Where are the Good Histories of the Viet Nam War?

Mrs. Buce asked if I could suggest a good history of the War in Viet Nam.  I said, "oh sure," and quickly bogged down.  I dug out an old copy of Stanley Kranow's  Vietnam: A History, which I remember as instructive if not exactly mind-bending (I see from the Amazon blurb that it's in available in audio but not Kindle--the old fashioned way).  And beyond that--

Well--beyond that, there are any number of accounts written with high intensity and great personal engagement, about aspects of the war.  I'm thinking of stuff like Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, or Philip Caputo's A Rumor of War, or Frances Fitzgerald's Fire in the Lake, or Neil Sheehan's  A Bright Shining Lie.  And as I scan, I'm remembering the movies: Apocalypse Now of course, and Deer Hunter, which I actually liked better.  There are some remarkable postmortems of the strictly military aspects--books like Harry Summers' On Strategy, or Andrew Krepinevich's The Army and Viet Nam.  If I'm not careful, I'll find myself getting sucked back into the undertow before the American involvement, to books like Bernard Fall's Street Without Joy  Graham Greene's The Quiet American or even Marguerite Duras' The Lover.

But it still seems to me like there is something missing here.  I suppose it is precisely because the war was such an open wound and because, yes, it remains so unfinished, that we seem never to have learned how to package it into a narrative.  So, Kranow it may have to be.

War Is About Winning, Not About Killing

Not being a regular reader of the New York Post, I don’t think I had ever heard of Ralph Peters until I stumbled onto this intriguing review by TigerHawk. I’ve now had a chance to explore a bit of Peters’ work with (qualified) pleasure and (qualified) profit. Without pretending to be present a fully developed review of my own, let me see if I can make one basic point.

But first, background. It may help to have earplugs. Peters is a romantic with a gushy, hand-wringing over-the-top style that assures you the world will end on Thursday if you don’t listen to him. His primary theme is something on the order of “the beleaguered virtue of the soldier” versus “the fecklessness and corruption of”—well, of just about everybody else. (quoted words are mine, not his) As a literary trope, this is pretty well worn. Still, as a rule of thumb for life, it probably has more truth than a lot of literary tropes. There’s no escaping the fact that the organized military is a behemoth organization and as such, is vulnerable not just accidentally, but systematically and predictably, to the kinds of ailments that beset behemoths everywhere. As TigerHawk says:

Peters['] sharpest observations turn on the relationship between weapons procurement and America's likely warfighting requirements. In short, he believes that the defense industry, the Pentagon brass, and the Congress have, through a combination of stupidity and self interest, seduced the rest of us into believing that small numbers of extraordinarily expensive and technologically advanced weapons systems can both achieve American military objectives and substitute for quantity.

Myself having almost as little military experience as our President, this kind of stuff gets beyond my pay grade fairly fast, but I’m generally persuaded that there is something to it: the chances are very good to excellent that the structure of the military enterprise will guarantee that it spends tons of money on the wrong things.

Now, take this as context for what seems to me to be Peters’ central error: he seems to believe that war is about killing. He doesn’t say so in so many words—at least not in what I’ve read. But he does seem to say that “war is about winning” and that “winning involves annihilation of the enemy (my quotes again).

If this is, in fact, his point, he is wrong. War is about winning. Sometimes, this involves a lot of killing, and sometimes it does not. There was probably no way for the Russians to beat back the Germans than with wholesale slaughter. But (to take just one example among many possible), consider General Sherman: a great warrior and a great victor—but not a great killer. The South remembers him bitterly for having achieved almost total dominance over them. They forget that he did it with only modest loss of life.

By contrast, consider that most useless of all modern battlefields: the Western Front where two sides hammered away at each other savagely because neither could think of a good reason to stop—the cream of ironies was that they never had a good reason to start in the first place.

That, of course, is the lesson of the modern “people’s wars” that we seem so determined to misunderstand. As may have said, we won it twice and lost it twice. As Ho Chi Minh liked to say, it didn’t matter because we didn’t understand the war we were fighting. So also the Israelis with an even more dramatic record of success on the battlefield and disappointment after the battle is over.

We do a bit better these days. No American seems to have understood the Vietnam War while it was going on. A few seem to understand Iraq today. On issues of operation and management, Peters is probably one of them: he certainly merits attention. On articulating strategic goals, he is not to be trusted.

[Peters’ book is: Never Quit the Fight available here, and do your best to ignore the fact that Amazon offers it as a companion piece to Ann Coulter.]