Who is Who in the War
HENEHAN, ANNE
Who is Who in the War VIETNAM IN THE MUD By James Pickerell Bobbs-Merrill. 129pp. $5.00. Reviewed by ANNE HENEHAN Former Executive Secretary, American Friends of Vietnam For the past four...
...military trying to build a democratic society in a leveled Vietnam is not an inviting one...
...At present, there are some rather synthetic good guys????the rural cadres or pacification teams????who have Saigon and Washington's blessing, but seem hampered by unmotivated personnel, the inevitable red tape, and "too much, too soon" expectations of what they can achieve in the countryside...
...Special Forces, Vietnamese troops, and other components of the U.S.-South Vietnamese military establishment provide a useful reference for those of the American newspaper public who suffer not so much from a dearth of reading matter about military operations, as from an inability to tell the players in the "Game" without a program...
...If this latter course is taken, Pick-erell's idea of the U.S...
...Ngo Dinh Diem did a pretty thorough job of emasculating one potential set of good guys????those in the old political parties (though some of the politicians who survived can now be heard at the Saigon "Opera House" which serves as headquarters for the Constituent Assembly...
...casualties, Pickerell thinks that the only chance to win is to fight the war on the ground in South Vietnam...
...When he engages in the riskier business of naming good guys and bad guys in the murky world of Vietnamese military politics, Pickerell is fallible...
...training GI's to win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese may become highly relevant????not only in the South but in the North...
...Pickerell has some praise for American soldiers and a recurrent lament on their relations with the Vietnamese...
...small search-and-destroy patrols rather than massive artillery...
...General Quang has been ousted from his highly lucrative post as IV Corps Commander????to the chargrin of virtually no one outside his immediate family...
...In short, despite the certain escalation of U.S...
...combat troops from his Mekong Delta region because he apparently felt that they "would cause more social problems in this densely populated area than they could possibly solve...
...A phoenix may have been able to rise from the ashes of a conquered Germany or Japan, but neither phoenix, hawk, nor dove has much hope of extracting itself from the mud of Vietnam...
...Quang, it is now generally agreed, was less interested in protecting the flower of Vietnamese womanhood from Yankee spoliation than in shielding his graft-ridden fiefdom from American scrutiny...
...So far, these two conditions have never been met simultaneously...
...But his wistful hope that the GI's learn how to win the hearts and minds of the people seems not only unrealistic...
...military advisors, American soldiers...
...backing, succeeded last spring in crushing what may not have been a 100 per cent "good", but what was probably at least a genuine grass roots force????the political Buddhists...
...Assuming though, that someone may turn up to whom we can, in good conscience, turn over the hearts and minds of the people, there is still the problem of winning the war...
...it is also just slightly more relevant to the real problem than pasting a "Back Our Boys in Vietnam" sticker on your car or trying LBJ for war crimes...
...pacification units which not only rout the Vietcong from a village but stay and protect the people...
...No doubt the military could profit by improved public relations techniques, but its basic task is to provide enough security so that the "good" Vietnamese can go around and win the hearts and mmds of their own people...
...Although his observations are not shattering, he does give a valuable non-technical, non-jargonistic explanation of who is who and who does what...
...Still, the prospect of a public relations conscious U.S...
...Since the book came out, however...
...He realistically concludes that the political and military decision makers????and, it may be added, the American public????are not willing to do this...
...His chapters on the U.S...
...Even in the unlikely event that American soldiers could win the war-hardened hearts and tough Oriental minds of the Vietnamese, what would we then do with them...
...Like many other thoughtful people who have spent time in Vietnam, Pickerell advocates the long, hard, no-results-guaranteed approach?escalation of economic and political reform rather than intensification of bombing...
...Major General Dang Van Quang, Pickerell writes, is "one of the ablest leaders in the Vietnamese military", who has barred U.S...
...Instead they will seek a quicker and less costly solution, possibly through premature negotiations, but probably by bombing North Vietnam into submission and ashes...
...The real problem is finding "good" Vietnamese who are capable of doing this, and persuading the Saigon regime to let them...
...Reviewed by ANNE HENEHAN Former Executive Secretary, American Friends of Vietnam For the past four years, free lance photographer James Pickerell has been playing what S.L.A...
...The current junta, apparently with U.S...
...Marshall calls the "game of Being With the Troops," and like so many of his colleagues in the Vietnam press corps, Pickerell has now written a book about the war...
Vol. 50 • January 1967 • No. 2
