Vietnam from the Air
RODMAN, SELDEN
Vietnam from the Air Chickenhawk By Robert Mason Viking. 339 pp. $17.75. Reviewed by Selden Rodman Author, "South America of the Poets," "Tongues of Fallen Angels," "Artists in Tune with Their...
...Indeed, once Washington decided to bar landings in the North and to leave enemy sanctuaries in Laos and Cambodia unmolested, the war was lost...
...The black humor of the pilots as they risk their lives in engagements that make no sense is irresistible...
...He tells the story of a French holdover who still runs a tea plantation and complains "not to the VC but to us" that his bushes are being endangered, whereupon the U.S...
...But the effectiveness of any airborne force was severely hampered by the Vietcong's consistently successful guerrilla operations on the ground...
...Mason's character-an unworldly American doing his duty with great skill and courage -comes through...
...Neither the corrupf'and poorly motivated regular South Vietnamese Army, nor the restricted American military, could ever cope with the tactics of the VC...
...pilots are told to avoid the area...
...Ho Chi Minh was the hero of all Vietnam, he feels, except for the self-serving clique we were keeping in power...
...For the helicopter, like the machine gun in World War I and the tank in World War II, was the critical offensive weapon for the American military in Vietnam...
...Reviewed by Selden Rodman Author, "South America of the Poets," "Tongues of Fallen Angels," "Artists in Tune with Their World" This no-holds-barred account of what it was like to be a helicopter pilot in the Vietnam War may not be the definitive document on that tragic conflict, but it will certainly have to be taken into consideration when the final balance sheet is drawn...
...The pilots in Robert Mason's First Cavalry Division complain constantly that none of their strips are permanently "secured" and linked to a defensible front capable of pushing forward toward North Vietnam...
...They might have been decisive, moreover, if all other things had been equal...
...And against those hit-and-run irregulars, the hundreds of helicopter '' LZs''-landing strips in the jungle between Pleiku on the Cambodian border and Bong Son near the South China coast-could never be held for more than a few weeks, or sometimes days, at a time...
...The clear implication is that we were in Vietnam to protect colonialism and a highly exploitative variety of capitalism, rather than to give the South a chance to resist Communist totalitarianism backed by the Soviet Union and China...
...Although Mason admits as much, the few comments he makes on the meaning of Vietnam and the reasoning behind our involvement there indicate that he adhered to the philosophy of the peace activists even before his unit shipped out...
...How we established our ties with South Vietnam in the first place, Mason does not seem to know...
...If the choppers did not decide the struggle in our favor this time, they did nonetheless change the nature of modern combat...
...By the time his nerves finally break and he comes home to find nothing but hatred for his role in the now wholly unpopular war-and to top it off gets arrested for smoking pot-he has earned and receives the reader's sympathy...
...Free elections would have proved that at any time, so we prevented them...
...Most of Chickenhawk, though, deserves the high praise it has received...
...Considering the complete lack of political orientation among our men at arms, such cynicism on the author's part is perhaps understandable...
...The close-up look at helicopter training and battlefield strategy is fascinating...
Vol. 66 • October 1983 • No. 18
