THE ARMY AND VIETMAN
Andrew F. Krepznivich, Jr.
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986,
318 pp., cloth
ADVICE AND SUPPORT
The Early Years of the U.S. Army in Vietnam 1941-19
Ronald H. Spector
Free Press, 1985
391 pp., $10.95 paper
THE RISE AND FALL OF AN AMERICAN ARMY
U.S. Ground Forces in Vietnam, 1968-1973
Shelby L. Stanton
Presidio Press, 1985
411 pp., $22.50 cloth
U.S. Army Col. Harry G. Summers was spending a depressing April (1975) in Hanoi. At one point of his diplomatic mission, during the wait for Saigon's fall, a North Vietnamese colonel came up to him and, in a gesture of military courtesy, said, "Don't feel badly. You did everything you could."
Summers replied, "You know you never defeated us in the field."
The American was right. One searches in vain for any evidence of U.S. failure of arms in the field. True, there were patrols that didn't come back, platoons and companies that got mauled, and battalions that took consistently heavy casualties. But a major defeat in the field it simply never happened. Even Text '68, initially viewed as a disaster, proved upon further analysis a devastating defeat for the enemy.
And the North Vietnamese colonel knew it. He replied, "That may be so." Then he added, "But it is also irrelevant."
In recent years, this vignette has become symbolic of a certain form of revisionist scholarship on Vietnam, a scholarship which centers on the question, why was victory attainable (as originally thought) but irrelevant? A minimal consensus has formed on this question. Victory was irrelevant, suggests this consensus, because it was never actively sought. According to the theory of "limited war" so fashionable among the Kennedy and Johnson administrations' Best and Brightest, combat had no intrinsic value. The purpose of the war, as Gen. Maxwell Taylor testified before Congress, was not to defeat the enemy, but to "cause them to mend their ways." Success was measured by negotiated agreement, not victory in the field. Violence was employed, not to conquer, but to "signal our determination" and to "inflict unacceptable pain" upon a resolute, totalitarian foe. In the end, suggests this consensus, the enemy did not so much defeat us as outlast us, while the true extent of our military victory was hidden from us by both their intransigence and our own misplaced criteria of success. Had we recognized that, by the 1970s, we had effectively defeated both the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese, the history of that tormented area, and of our own nation, might have been very different.
Would that it were as simple as
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