Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power

by Victor Davis Hanson

  The media likewise created an entire mythology around the American GI and the returning Vietnam veteran. Far from being driven insane by the experience, suffering from PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), or reduced to an alcoholic or drug stupor, veterans adjusted about as well as past war returnees and showed no higher incidence of mental illness than found in the general population:

  The portrayal of the Vietnam vet as well-adjusted and untroubled by the war would have undermined [the] antiwar agenda, and hence evidence that Vietnam veterans were readjusting or had readjusted well to American society tended to be drowned out by excited and strident recriminations leveled against the U.S. government. (E. Dean, Shook Over Hell, 183)

  Drug usage was no higher in Vietnam than among those of similar age groups in the general civilian population. Instead, most veterans later expressed remorse over the senseless loss of close friends and also over their inability to win the war, the subsequent communist takeover, relocation camps, boat people, and the Cambodian holocaust. Ninety-one percent of those who served in Vietnam later stated that they were glad to have done so.

  Nor did blacks and Hispanics die in Vietnam disproportionate to their numbers in the general population, in some sort of racist plot by the American government. Thomas Thayer’s exhaustive statistical profile concluded that “Blacks did not bear an unfair burden in the Vietnam war in terms of combat deaths despite allegations to the contrary. . . . The typical American killed in combat was a white, regular, enlisted man serving in an army or marine corps unit. He was 21 years old or younger” (War Without Fronts, 114). Eighty-six percent of all dead were listed as Caucasian.

  If there were generalizations to be made, it was largely a question of class. The vast majority of those who fought in Vietnam as frontline combat troops—two-thirds of whom were not drafted but volunteered—were disproportionately lower-class whites from southern and rural states. These were young men of a vastly different socioeconomic cosmos from the largely middle- and upper-class journalists who misrepresented them, the antiwar activists and academics who castigated them, and the generals of the military high command who led them so poorly. Class was the third rail that antiwar activists did not concern themselves with. Perhaps that unease explains why popular films like The Deer Hunter (which the leftist war correspondent Peter Arnett called “fascist trash”), the music of Creedence Clearwater Revival (e.g., “Fortunate Son”), and the early songs of Bruce Springsteen (e.g., “Shut Out the Light,” “Born in the U.S.A.”)— which all dealt with either ethnic or lower-class attitudes toward the inequities in the conduct of the war—were either ignored or criticized by the more elitist critics of Vietnam. Yet far from being either crazy, mutinous, or disillusioned, most of such soldiers who fought bravely in Vietnam had volunteered, and later confirmed that they were unabashedly proud of their service. Ninety-seven percent of those Americans who saw tours in Vietnam were granted honorable discharges from the military.

  Such attitudes and conduct on the part of American soldiers were especially surprising in an undeclared war that lasted for more than a decade and was fought under horrific conditions. It was also rarely reported that Vietnam was a much more brutal war for those who served than was World War II—again proof of the superb record of the American soldier. Infantrymen in the Pacific, for example, on average saw forty days of combat in four years; combat soldiers in the field in Vietnam averaged more than two hundred days of contact with the enemy in a single year-long tour of duty.

  Most American books about the Vietnam War published between 1968 and 1973 are not accurate. Unlike contemporary accounts of the Zulu War or Midway, they consistently garnered selective data and provided exegesis designed either to galvanize contemporary domestic public opinion or to defend past opinions, positions, and conduct of dubious accuracy or ethics. Most narratives devoted entire sections to the one hundred or so innocent civilians slaughtered by the Americans at My Lai, but almost nothing concerning the nearly 3,000 graves of those executed in cold blood by the communists at Hué. The great, unsung tragedy of the antiwar movement was that its own lack of credibility, fairness, and fondness for hyperbole did as much to tarnish the hallowed Western tradition of open dissent and careful audit of military operations as did the worst excesses of the American military in Vietnam.

  AFTERMATH

  A Unified Vietnam

  The Americans’ war lasted another five years after Tet. With the withdrawal of American ground troops and air support from Vietnam during 1973–74, the eventual defeat of South Vietnam was assured. Soviet and Chinese support escalated without worry of American bombing. Immediately after the negotiated peace accords of 1973, the North Vietnamese sent four times as much military supplies into the South than during the war year of 1972—so confident were they of immunity from American air strikes. Unlike the situation in Korea, where the United States left thousands of troops to ensure the armistice, nearly all American soldiers were gone by March 1973. Saigon fell to a massive communist offensive on April 30, 1975. Yet the North Vietnamese had paid a terrible price for victory—at least a million combat dead, and perhaps just as many missing and wounded. In the end, the communists had four times as many war dead as did the South Vietnamese army alone.

  Many charges were leveled that the Americans in more than a decade of bombing may have inadvertently killed 50,000 civilians. If true, that was a terrible and tragic consequence of the war, and reflects poorly on the air force’s often indiscriminate bombing of rural trails, jungles, and hamlets in order to interdict the flow of supplies. But as a percentage of the total North Vietnamese population, that unfortunate figure still represented a far smaller civilian toll than what occurred over Germany and Japan during World War II—and a fraction of the some 400,000 civilians that were believed killed by indiscriminate communist shelling and rocketing of cities, as well as terrorist attacks. In defeat, the United States lost 58,000 total dead and spent more than $150 billion, aside from the social and cultural costs back home.

  A communist victory brought more death and even greater dislocation to the Vietnamese than did decades of war—more often slowly by starvation, incarceration, and flight, rather than by outright mass murder. The occupation by the Japanese and French had led to moderate exoduses from Vietnam in the past, but nothing in the history of the country was comparable to mass departures from South Vietnam after the communist takeover in 1975. Exact numbers are in dispute, but most scholars accept that well over 1 million left by boat; and hundreds of thousands of others crossed by land into neighboring Thailand and even China. Aggregate numbers of fleeing Vietnamese vastly exceeded the original trek south during the partition of the country in 1954 that had numbered more than a million. America alone eventually took in 750,000 Vietnamese and Southeast Asians, other Western countries another million. Those who died in leaky boats or in storms numbered between 50,000 and 100,000; to leave, most bribed communist officials—only to be robbed on the high seas by the Vietnamese navy. It should be noted as well that by 1980 the Vietnamese communists had also exiled thousands of ethnic Chinese in a countrywide campaign of ethnic cleansing.

  In the first two years after the fall of Saigon (1975–77), there were almost twice as many total civilian fatalities in Southeast Asia—from the Cambodian holocaust, outright executions, horrendous conditions in concentration camps, and failed escapes by refugees—as all those incurred during ten years of major American involvement (1965–74). When asked about the thousands of doctors, engineers, and professionals sent to concentration camps, a North Vietnamese official said, “We must get rid of the bourgeois rubbish.” Yet in private, the communist chief of press relations in Ho Chi Minh City remarked of emigration to America, “Open the doors and everyone would leave overnight” (S. Karnow, Vietnam, 32, 36).

  No figures exist on the numbers who died in reeducation camps— forty established in South Vietnam alone—but they are believed to have been in the thousands. The elite of the Communist Party quickly selected
the most lavish of American and South Vietnamese homes for their own residences. The American Left made a good case that South Vietnam was run by a corrupt aristocracy; but such theft paled in comparison to the communist government that took over in 1975, under which even Chinese and Soviet ships had to pay bribes to unload their cargoes in Haiphong, and local officials made fortunes by providing exemptions to any who wished to leave the country or evade the camps. Most media accounts of postwar Vietnam did not suggest that the peace was more costly to Southeast Asia than was war against the Americans, that communist officials killed or drove out far more of their own countrymen in twenty-four months of armistice than had the Americans in a decade of fighting.

  In the short term the scenario of the domino theory, so ridiculed by critics of the Cold War, turned out to be largely true. With the fall of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos came under communist domination; Thailand was for a time marginalized and forced to sever most ties with Americans. After 1975 the Soviet Union showed a greater, rather than reduced, tendency to intervene abroad, as fighting broke out in Afghanistan, Central America, and eastern Africa. The communist Vietnamese army grew, rather than shrank, after the war. It soon ranked as the third largest land force in the world after China and Russia—its frontline soldiers and paramilitary troops numbered 3 million—and subsequently fought both Cambodia and China. Few American activists of the past antiwar movement protested the hundreds of thousands of Asians who killed each other from 1975 to 1980. But, then, all those who died on both sides were communists.

  The Vietnam experience stands as the worst-case scenario imaginable in a free society at war—a test of the institution of free criticism fundamentally distorted, in which many of the dissidents were ignorant, their tools of communication instantaneous and enormously powerful, and their sympathies more with the enemy than with their own soldiers. Yet the allowance of such a critique, even under such singular conditions, did not undermine the power of the United States in the long run. The loss of Vietnam to communism was not a harbinger of things to come, given the apparently inevitable march of democratic capitalism during the 1980s and 1990s—a tide that finally even washed away Vietnam’s former patron, the Soviet Union, and eroded orthodoxy in communist China. Today, 179 of the 192 autonomous countries in the world have some sort of genuine legislature, with elected representatives. Vietnam, like Castro’s Cuba, was, and is, on the wrong side of history.

  Determinists will argue that Vietnam, sooner or later, will be free and that the American war was mostly a peripheral theater of needless American losses that did not affect the major containment of Soviet communism or the inevitable global onslaught of democratic consumer capitalism. There were dominoes, but they were too small to be of global importance. On the other hand, supporters of the war might still counter that the fighting in Vietnam did weaken communism and helped to protect the Philippines, Malaysia, and Singapore—and that the final American defeat ensured that thousands of Southeast Asians were killed or doomed to suffer in poverty and tyranny until the supposedly inevitable wave of Western-style freedom reaches them in the twenty-first century. For the millions who died in Southeast Asia immediately after the American withdrawal, and for the thousands of now rotting Americans and Vietnamese who were killed in Vietnam in a misguided crusade to prevent just those later atrocities, such “what-ifs” about the long-term future of Vietnam mean nothing.

  Vietnam and the Western Way of War

  The American military in Vietnam, far from being incompetent, in its daily operations reflected all the lethal elements of the traditional Western paradigm. Despite exaggerated reports of rampant drug use and sedition, the American soldier remained disciplined and well trained, even when it was clear that the war was not being fought to win, and even with a sizable number of vocal critics at home. Whatever the inequalities of the draft, civic militarism was very much still alive in America. With eventual changes in the voting age, all GIs eighteen years and older could voice their views in the national elections and express freely to journalists opinions about the conditions of their own military service. The opposite was not true of the Vietcong and North Vietnamese. Most American soldiers, it was believed, voted for leaders who advocated continued military involvement in Vietnam. When they fought in Vietnam, it was generally true that a majority of Americans wanted them there; when they began to leave, most Americans preferred that they did so. Again, voting and free speech were not characteristic of either the Vietcong or the North Vietnamese army. Ultimately, that key difference was recognized even by the communists who won. Former Vietcong general Pham Xuan An later remarked in disgust: “All that talk about ‘liberation’ twenty, thirty years ago, all the plotting, all the bodies, produced this, this impoverished, broken-down country led by a gang of cruel and paternalistic half-educated theorists” (L. Sorley, A Better War, 384).

  Freedom the Americans fought for, and free they were who fought. But paradoxically, while enjoying almost no freedom during the conflict, its promise drove on many Vietnamese who joined a communist cause disguised as a war for independence. The Vietnamese peasant was assured a war of “liberation” —libertas being a very Roman republican idea, rather than one of indigenous Vietnamese heritage. But since the communists had fought continually against the Japanese, French, and Americans for some thirty years, they never had occasion to govern in peace—and thus had never been held accountable for the fulfillment of promises offered. That illusion vanished with victory in 1975, when at last a true accounting came due for three decades of democratic rhetoric. Duang Van Toai, a former supporter of the Vietcong, explained the paradox of why he and others aided a movement that was so hostile to freedom:

  Like others of the opposition movement in Vietnam and in the United States, I was hypnotized by the political programs advocated by the National Liberation Front, which included the famous and correct policy of national reconciliation without reprisals and a policy of non-alignment with and independence from the Americans, the Russians, and the Chinese. . . . Under the domination of the Japanese, there were almost two million Vietnamese dying of hunger, but no one fled Vietnam. Under the Saigon governments during the war, hundreds of thousands of prisoners were arrested and jailed, but no one fled the country. Yet those who are pro-Hanoi or are hypnotized by the propaganda of Hanoi claim that the boat people are economic refugees . . . [but] among the refugees . . . were also the Vietcong, the former opposition leaders, and even the former justice minister of the Vietcong. You can imagine the situation of justice in a country if the justice minister of that country had to flee. (“Freedom and the Vietnamese,” in H. Salisbury, ed., Vietnam Reconsidered, 225)

  It was not by assurances of no free elections, no private property, and no free speech to come that the Vietcong and North Vietnamese had galvanized their army, but by the very Western notions of creating a “republic” of elected officials and a free press. The result was that Vietnamese soldiers in service to communism (itself a nineteenth-century European offshoot of Western utopian thinking that went back to Plato) fought as nationalists against foreigners in the mistaken hope of just that Western ideal of personal freedom and national autonomy. Instead, they found that in 1975, on the first occasion of real peace in three decades of war, their own government was not really a republic and they were hardly free at all. It was also another unnoted irony of the entire Vietnamese war that those who resisted the Americans did so by incorporating the promises— but never the reality—of America: empty dreams that fooled not only their own soldiers but much of the American academic and journalistic establishment as well. The Democratic Republic of Vietnam, which was the official name of communist North Vietnam, did not draw its nomenclature from the hallowed traditions of Southeast Asia or the perversions of Stalinism, but from the language of freedom of Greece and Rome. Yet there was never to be either a democracy or a republic in Vietnam.

  The American economy produced a surfeit of arms, war supplies, and consumer goods in Vietnam that had the effec
t of drawing more than a million peasants from the countryside into an already overcrowded Saigon of 3 million persons and creating a booming economy in the process. In general, the American capitalist economy found it much easier to ship and airlift matériel thousands of miles across the seas than did China or Russia to their clients on their own front doorstep. American weapons were as a rule also better than the enemy’s, especially in areas of communications, aircraft, radar, ships, and armor. In cases where the Vietcong and North Vietnamese achieved parity—mostly in automatic rifles, mortars, antitank guns, mines, and grenades—it was solely as a result of imported Chinese and Russian arms, themselves ultimately patterned after European designs or a result of the Western tradition of research. The history of Soviet arms production and development is the story of American aid during World War II, the copying and capturing of German arms on the eastern front (1941–45), the recruiting of German scientists after the war, the constant emulation of Western designs through espionage and defection, and ultimately the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century importation of British, French, and German consultants to modernize the czarist military.

  The Vietnamese drew on no indigenous scientific tradition—except for a few cases of ingenious antipersonnel bamboo and wooden traps— to craft their tools of killing. Without Western-style arms, the communists would have been annihilated. The same is true of Vietnamese military organization and discipline. North Vietnamese equivalents to terms like “division” and “general,” coupled with training in automatic arms and infantry tactics, were ultimately patterned after Soviet and Chinese exemplars—themselves borrowed from Western militaries. While the North Vietnamese made undeniable changes in battle operations to reflect native realities, it was a great irony of the war that Americans were killed by automatic rifles that looked hauntingly similar to M-14s and M-16s, and by privates, lieutenants, companies, and regiments that at the most basic organization level mirror-imaged their own. It would take a near expert to distinguish an American 81mm mortar from its North Vietnamese 82mm counterpart.