The Real War

from The Real War

More than a decade after its end, the Vietnam war refuses to lie quiet in its historical grave. Its whys and wherefores roil the scholarly community, its passions continue to spill out in books and plays and movies, its legacy vexes and divides our policy-makers. Questions regarding the very nature of the war remain unresolved. Who, we are still wondering, was our enemy? Was it the National Liberation Front N.L.F.)? Was it North Vietnam? Was it the Soviet Union? China? Both the Soviet Union and China? Or first one and then the other? Was it that still larger, if vaguer, entity “world communism”? Did we, in other words, face a local guerilla force, or the conventional army of a small state, or a rival superpower, or a league of superpowers, or a coordinated global political movement? Or were we ourselves somehow the enemy? (President Nixon, for one, thought so. In his speech to the nation on November 3, 1969, in which he announced his secret “plan” for ending the war, he told the public, “North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that.”) And what correspondingly, was the character of the war? Was it a domestic revolution, a civil war, a war of aggression by a neighboring power, a war of subversion from without, or a strategic move by a global power bent on world domination? Or did we perhaps think it was one of these whereas in fact it was another? Why did we fight? Was it to defend the independence and freedom of a small country? Was it to defeat “wars of national liberation” in a “test case”? Was it to halt at the earliest possible moment a great power on the march, so as to prevent in our time, a repetition of the mistake made by the democracies in 1939, in Munich, when they acquiesced in Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia? Or was it out goal not so much physically to stop an enemy as to preserve our reputation all around the world as a mighty nation ready and able to use its power to advance its interests and beliefs—to preserve what four presidents called the “credibility” of our power? Did our goal change during the war: did we perhaps enter the war for one reason but stay in it for another? How did we get into the war? Were we dragged reluctantly into an Asian “quagmire”? Or, on the contrary, did we carefully and calculatedly apply our power in accordance with theories of “limited war” that had been worked out well in advance by strategic analysts wrestling with the dilemmas of power in the nuclear age? And—perhaps the most baffling question of them all—why did we lose? How did it happen that the self-described mightiest power on earth could not prevail over forces mustered in tiny, poor, backward Vietnam? Was it because our military strategy correct, and did we in fact win with it, only to throw away the victory by prematurely withdrawing, under pressure from cowardly politicians, a duplicitous press, and a duped public? Did our political “establishment” suffer a “moral collapse,” as Henry Kissinger has suggested, and is that why we lost? Or, on the contrary, did we leave, and lose, not because of any collapse but because we came to our senses and liquidated a hopeless and ruinous effort that we never should have launched? Finally, we ask ourselves, What does it all mean—what lessons, if any, should the United States draw from the experience? Is the lesson that there are certain limits on the usefulness of military force in imposing our will on other countries? Or is this lesson in fact a perilous “syndrome,” a further symptom of the moral collapse that unnecessarily brought on the defeat; and is the proper lesson, therefore, that we should seek to revive our faltering will and assert ourselves militarily in the world? Because these questions concern the nature of the world we live in, and the nature of the world we live in, and the nature of the United States’ obligations in it, the debate is about more than the past; the present and the future are actively involved as well. In late 1966 and in 1967, I was in Vietnam as a reporter for The New Yorker; and from then until now I have found myself thinking and writing about the war in one way or another. In what follows, I will not try to address all the questions that have been raised by the war; instead, using the full benefit of hindsight, including the material that has been made public in the years since the war’s end, I will concentrate on the question why the United States lost in Vietnam. But I hope that in addressing this question I will be able to shed some light obliquely on the other questions as well.