam ended, there is a serious effort underway to re-examine the American experience in Vietnam, manifested by Mark Bowden's Huê 1968 (2017), Max Boot's The Road Not Taken (2018), and Ken Burns and Geoffrey C. Ward's The Vietnam War (2017). In his comprehensive, brilliant, and heartbreaking account, Hastings (The Secret War , 2016) views the 30 years of war against French colonialism and American interference as one long tragedy for the people of Vietnam. For every American death, at least 40 Vietnamese died, many of them noncombatants. Vietnam suffered under a vicious, violent Stalinist regime in the North, a corrupt series of warlords in the South, and the French and Americans who viewed them as pieces on a chessboard in a larger game. Individual acts of courage and nobility are recounted here among mind-numbing acts of savagery, but there are few heroes. Hastings even portrays many antiwar protesters in the U.S. as cynical, infantile, or simply wanting to avoid death in a distant land. This isn't an easy read, but it is an essential one to comprehend the totality of the wars in that long-besieged country.--Jay Freeman Copyright 2018 Booklist

Historian Hastings (The Secret War), serves up a mammoth history of the Vietnam war, drawing on many secondary and primary sources and interviews he conducted with veterans of all sides. The book, he says, is not an attempt to "chronicle or even mention every action"; rather, it's intended to "capture the spirit of Vietnam's experience" for the general reader. Much of the book covers well-trod but appropriate ground: Dien Bien Phu, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the Tet offensive, the perfidies of Nixon and Kissinger and North Vietnam's Le Duan, and so on. Many of Hastings's conclusions are sound, but one calls the enterprise into question: writing about Americans who served in the war, Hastings says, "Maybe two-thirds of the men who came home calling themselves veterans-entitled to wear the medal and talk about their PTSD troubles-had been exposed to no greater risk than a man might incur from ill-judged sex or 'bad shit' drugs." In addition to being factually questionable, this rhetoric is likely to alienate readers who have a personal connection to the war. Readers interested in recent in-depth Vietnam histories might do better to look to Road to Disaster: A New History of America's Descent into Vietnam. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.