If This Be Heresy

...Spiritually and materially committed to procedures which often provide their own personal raisons d'etre, military and civilian bureaucrats have become afraid to admit doubts or errors even to one another, let alone to outsiders...

...or that threatening, bombing and uprooting people is hardly the way to pacify them, let alone "win their minds and hearts...

...He focuses on what is generally termed "the Other War," aimed at keeping "the people" out of Vietcong clutches, although he is careful to note that the political and military struggles are inseparable...

...Common sense and clear observation could easily have illuminated the objections to these tactics...

...Instead of deferring to this sorry crew, Corson suggests that our forces assume direct command of Vietnamese fighting units and initiate bold new programs of local reform...

...As proof that things can be done better, he details his own experiences with Combined Action Platoons (cap), consisting of small groups of Marines integrated with Vietnamese Popular Forces...

...We must be grateful that he had the mind and heart to produce this book...

...His quarrel is with the concepts that have shaped our efforts to make South Vietnam safe for democracy...

...If not we had better begin to withdraw, in the hope that this will impel capable Vietnamese now submerged in the lower ranks of the government and the Army to revolt and form a responsible regime...

...It was the "search and destroy" operations subsequently initiated by General Westmoreland that brought the war to the peasants, rendering them more susceptible to Vietcong pressures, and making a cruel joke of the aim of "winning minds and hearts...

...Corson's pride in his own accomplishments also caused me to squirm slightly, yet current accounts of the success of new cap teams, operating in the manner he describes, suggest that he may not have overstated his case...

...Some flippant comments, a few repetitious phrases, and minute errors of fact or spelling are doubtless the result of hasty editing, but they do little to obscure the value of Colonel Corson's message...

...If such operations were expanded, Corson feels, we might yet achieve most of our basic aims in Vietnam and it might then be worth our while to stay...

...Equally appropriate in assessing why so much has been so mismanaged by so many, would be Santayana's observation that those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it...

...Shattering the familiar myth that the Vietnamese people have been constantly involved in warfare for over two decades, Corson shows that the great majority of them were left virtually untouched until we began deploying large numbers of combat troops in the spring of 1965...

...The credibility gaps temporarily camouflaged by the statistical pyrotechnics of Robert Komer have become the order of the day, and Corson's efforts here to reveal the facts have been judged by his superiors as an "act of heresy," prompting his resignation from the Marine Corps...

...Corson holds these self-serving, inept cliques responsible for sabotaging pacification...

...Having found an effective means of maintaining hamlet security, the Marines helped the people develop their own projects...

...But to the computer-girded, cost-effective warriors now entrenched in Washington and Saigon, simple truths that challenge basic dogma have become as intolerable as they were in the age of Galileo...

...that villagers are apt to feel more empathy with "our boys" in the rebel ranks than with uninvited foreigners...

...Corson claims that even without the carnage, orthodox pacification programs had little chance of success, not only because they were introduced by Americans without consulting the people they were meant to serve, but primarily because any genuine social, economic or political reforms are incompatible with the interests of Saigon's ruling elite...

...One could wish that Corson had occasionally been more tolerant toward simple human fraiity, but considering the astronomical expenditures of the American and Vietnamese people in human and other resources, tolerance may be an undeserved luxury...

...he blames them, and the Americans who insist on supporting them simply because they are the government, for the failure of our efforts...

...If it be heresy, let us make the most of it...

...And this not because of an announced invasion by a North Vietnamese division, but because we anticipated a mass desertion of arvn troops...

...Not that one would have to study much history in order to deduce, for example, that an unpopular government will have difficulty rallying popular support...

...A highly experienced combat officer (who also holds at least one PhD and who, malgre tout, obviously remains devoted to the Corps) Corson does not debate the merits of our being involved in Vietnam in some capacity...

...As Colonel Corson demonstrates, our government's dismal record is the result of its unwillingness or inability either to properly apply valid lessons gleaned from past counterinsurgency operations, or to analyze precisely why certain tactics previously used in Malaya, the Philippines, Algeria—or Vietnam?succeeded or failed...

...Reviewed by LORNA HAHN Director, Intelligence Research and Analysis Program, American University The first chapter of this relentless recital of American blunders in Vietnam opens with Hegel's famous dictum that "people and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it...

...To continue on our present course of bombing the North and procuring rococo new weapons which do little but pad already bloated Air Force and industrial budgets, might lead to our losing the war in every sense...

...this resulted in the people voluntarily cooperating with the Americans against the Vietcong...