The Futile War
Liggio, Leonard P.
The Futile War To What End: Report from Vietnam, by Ward S. Just. Houghton Mifflin. 209 pp. $4.95. Our Own Worst Enemy, by William J. Lederer. W. W. Norton. 287 pp. $4.95. Reviewed by Leonard P....
...Just's occasional reflections on American policy-making tend to be thin although clear...
...It exposes every layer of the inefficiency of and mismanagement by the military...
...He believes that Americans bear responsibility for the two million killed and wounded, the four million refugees—almost half of the South Vietnamese population...
...Lederer at that time insisted to Chou En-lai that the United States would support Vietnamese self-determination...
...His report of General Maxwell Taylor's implicit recommendation of expanding the war after a visit to Vietnam in the summer of 1967 deserved several pages of analysis...
...planes...
...Massive B-52 raids from Guam and Okinawa are aimed exclusively at the South Vietnamese (the air war against the North has been carried out by medium aircraft from Thailand as well as from the Seventh Fleet...
...Yet, despite Lederer's intentions, one does not feel that .this war can be any different...
...The conclusion which Just's personal report conveys is the hopelessness of the Vietnam war for the United States and its troops there...
...For those who desire an American victory in Vietnam, Our Own Worst Enemy will be a traumatic experience...
...Lederer has had more than a quarter century of experience in the Far East as a career naval officer...
...In 1940 he served as a naval lieutenant on a gunboat in the American Yangtze River patrol —to state that lone fact is a commentary on the roots of America's Asian policies...
...Although not lacking in its own description of American soldiering, William Lederer's Our Own Worst Enemy undertakes a rational examination of U.S...
...soldiers who "advised" the Diem regime under the Kennedy Administration and the hundreds of thousands fighting for the Thieu-Ky regime under the Johnson Administration...
...Yet, the NLF guerrillas and the South Vietnamese peasants continue to be faceless while American soldiers have received proportionately more coverage than in any other recent war...
...It is hard to accept the full extent of what we have accomplished without seeing it in person—the burned-out countryside, the unplanted fields, the bombed villages, the millions of refugees . . . ." Perhaps it is to avoid the implications of that responsibility that Americans prefer that the Vietcong remain faceless...
...Every miscalculation seems logically derived from original decisions by the State Department and the Pentagon...
...To What End is written from that limited viewpoint of the U.S...
...policy in Vietnam...
...This is why the NLF has the political and military initiative in three quarters of South Vietnam and why the number of villages controlled by the NLF increased during 1967 and early 1968...
...Reviewed by Leonard P. Liggio The "faceless Vietcong" remain as faceless now as when the National Liberation Front was founded in December, 1960...
...More than a half million American troops operate in Vietnam...
...Chou expressed his doubts and replied: "You have allowed your fear of Marxism to destroy your sense of political reality...
...Instead Just merely comments that "it seemed the remark of a man who overturns the chessboard when his king is checked...
...A combat sergeant, depicting the Vietcong soldier as the best fighter he has ever seen, pauses and adds: "Of course, that's because he's fighting in his own country...
...This situation exists despite the tens of thousands of U.S...
...Ward Just, The Washington Post's correspondent in Vietnam for a year and a half, presents a brilliant, impressionistic survey of what he saw and what American soldiers experience every day in Vietnam's swamps and jungles, barracks, and bars...
...Lederer tries to have his American reader visualize the effect on the Vietnamese peasants of "defoliation and the fire bombs of the B-52's, and the savage and indiscriminate use of napalm and cluster-bomb units by U.S...
...This futility is captured in one of many insights by American soldiers Just describes...
...Lederer repeatedly emphasizes that massive American superiority in firepower cannot win an essentially political war...
...The logic of such political developments requires that the civilian population be considered as the enemy...
...soldiers' lives, thoughts, and deaths...
Vol. 32 • July 1968 • No. 7
