Vietnam Mire

...The partisans—in this case the Viet Minh—have been at their task of liberating Vietnam from foreign domination for some time, but their leader, Ho Chi Minh, accepts the American support in a positive spirit...

...We learn, for example, that the darkroom Edward Lansdale set up for Diem meant more to the dictator than all the millions his relatives and cronies were pirating from the U.S...

...The denouement is also well known to us by now: the disintegration of the American army in the field...

...But as Edmund Gullion, the former American charge in Saigon from 1950 to 1953, reminds us, the State Department faction back home who supported the communist Ho as leader of an independent Vietnam was always marginal...

...The accounts of the war's unrepentant managers are, nonetheless, full of revelations heretofore missing from the Vietnam literature...

...Fuzzy reasoning of this sort pervades the opening testimonies of Strange Ground, and causes one to wonder whether the mechanistic minds that engineered such a policy imagined that the founders of the American republic also approached the creation of our new nation as "a project," the historical equivalent of assembling an institutional erector set, not to mention as a task better suited to foreigners than to themselves...

...Through such anecdotes we may at least demystify the powerful, and reduce them to a human scale...

...In this new look back on Vietnam, journalist Harry Maurer has chronologically arranged interviews with sixty Americans whose experiences embrace every aspect of the war's execution and span the full thirty years of U.S...

...Indochina policy right from the beginning, and unleashed on Vietnam a human wave of "nation builders"—the likes of Ogden Williams, a CIA operative and sidekick of super-spook Edward Lansdale during the Diem years...

...The real power inclined elsewhere, or as Gullion asserts with some coyness, "There was a tide of interest in 'containment.'" In terms less euphemistic, Gullion also specifies the nature of the imperial interrogative that underlay the true U.S...

...A few hearty OSS types are dropped behind the Japanese lines in occupied Indochina to rally the partisans at the end of World War II...

...And so, in the end, reading Strange Ground has an effect similar to damp weather on an old wound: You feel the discomfort, but you can't reach the place that needs soothing because the source of irritation is buried too deep beneath the skin...

...In the graphic, agonizing detail of the Vietnam genre, we are led again through the mire of dehumanization that began with a conventional beachhead assault by U.S...

...involvement...

...But almost to a man they come off sounding as anachronistic as samurai...

...As each of these men searches to explain to us and to himself the causes of America's failure in Vietnam, he is forced to champion anew those strategems with which he himself was most intimately associated—"pacification," "counter-insurgency," "Vietnamization"—arguing in a litany of "if onlys" that defeat could have been avoided...

...It may surprise even readers of The Progressive to learn that the former managers of America's Vietnam policy whose recollections fill the book's provocative initial section, covering the years 1940-1965, remain staunch hawks...

...Michael Uhl (Michael Uhl, a Vietnam veteran, is a freelance writer in Maine...

...Many are patricians, including several career diplomats, but all-including a sprinkling of old soldiers, spooks, technocrats, and a former combat photographer for Life magazine—spent considerable time in Vietnam, and in purely literary terms, the details of their stories are undeniably fascinating...

...policy: "Was it possible to create a self-sustaining, self-confident Vietnamese nation, and a national spirit...

...he has selected each voice with extreme care to illuminate some evolutionary moment in the war's progress, or some theme or policy for which Vietnam was to become virtually synonymous...

...Thus, the enemy's point of view is never taken into account, even after he has been victorious...

...These voices—all male—do not hold that U.S...

...But for reasons both historical and psychological, the horrors do not bridge the em-pathic gap...

...For Williams, Vietnam was "a small country" that he could identify with "as a project," and a "new nation" that ought to be ruled by "our system of representative government...

...constantly he reminds the Americans of their own democratic traditions and freedoms...

...They defend the war and their own participation without reservation...

...Marines, but soon degenerated into a living tableau of horrors on a scale only Hieronymus Bosch might have fully comprehended...

...This is not the case with the testimony of the warriors themselves that packs the inner core of Strange Ground, covering the intensive combat years, 1965 to 1970...

...Maurer's opening interview in Strange Ground suggests that American involvement in Vietnam began as something of a lark...

...Nowhere in the words of these former policy-managers is there the slightest sign of consciousness that the United States was a foreign invader in Vietnam, an army of occupation...

...involvement in Vietnam was a "mistake...

...Such thinking dominated U.S...

...the pageant of self-destruction played out ad infinitum on the home front by a permanent underclass of Vietnam veterans, and, finally, the virtual fulfillment of Air Force General Curtis LeMay's diabolical intent to bomb Vietnam back to the Stone Age...

...And here is the rub...

...There is nothing random about Maurer's casting...

...While almost every soldier's tale is expressed with rare eloquence—aided, no doubt, by Maurer's skillful editing—and is possessed of a power to trigger the deepest emotions, there remains about these grotesque accounts something so remote from the subtle shadings of good and evil we encounter under normal circumstances that their painful significance has yet to be assimilated by the American people, much less by their Government...

...Here, we are thrust into a world of incomprehension...

...Similarly shattering eyewitness accounts of the war's special bestiality have been widely publicized over the years, and few ttiday can doubt their truthfulness...

...war chest...