Why Vietnam?
Maclear, Michael
BOOKS Why Vietnam? THE TEN THOUSAND DAY WAR by Michael Maclear St. Martin's Press. 288 pp. $16.95. f there is a thesis in Michael Maclear's The Ten Thousand Day War it is that the original sin...
...advisory teams led by men like Edward Lansdale, who, Maclear reminds us, is brilliantly portrayed as a nation-building zealot by Graham Greene in The Quiet American...
...Its contents come largely from interviews undertaken for a Canadian television series of the same name...
...The Ten Thousand Day War, which especially deserves to be read by high school and college students and by GIs, does have some flaws...
...It should be emphasized that The Ten Thousand Day War is a story, not a history...
...They soon came to ruin at the battle of Dien Bien Phu...
...At the end of World War II, the French re-established colonial rule in Indochina...
...Michael Uhl (Michael Uhl, a Vietnam veteran, is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn...
...Maclear pieces together a colorful account of that battle from a rich legacy of French and Vietnamese memoirs...
...The battle for hearts and minds gave way to an avenging escalation of military means...
...After Diem, President Lyndon Johnson found himself dealing with a new Saigon government on an average of every two months for two years...
...With this paramount question, Maclear begins a narrative of plot and counterplot in a war in a once remote country that dragged on wearily from 1945 to 1975...
...As for the U.S...
...f there is a thesis in Michael Maclear's The Ten Thousand Day War it is that the original sin of America's involvement in Vietnam lies in the failure of U.S...
...Mercifully absent from this work are the undigested romantic prose of a book like Dispatches or the mythologizing pop-journalism of recent news magazine cover stories that enshrine Vietnam veterans as anti-heroes rather than treat them as once healthy and ordinary citizens whose lives now often reflect what all of us should hate in war and guard against in the future...
...Still, Maclear succeeds admirably and in the end captures, if not history, at least the texture and the aftertaste of the thirty years' war which has so powerfully affected our world and our time...
...More accurately, it is a form of teleplay or a literary docu-drama...
...Maclear treads too lightly over the crucial issues of whether U.S...
...There is some irony in this approach to the subject, since Vietnam has been widely labeled as the "first television war...
...interest in Vietnam any more sophisticated than the single idea that, with Ho's ascendancy in the North, an expansion of monolithic communism threatened all the other small nations of Southeast Asia...
...He is more high-spirited when parrying criticism of the coverage of the war and admiring the courage of the Vietnamese...
...For the true military buff, Maclear's glimpse of the workings of the Ho Chi Minh trail should prove a highlight in the text...
...forces won or lost on the battlefield...
...interests in the area...
...On the misreading of Vietnamese intentions, Maclear describes how American OSS agent Archimedes Patti established, through successful collaboration with the then obscure Ho Chi Minh, "an intelligence network in the entire peninsula of Indochina" in 1945 to harass Japanese occupation forces there...
...Maclear draws on interviews of American military men and policy makers, Vietnamese communists and compradors, veterans and antiwar activists...
...With Tod Ensign he wrote "GI Guinea Pigs...
...Maclear narrates in its entirety this fractured tale of the American effort to establish and maintain the "free" state of South Vietnam...
...What emerges from Maclear's documentary at this point is that direct American intervention did not lead to a U.S...
...policy on the question of Vietnam's independence...
...If our leaders had ever bothered themselves to understand the Vietnamese and their motives, would the war have been avoided or at least shortened...
...In the re-reading of these events, the air war still ranks among history's armed excesses for the scale of its barbarism...
...Patti, along with many of his State Department and CIA successors, believed that the Vietnamese patriots, while communists, were unlikely to be dominated by the Chinese, their ancient enemy, or the Russians, and that a "Yugoslavia" in Southeast Asia would not necessarily be antagonistic to U.S...
...and Vietnamese governments, many of those who occupied high places in policy making during the military period tell us what they did and why...
...The assassination of President Diem, however, signaled the end of any serious attempt to achieve this goal through political means...
...A generation later, the initiatives of those who shared this perspective would be revealed in hearings before the U.S...
...Before long, Saigon became aware of a new presence: U.S...
...Senate...
...The Ten Thousand Day War will disturb those who have managed to dull the memories of a painful past...
...Administrations from Franklin Roosevelt's to Richard Nixon's to grasp the nationalist character of the long Vietnamese struggle...
...The burden of their testimony was that an obsessive national fear of communism formed the core of U.S...
Vol. 46 • June 1982 • No. 6
