Give War a Chance

...BY CHRISTOPHER LYNCH The word "tragedy" is perhaps the most frequently intoned about the Vietnam War, and usually what is intended by it is a sense that American involvement in the war was a mistake and American defeat was inevitable...

...But for all its successes and difficulties, the Gulf War was less a test of our abilities and our endurance than was the Vietnam War...

...Defeat in Vietnam is its analysis of how an independent and sustainable South Vietnam could have been attained relatively early by an intelligent prosecution of the ground war...

...In the book's final chapter, Gregory H. Stanton takes aim at the standard portrayal of the bloodletting that swept Indochina, especially Cambodia, after the war...

...But Hackworth's self-promotion and occasional recklessness can be forgiven in light of his well-attested tactical brilliance, devotion to his men, and ability to inspire by "leading from up front"—not to mention his (and his co-author and wife's) narrative gifts...

...After our military success in the Gulf War, the first President Bush announced that we had kicked the "Vietnam Syndrome"—our sense that we could not, or even should not, win again...

...Rather than order any of his 800 troops to attempt a dubious rescue, he commandeered several helicopters to provide covering fire...

...These atrocities are usually cast as a tragic turn in the cycle of violence initiated by American carpet-bombing of civilian areas...

...Walton shows that the American commander, General William Westmoreland, was dealt a bad hand and then played it poorly...

...The historical case that the war was well authorized by a Congress aware of every major escalation is accompanied by a persuasive constitutional argument that war-making is an essentially executive function...

...The book chronicles Hack-worth's four-month transformation of a demoralized, ragtag battalion fighting in the Mekong Delta into a staggeringly effective force...

...By so doing, the United States could have fought well in the big war and the small war, destroying "main force units" while "pacifying" rural areas...

...Curiously, the book is most wanting when it comes to describing what motivates soldiers...

...His work shows the path by which the experts' "tendency to view operational difficulties . . . as insurmountable barriers to U.S...

...The high point of The Myth of Inevitable U.S...

...Hackworth wonders, "How can you beat such fighting spirit...

...Properly aware of the limits of counterfac-tual arguments, Walton offers considerable evidence that his preferred alternatives (the hot pursuit of Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army forces into their Cambodian and Laotian sanctuaries and the effective coordination of the bombing campaigns in the North with the ground war in the South) were genuine possibilities at the time...

...Steel My Soldiers' Hearts, Hack-worth's account of his third tour in Vietnam, is as riveting and profane as Walton's strategic analysis is sober and clinical...

...Walton maintains that Vietnam "has consistently been the most strategically misappraised of all U.S...

...Christopher Lynch is assistant professor of political science at Carthage College...

...So, for instance, C. Dale Walton, in The Myth of Inevitable U.S...

...But summaries by five authors— including B.G...

...By showing that our national failure arose not from blind fate but from deliberate policies and actions that could and should have been otherwise, these three books can help us to face it squarely and learn its real lessons well...

...at the same time, he should have built up successful coun-terinsurgency programs...

...victory" and their corresponding "reluctance to acknowledge that the United States had compensating advantages" have led us into moral as well as strategic confusion...

...Hackworth's desire was to out-guerrilla the guerrillas...

...He describes a Viet Cong soldier who, as Hackworth's helicopter narrowed in and wounded him, continued firing long enough for his comrades to escape...

...The book's only serious defect is that it appears to be a record of the conference containing superfluous material such as several brief, contentless "papers," and others wholly lacking supporting evidence...

...A fear of Chinese intervention prevented leaders from availing themselves of either option...

...We need not balk at the fact that the current war on terrorism has more in common with Vietnam than with the Gulf War...

...When in his absence several of his troops became trapped by heavy fire in an open field, Hackworth returned toward nightfall to find the thorniest tactical problem of his career: how to save them before dark without losing more men to an enemy lying in wait beyond a tree line offering perfect cover...

...For instance, in a study of the legality and constitutionality of the war, Turner explodes the assumption—pervading nearly every other account—that the war arose from extra-constitutional executive usurpation of congressional authority...

...His helicopter riddled with bullet holes, Hackworth whisked the awestruck men away, an action that won him a recommendation (still pending) for virtually the only decoration he has yet to receive, the Medal of Honor...

...In Hackworth's hands it meant properly training his men to set ambush after ambush of their own, resulting in an astounding 100-to-1 ratio of enemy to friendly killed in action...

...In a small way, his stand symbolized the war: a small backward country taking on a superpower and winning because its people believed their cause was right and stubbornly refused to give up...

...John Norton Moore and Robert F Turner's Real Lessons of the Vietnam War, a compilation of papers from a conference held in 2000, has more to say regarding the principles guiding American involvement...

...Westmoreland chose to put all his eggs in the search-and-destroy basket, first in the hopes of repeating early successes in major engagements, then in order to "attrit" an enemy constantly replenished by the North...

...In the wrong hands, this principle could lead to the wasteful "search-and-avoid" tactics practiced by soldiers disgusted with Westmoreland's strategy of attrition...

...conflicts...

...One man against a war machine...

...Defeat in Vietnam, catalogues the errors that led to the fall of Saigon in 1975, persuasively—if inelegantly— arguing that they could have been avoided...

...Washington refused him sufficient troops for simultaneously defeating both the enemy's main forces and their small, widely dispersed guerrilla cells...

...But such motivation seems insufficient, even for Hackworth...

...Such stories sustain one into the second half of the book, but at that point Hackworth inserts into Steel My Soldiers' Hearts a long chapter on the heroism of the war's medics (already amply recounted) and another on the effects of wartime VD that reads about as well as a textbook description of a bad head cold...

...Hackworth's caution regarding the lives of his men didn't extend to himself...

...The remaining chapters are aimed at serious students of the war...

...Burkett on the media, Lewis Sorley on the war's winnability, and Michael Lind on its necessity—of their book-length studies are useful to general readers...

...Hackworth repeats the by now well-worn military refrain that men fight and die not for patriotism or principle but only for each other...

...Victory, according to Walton, was attainable by means ranging from a slightly modified version of the limited-war strategy actually adopted to a full-blown invasion of the North...

...With this nod to the conventional belief in the inevitability of defeat, Hackworth seems to forget not only his own outstanding successes, but also our failure to nourish our soldiers' will to fight on the principles at stake in the war...

...The result is a remarkably uneven volume...

...Had commanders come within hailing distance of that rate, the Ho Chi Minh trail operating at full bore could never have supplied enough soldiers to threaten the independence of South Vietnam...

...Walton argues that Westmoreland should have instead cut his army's disproportionately long logistical tail and aggressively trained the South Vietnamese army in order to tap into its vast manpower...

...Walton rightly resists the temptation to pin American failure on a single problem—political, cultural, or military...

...Meanwhile, for another recent author—Colonel David H. Hackworth—Vietnam was all about beating the guerrillas at their own game...

...Though Stanton condemns this bombing, he rightly directs most of his moral fire at those who fail to see the perversity of blaming the United States for the Khmer Rouge's systematic killing of millions...

...Hackworth seems a combination of General Patton, Mel Gibson's stolid Colonel Moore in We Were Soldiers, and M*A*S*ffs gung-ho and slightly demented CIA officer, Colonel Flagg...

...He put to good use the rule of thumb—anathema to doctrinaire Clausewitzians but heartily recommended by Machiavelli—that it's more important to avoid being hit by the enemy than it is to hit him...

...But he turns that point around to make it a stinging indictment: "There were numerous roads to victory, but . . . Washington chose none of them...

...That kind of proposition, however, is like a gauntlet thrown down to historians, and an interesting turn has begun to take place in recent years as more and more historians start to suggest the exact opposite of the conventional understanding of Viet-nam—namely, that the war was just and necessary, and that an American victory was entirely possible...