VIETNAM RECORD
Bacevich, Andrew J.
VIETNAM RECORD How We Lost the War By Andrew J. Bacevich Jeffrey Record is a prolific defense analyst who served with the State Department in Vietnam. In his new study, The Wrong War, he ascribes...
...Record begins with a characteristically breezy assertion: The United States routinely investigates such disasters as plane crashes and presidential assassinations, but “there has been no such inquiry into the cause of America’s failure in Vietnam...
...Similarly, in describing the rationale for U.S...
...As with Westmoreland, zeal isn’t always sufficient...
...Record does not disguise his low regard for the U.S...
...Excluding the Vietnamese allows Record to explain the war as “the product of bad decisions by wellintentioned though arrogant—and ignorant—individuals,” all of them Americans...
...Apparently considering this view to be self-evident, he offers little documentation to support his claim, none at all from Vietnamese sources...
...A chapter later he returns to the topic and reaches the same conclusion, but concocts a different explanation: China was unlikely to intervene not because it was convulsed by internal turmoil but “precisely because the United States refrained from actions . . . that could have threatened the integrity of North Vietnam’s territory and regime...
...The United States lost the war because it misunderstood the nature of the conflict, underestimated the tenacity of its adversary, overestimated its own stamina and military prowess, and allied itself with a client that was from the outset incapable of commanding the loyalty of its people...
...At a time when the United States is becoming increasingly casual in employing its military might, such cautionary reminders are to be welcomed...
...Pacification, in the eyes of American officers, was for sissies, not real soldiers...
...Lyndon Johnson’s reluctance to mobilize the reserves was a huge mistake, he declares, depriving the Pentagon of “a vast reservoir of mature and well-trained manpower...
...Within the space of a single paragraph, Record declares that Americans “accorded little intrinsic importance to South Vietnam” and quotes David Halberstam in 1965 describing it as “one of five or six nations that is truly vital to U.S...
...In short, Record credits the misfits after 1968 with forcing the North Vietnamese to fight on American terms...
...Yet elsewhere the author skewers Westmoreland for misusing the forces he already had...
...In short, a reprise of Korea was improbable...
...And yet, Record has packaged that argument in a book that is itself strident in tone, heedless of culture, derelict in its use of history, and laced with contradictions...
...history, and policies that were contradictory to the point of incoherence...
...Reducing the reasons for American failure in Vietnam to a handful of familiar clich?s—all of them rendered in language suggesting that war is simple— The Wrong War reminds us that smugness lives on, gets published, and even attracts admiring blurbs...
...interests...
...The author is adamant in his judgment of those who fought for and governed South Vietnam: They were craven, cowardly, and corrupt...
...With The Wrong War, he aims to correct that ostensible deficiency...
...To be sure,” the author notes, “these judgments have been made before,” as indeed they have, repeatedly, beginning twenty-five years ago with The Pentagon Papers and continuing with a flood of histories, memoirs, conferences, and documentaries ever since...
...In his new study, The Wrong War, he ascribes the defeat of the United States in the Vietnam war to arrogance, ethnocentrism, a disregard for Andrew J. Bacevich is a professor of international relations at Boston University...
...The result—based entirely on readily available sources published in English—makes four main points...
...To support his thesis, the author brings to bear an arsenal of opinion, with much the same fervor as General William Westmoreland tried to use American firepower to bludgeon his adversary into submission...
...Perhaps the most curious thing about The Wrong War is the way in which it is not just an explanation of America’s defeat in Vietnam, but a compelling example of the attitudes that Record himself declares led to that defeat...
...One page later, Record backs away from the issue altogether, conceding that “it is too easy, in retrospect, to argue, as I have in these pages, that a war with China over South Vietnam’s fate was never in the cards...
...And he arrives at the most comfortable of conclusions: Defeat was an aberration, attributable to the mistakes of a handful of bumbling officials...
...restraint in prosecuting the war, Record notes and immediately dismisses administration fears of possible intervention by China...
...Obsessed with firepower and technology, “the American armed forces were military misfits in Indochina...
...Record’s confusions are many...
...Having “explained” Vietnam, Americans need not fear its recurrence...
...Having purged the perpetrators, having identified the personal foibles and the specific errors of judgment that led to failure, we can rest easy...
...Blissfully ignorant of Mao’s theory of revolutionary war, they assumed that they could win in Vietnam, as they had won elsewhere, by waging a “capital-intensive brand of conventional warfare that placed a premium on material and technological superiority...
...Elsewhere, however, Record concedes that both the U.S...
...Indeed, the shift by Westmoreland’s successor Creighton Abrams away from attrition to population protection “fatally undermined the communist base in the South, propelling Hanoi toward increasing reliance on conventional military and diplomatic means to achieve reunification...
...Given the American insistence on huge base camps, creature comforts, and a one-year tour of duty, few of those serving in the war zone, according to Record, were gainfully employed...
...Given that China in 1965 “was on the verge of starting its long march toward the disaster of the Great Cultural Revolution,” it appears obvious to Record that “Beijing had every reason to avoid war with the United States...
...forces that fought the war...
...Although Record does not hesitate to delve into the collective psyche of the North Vietnamese, to do so he relies on the testimony of American journalists like Harrison Salisbury and radicals like Gabriel Kolko...
...Even among the war’s sternest critics, in other words, Vietnam’s strategic insignificance was not obvious in the mid-1960s...
...Indeed, the bibliography contains only three books by Vietnamese authors...
...Yet, however inadvertently, this book serves a useful purpose...
...He hurls charges against President Johnson, General Westmoreland, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara (branded by Record as the American Albert Speer...
...Army special forces and Marines devised innovative and effective approaches to pacification...
...If this is true, sending still more troops to Vietnam would have had little bearing on the actual conduct of the war, and the mobilization issue becomes a red herring...
Vol. 3 • August 1998 • No. 48
