‘If peace demonstrations had been permitted in Hanoi, how many people would have shown up?’ He replied unhesitatingly, ‘None. The North was 100 per cent behind the struggle.’
This seems heroically naïve: most normal human beings crave escape from an experience that is inflicting grief and hardship on themselves and loved ones. Many of those in the West who opposed the war made a well-founded assessment that the US was doing something unlikely to succeed, employing grievously haphazard violence. Some then went a step further, adopting a view that if their own nation had embraced a bad cause, the other side’s must be a good one. Yet the Hanoi politburo and National Liberation Front caused the South Vietnamese people merely to exchange oppression by warlords and landlords in favour of even harsher subjection to disciples of Stalin. Democracy allows voters to remove governments with which they are dissatisfied. Once communist rule has been established, however, no further open ballot is indulged, nor has been under Hanoi’s auspices since 1954.
In conducting its war effort, the Northern politburo enjoyed significant advantages. Its principals were content to pay an awesome price in human life, secure from media or electoral embarrassments. They could suffer repeated failures on the battlefield without risking absolute defeat, because the US had set its face against invading the North. By contrast, when the South lost once, its fate was irreversible. There are significant parallels between the Vietnamese communists’ struggle and the Soviet Union’s 1941–45 war effort: Stalin yoked patriotism, ideology and compulsion in just the fashion emulated by Ho Chi Minh and Le Duan a generation later. Beyond peradventure the communists proved more effective warriors than the soldiers of Saigon, but it seems prudent to hesitate before anointing them the good guys in this saga.
Much of the narrative below depicts cruelties and follies, yet within the big canvas many individuals, Vietnamese and American, of all ages and both sexes, military and civilian, behaved decently. I have sought to tell stories of such people, because it is mistaken to allow virtuous endeavour to vanish into the cauldron of bomb blasts, brutalities and betrayals from which most accounts of the war are served up. I decided not to conduct primary political research: US archives have been trawled by scholars for decades; exhaustive accounts exist of the Western participants’ decision-making, notable among them those of Fredrik Logevall. Ken Hughes’ 2015 rendition and analysis of the White House tapes have established an almost incontrovertible record about the thinking and decision-making of Nixon and Kissinger that ended in the January 1973 Paris Accords, and supersedes much of the self-serving narrative presented in the participants’ memoirs. However, I have spent many hours studying testimony in the US Army’s Military Heritage and Education Center at Carlisle, Pa., and the US Marine Corps’ Archive at Quantico, Va. I have also accessed online material from Texas Tech University’s Vietnam War Study Center at Lubbock, and conducted almost a hundred interviews with survivors of all ages and both sexes, American and Vietnamese. Thanks to the indispensable aid of Merle Pribbenow, I have read many thousands of pages of translated Vietnamese memoirs, documents and histories.
Any historian such as myself, publishing a 2018 study of Vietnam, should acknowledge a debt to the recent Burns-Novick TV documentary series, which around the world has reawakened consciousness about this epochal struggle. I hope that my own work conveys something of the enormity of the experience the Vietnamese people endured over three generations, from the consequences of which they remain unliberated to this day.
MAX HASTINGS
Chilton Foliat, Berkshire, and Datai, Langkawi, Malaysia
May 2018
* Described, along with other experiences of conflict, in the author’s 2000 memoir Going to the Wars.
Note on Styles Adopted in the Text
Viet Nam is represented thus by its own people; in the interests of accessibility, however, I sustain the Western custom of using Vietnam, just as I render Ha Noi, Sai Gon, Dien Bien Phu, Da Nang and Viet Cong as single words.
The Vietnamese language makes extensive use of tone marks. I omit these in my text, but in the bibliography and index all proper names are appropriately accented.
Vietnamese names are commonly triple-barrelled, with the family name coming first, and I have adhered to this convention. Many Westerners are bewildered by the profusion of Vietnamese called Nguyen, but this is an accident beyond my undoing.
Wherever possible without forfeiting coherence I omit province names, to avoid crowding the narrative with geographical detail.
Translations often yield stilted prose. When quoting from foreign-language documents and memoirs in all my books, I respect Dryden’s admonition that a translator ‘should not lackey behind his author, but mount up beside him’. Thus, I seek to convey Vietnamese and French conversations in colloquial English.
‘African American’ is a modern term; in the Vietnam era, the word ‘black’ was used, and thus I retain it here. I cite an American’s race only where this seems relevant.
Ranks attributed are those held at the time of episodes described.
North and South Vietnam are capitalised thus when referenced as separate states, but lower-cased as north and south when the country was unified pre-1954 and post-1975.
All the combatants measured distances metrically. I nonetheless adopt feet, yards and miles, even in direct quotations.
The colloquial phrase for joining South Vietnam’s communist guerrillas was ‘ra bung’ which meant ‘going out into the marshes’, rather as some French World War II Resistants designated themselves maquisards, because they sought refuge in the maquis wilderness. Vietcong and its abbreviation ‘VC’ were South Vietnamese slang terms, but too familiar not to retain here.
American spellings are used in quoted speech by Americans, or in a conspicuously American context, for instance ‘secretary of defense’.
In thematic sections – notably, about the experience of combat – personal experiences from different periods of the war are sometimes merged, where this does not distort their significance and validity.
Timings of military operations are given by twenty-four-hour clock, but otherwise in accordance with twelve-hour civilian practice.
No attempt seems plausible to set a value upon the South Vietnamese piaster against the US dollar, since chronic inflation and unrealistic official exchange rates render no comparison valid for more than a short period of the wartime era.
AFN US Armed Forces Network radio stations
AK-47 Soviet-designed Kalashnikov assault rifle of which a Chinese variant began to be issued in quantity to Vietnamese communist forces in 1965
APC armoured personnel-carrier, most often in Vietnam the tracked M-113
ARVN Army of the Republic of [South] Viet Nam, pronounced as ‘Arvin’
bangalore torpedoes explosive charges packed in sections of metal or bamboo tubing, for breaching wire entanglements
battalion military unit, comprised of 400–1,000
