TEN

Dissent and Self-Critique

Tet, January 31–April 6, 1968

The expedition to Sicily was not so much a mistake in judgement, considering the enemy they went against, as much as a case of mismanagement on the part of the planners, who did not afterwards take the necessary measures to support those first troops they sent out. Instead, they turned to personal rivalries over the leadership of the people, and consequently not only conducted the war in the field half-heartedly, but also brought civil discord for the first time to the home front. . . . And yet they did not fail until they at last turned on each other and fell into private quarrels that brought their ruin.

—THUCYDIDES, The Peloponnesian War (2.65.12–13)

BATTLES AGAINST THE CITIES

American Embassy, Saigon

SAIGON WAS QUIET, as it should be during the holidays. There was a thirty-six-hour truce in effect for the Tet Nguyen Dan celebration and various festivals commemorating the lunar new year. In any case, the Vietcong rarely came into the southern urban centers of Vietnam to attack openly with sizable forces. All that changed suddenly and without warning in the early morning of January 31, 1968. The entire country of South Vietnam, or so it seemed from panicky reports that flashed into American headquarters in Saigon, had come under fire in a matter of minutes from enemy infiltrators. Cities, villages, even rural hamlets— more than one hundred in all—were being overrun. Such a scenario at first seemed preposterous to American commanders. They were convinced that the enemy would never attack en masse, and especially not after heavy bombing attacks during 1967 that had gradually turned the tide against North Vietnam.

The center of American power in South Vietnam was the capital city of Saigon, supposedly a sacrosanct fortress. The bastion for this vast network of military and civilian support, MACV (Military Assistance Command Vietnam), was the American embassy, its walls of ugly concrete the consummate image of the strength and commitment of the United States to stop the communist incursion from the North and thereby allow for the eventual creation of a democratic, capitalist nation in the South. After the riveting success of World War II, two decades earlier, and the salvation of a capitalist, “free” South Korea in 1953, the American military during the first few years in Vietnam still operated with a sense of invincibility. In their eyes, the problem in Southeast Asia was not defeating the enemy, but finding him and then coaxing him to come out and fight, where he would then be promptly destroyed through overwhelming American firepower.

But city streets were as inimical to the Western way of war as dense jungle. If the Americans wished to bomb and shoot openly and thereby incinerate thousands of communists, then the North Vietnamese would attack stealthily and at night, and not always with even the pretext of shooting exclusively at combatants. Indeed, the embassy, too, was a target—in fact, the first objective of the entire massive enemy offensive that began nationwide at about 3:00 in the morning on January 31. Some 4,000 Vietcong guerrillas, many in civilian clothes and soon aided by infiltration units from the regular army of North Vietnam, attacked nearly all the main South Vietnamese and American government installations in Saigon. Hundreds of small cadres attempted to storm the military headquarters of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), the state radio and television stations, police compounds, government agencies, and individual homes of army, police, and American officials in a madcap plan to raise general insurrection among the population and thereby inaugurate the long-promised war of national liberation.

Nineteen Vietcong commandos planned to force their way through the sealed American embassy grounds and overpower a skeleton detail of surprised and sleepy guards. Pulling up in a truck and taxicab, they blasted a hole in the compound wall, killed five American marines, and then began to fire grenades and automatic weapons against the heavy doors of the main chancery in a vain attempt to enter the offices of the embassy proper. What would the American public think, when in just a few hours television broadcasts sent the nation images of Vietcong peering from the windows of Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker’s own office?

It was not to be so. Within five hours helicopters had landed American airborne troops onto the grounds. The Americans killed all nineteen enemy infiltrators and secured the embassy. The enemy assault, like dozens more that morning against President Nguyen Van Thieu’s palace and other Vietnamese and American buildings, was a complete surprise and yet failure at the same time. As they urged on their troops, planners in North Vietnam boasted that the raids would signal a general uprising against the Americans and their “puppet” Vietnamese hosts:

Move forward aggressively to carry out decisive and repeated attacks in order to annihilate as many American, Satellite and Puppet troops as possible in conjunction with political struggle and military proselytizing activities. . . . Display to the utmost your revolutionary heroism by surmounting all the hardships and difficulties and making sacrifices to be able to fight continually and aggressively. Be prepared to smash all enemy counter attacks and maintain your revolutionary standpoint under all circumstances. (L. Berman, “Tet Offensive,” in M. Gilbert and W. Head, eds., The Tet Offensive, 21)

Most residents of Saigon, however, were far more concerned about the lack of security and the random shooting in their streets. Worried American and Vietnamese officers and bureaucrats barricaded themselves in thousands of private residences and began firing at anyone suspicious.

Few Vietnamese had any desire to turn on their own government, much less on the Americans, and the majority of the local population watched from the sidelines. Almost no one joined the communist “uprising.” Most were keen to monitor closely the degree of Vietcong success— weighing the odds that the communists and not the Americans might soon be in control of their lives. Like the Tlaxcalans who followed Cortés to slaughter other indigenous Mexicas, or the tribal irregulars who were attached to Chelmsford in Zululand, the South Vietnamese were ready to fight with the murderous Westerners against the hated communists—but only if the Americans could guarantee military success and bring permanent relief to Vietnam. Now their very embassy was under attack!

By midmorning the Americans were cleaning up the mess on the grounds, as Ambassador Bunker arrived for work, accompanied by dozens of television cameras and reporters, many of whom sent back fantastic cables that the Vietcong had for a time taken over the American embassy and were in possession of the main chancery. The misinformation came not only from the press. Back home President Lyndon B. Johnson scurried to assure the nation that the raid was more like a riot in a Detroit ghetto than a major military operation. General William Westmoreland, in charge of the American command in Vietnam, would insist to the nation that the systematic attacks were mere diversionary probes to draw resources away from the ongoing siege at Khesanh far to the north. He nevertheless welcomed such enemy concentrations, since they made much easier targets for overwhelming American firepower; while politicians fretted over the offensive, Westmoreland saw a chance for decisive victory.

The next month would prove wrong Westmoreland’s initial guess that Tet was some enormous ruse, but he was accurate in his belief that thousands of enemy Vietnamese were now more likely to be in the open, vulnerable, and shortly to be annihilated. The entire effort of Westmoreland’s previous three years in Vietnam had been to create the conditions of traditional Western decisive battle, in which the American military might draw on its wonderfully trained and disciplined shock infantry and enormous technological and material superiority to blast apart the enemy and then go home. The problem for the Americans in Vietnam, as for Westerners overseas in general, had always been the reluctance of the enemy to engage in set battle pieces, instead turning war into one of infiltration, jungle fighting, terror bombing, and house-to-house raiding. In retreat, not battle, Darius III had found safety from Alexander; Abd ar-Rahman had far more success looting Narbonne than meeting Charles Martel at Poitiers; the Aztecs sometimes won when they attacked the Spanish at night, in surprise, or in mountain passes. Cetshwayo would have been far better off ambushing wagons than charging British squares.

Sixty million Americans back home during the next week of fighting saw a somewhat different picture of the first night’s attack. Cameras flashed back images of a few dead Americans on the compound grounds. Tanks and howitzers rushed through the streets of Saigon. Headlines flashed “War Hits Saigon.” An especially disturbing picture was shown for days on television: General Nguyen Ngoc Loan blowing the brains out of a captured Vietcong infiltrator. That the prisoner had been part of infiltration units which just earlier had gunned down many of Loan’s security forces, including one officer at home with his wife and children, or that enemy agents out of uniform and in civilian dress were not accorded the same treatment as captured soldiers, was lost in the journalistic frenzy. Eddie Adams, the Associated Press photographer who snapped the picture for Lifemagazine, won the Pulitzer Prize for photography.

The image of those scattered brains apparently summed up the entire mess of Tet—dying Americans unable to protect the nerve center of their massive expeditionary force while their corrupt South Vietnamese allies shot the unarmed and innocent—at a time when the public was assured that “the light is at the end of the tunnel.” As they watched their television sets, Americans wondered if victory really was at hand and were troubled over what and whom to believe:

It says something about this war that the great picture of the Tet Offensive was Eddie Adam’s photograph of a South Vietnamese general shooting a man with his arms tied behind his back, that the most memorable quotation was Peter Arnett’s damning epigram from Ben Tre, “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it” and that the only Pulitzer Prize awarded specifically for reporting an event of the Tet offensive was given two years later to Seymour M. Hersh, who never set foot in Vietnam, for exposing the U.S. Army massacre of more than a hundred civilians at My Lai. (D. Oberdorfer, Tet!, 332)

Outside the embassy a vicious battle erupted at the Phu Tho racetrack that the Vietcong had occupied as the main element of their attack, a traffic hub for several main boulevards with enough open spaces to coordinate an entire army. Homes surrounding the track were stuffed with hundreds of snipers. It took a week of house-to-house fighting for American army troops and ARVN forces to locate and expel the Vietcong, who rarely surrendered and had to be killed almost to the last man. Yet on television Americans were being blamed for blasting apart residences, as if no one noticed that urban snipers were shooting marines in the middle of a holiday truce.

It took almost three weeks for the last organized infiltrators to be killed or expelled from Saigon. A company of marines from the 3rd Battalion, 7th Infantry Division, tried to storm the Phu Tho racetrack and locate a Vietcong battalion in brutal fighting typical of the urban firefight:

Recoilless rifles blasted holes through walls, grenade launchers were fired through the jagged cavities, and then soldiers clambered into the smoking entrances. Hundreds of panic-stricken civilians fled past the armored carriers as the battle raged on. The column continued to contest the Viet Cong in fierce house-to-house fighting as it pressed closer to the racetrack. Gunships swooped down to blast apart structures with minigun and rocket salvos. By one o’clock that afternoon [January 31] the company had advanced two more city blocks. Then the Viet Cong withdrew to positions dug in behind the concrete park benches, backed up by heavy weapons located in concrete towers on the spectator stands inside the racetrack itself. (S. Stanton, The Rise and Fall of an American Army, 225)

Bloodbath at Hué

Even worse city fighting was far to the north, near the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), in the provincial capital of Hué—a picturesque former imperial city of the once-unified Vietnam, containing about 140,000 residents. Although it was South Vietnam’s third largest city, and near the North Vietnamese border, Hué was still relatively untouched by war. That was soon to change. At about the same time the American embassy was attacked, three columns of North Vietnamese forces, including two full regiments and two Vietcong battalions—their numbers eventually to rise to nearly 12,000 troops—stormed the city. They soon met up with infiltrators that had mixed in with the Tet holiday crowds, quickly brushed aside the small ARVN garrisons, and then occupied the “Citadel,” a massive fortress overlooking the old city amid ancient palaces and temples.

Once the North Vietnamese were in control, agents systematically fanned out, searching for South Vietnamese soldiers, government officials, American sympathizers, and foreigners in general. Somewhere between 4,000 and 6,000 were rounded up. Most of those were clubbed or shot to death. Doctors, priests, and teachers were especially targeted. Three thousand bodies were eventually found in mass graves. The others were written off as “missing.” Although Western reporters were soon ubiquitous in Hué, few commented on the executions; those who did often denied they even occurred.

The American counterattack spearheaded by U.S. marines was ferocious, leading to twenty-six days of nonstop fighting, tank attacks, reinforcements, and air strikes to recapture the nearly demolished Citadel. As in Saigon, marines often had no idea where or who the enemy was until they were fired upon from private houses:

I finally began to understand why we had experienced such difficulty getting across the street. Many of these houses were one-story homes, but a couple were two-story affairs, providing excellent and advantageous firing positions for the waiting NVA [North Vietnamese Army]. From these positions, the NVA could shoot right down on us, point-blank as we tried to run across the street. This was obvious and we understood the situation clearly, so we had directed our return fire at the windows and doorways of the houses across the street, which were the likely enemy firing positions. What we had not realized was that the NVA were also shooting at us from well-connected, dug-in positions between the houses, at street level. (N. Warr, Phase Line Green, 159–60)

The Americans had been trained to fight a war of maneuver and annihilation, in which they roamed wetlands and the jungle to engage in sharp but brief firefights before calling in artillery and air strikes and then heading back to fortified and relatively secure compounds. Like hoplite soldiers or Lord Chelmsford’s redcoats, the point of war was to find the enemy and then defeat him through greater Western firepower, itself the product of superior discipline, technology, and supply. But whereas General Westmoreland claimed that Tet was an enemy blunder in allowing his forces the rare opportunity to fight the North Vietnamese in the open, few of the enemy offensives during Tet resulted in traditional Western collisions of shock battle. More often, to gain advantage from the American edge in firepower meant to call in artillery and air strikes on urban residences that housed Vietcong snipers—and whose destruction only alienated their South Vietnamese owners and incited hostile media attention back in America.

At Hué the Vietcong and North Vietnamese infiltrated in small independent units, at night, and often out of uniform. They fired automatic weapons, mortars, and grenade launchers from house windows, behind walls, and in crowds, forcing the marines to fight a counterattack reminiscent of Stalingrad, in which the enemy had to be expelled block by block, destroying hundreds of residences in the process. Often the Americans’ choice was either to be picked off at random by well-ensconced snipers or to blast apart entire—and often historic—buildings by using howitzers and aerial bombardment:

They were unshaven, grimy, and covered with dust from the shattered brick and stone buildings. Sweat and bloodstains covered their fatigues. Elbows and knees stuck out of holes in their uniforms, the same ones they had worn for two weeks. . . . The Marines, who were trained to be a mobile, amphibious reaction force, had become moles. They had become a static, immobile collection of rats, hunkered down in a junk pile of crumbled houses, surrounded by shell-pocked courtyard walls, burned-out automobiles, and downed trees and power lines. Death was waiting to tap them on the shoulder at any time, and many would never know where it came from. (G. Smith, The Siege of Hue, 158)

Yet in less than a month the enemy was expelled from Hué. The final tally of the dead was dramatically lopsided. Americans and their South Vietnamese allies—the Elite Black Panther company (Hac Bao) was given the privilege of storming the imperial palace and slaughtering the last enemy holdouts—had killed 5,113 of the enemy. Only 147 Americans were lost in action, with 857 wounded—fatality figures that in their own right would have signaled a landmark victory in both world wars. Yet reporters who freely roamed Hué ignored the respective sacrifices and were uninterested in the larger tactical situation. Instead, they mostly interviewed American soldiers in the midst of the dirty street fighting. Often they sent back mini-interviews like the following with a marine taking a minute’s break from firing:

What’s the hardest part of it?

Not knowing where they are—that’s the worst thing. Riding around, running in sewers, the gutter, anywhere. Could be anywhere. Just hope you can stay alive, day to day. Everybody just wants to go back home and go to school. That’s about it.

Have you lost any friends?

Quite a few. We lost one the other day. The whole thing stinks, really. (S. Karnow, Vietnam, 533)

For the first time in the history of Western warfare—in fact, of any conflict anywhere at any time—soldiers in the heat of battle could be seen instantly by millions of their parents, siblings, and friends in the safety of their living rooms. Images of the wounded and dead were flashed home in gruesome detail—and in color—by reporters of any nation, who were mostly free to go, see, and send back what they wished, with the likelihood it would be heard, read, or seen by the American voting public within hours, if not minutes. When such technological breakthroughs in instant video communications, often in abbreviated snippets and without context, were married to the traditional Western emphasis on unlimited freedom, the result was soon a level of civilian vehemence against the war rarely seen in the past, even among the voices of dissent against the Athenian expedition to Sicily, the European conquest of the Americas, or the British conduct during the Zulu and Boer Wars.

While Americans saw pictures of atrocious killing on television and interviews with disgusted marines, who found their South Vietnamese allies as reluctant to charge fixed positions alongside them as their North Vietnamese enemies were deadly, almost no reports were issued about the North Vietnamese massacres of the innocent. Much less was there any appreciation of the astounding ability of surprised and outnumbered U.S. marines to expel 10,000 from a fortified urban center in just over three weeks at the cost of fewer than 150 dead. Hué, brutal as it turned out to be, was yet another impressive American military victory, perhaps a feat of arms rivaling any bravery shown in either World War I or II. And the Americans were not done.

Khesanh

When the North Vietnamese and Vietcong broke the thirty-six-hour Tet truce on January 31, they systematically attacked the main cities of Saigon, Quangtri, Hué, Da Nang, Nha Trang, Quinhon, Kontum, Banmethuot, My Tho, Can Tho, and Ben Tre with more than 80,000 troops. Altogether thirty-six of forty-four provincial capitals were invaded at a time when 50 percent of the South Vietnamese army was on leave for the holidays. Yet in most places, except for Saigon and Hué, enemy infiltrators were expelled within a week. That counterattack was an amazing feat in and of itself, because the Americans were caught off guard—intelligence warnings of the size and date of the invasion were issued weeks prior, but largely ignored by the squabbling MACV high command.

Even though relatively small numbers of troops had infiltrated key installations in the hearts of major cities like Saigon and Hué, the North Vietnamese initially achieved a psychological dividend far out of proportion to the actual damage inflicted on the Americans and their allies. They were learning quickly that they need not win the offensive, but only overrun for a few days purportedly secure areas in order to cause a firestorm of recrimination and unrest in America. Moreover, at first the American command was confused over enemy intent. General Westmoreland himself felt that the Tet offensives were diversionary tactics to draw American forces away from the siege at Khesanh. Yet the opposite was more likely true: the early siege at Khesanh was designed to divert attention from the urban attacks to come in the following week.

At a little after 5:00 in the morning on January 21, ten days before the formal start of the Tet Offensive, thousands of North Vietnamese troops unleashed an artillery barrage as part of a general assault on an American base at Khesanh. The latter was a forward-area garrison near the DMZ that was intended to cut the supply of troops and matériel from North Vietnam. During the last week of January, news of the beleaguered base ran around the world. Many newspapers dubbed the siege another Dien Bien Phu, where a French garrison in 1954 was nearly annihilated before surrendering its 16,000 survivors.

Yet at Khesanh daily air strikes, hourly resupply, relatively safe evacuation of Lao and Vietnamese refugees, and constant communications kept the besieged 6,000 troops in relatively good shape. Was there much strategic value in hanging on to the surrounded Khesanh? It was hard to ascertain any. The Americans chose to hold the isolated outpost as bait, apparently as a deliberate plan to draw whole North Vietnamese divisions into an open firefight, or they were worried that withdrawal would signal a critical weakness in an American election year, when antiwar protests were on the rise. Whatever the rationale for the decision to stay, far from being another Dien Bien Phu, Khesanh was yet another devastating American demonstration of firepower. While the French had been cut off, outnumbered, without much air support, and isolated in North Vietnam near the Chinese border, the Americans were supplied daily, reinforced, south of the DMZ, in constant and easy communications, and able to drop tons of ordnance on the enemy. Nonetheless, the surrounded marines were also in a sea of seasoned North Vietnamese troops and themselves somewhat unsure of their exact mission. What was the eventual American plan for Khesanh? Was it, as professed by Westmoreland, a key to the defense of the DMZ and possible future operations in Laos, or simply a killing zone to incur enemy body counts and thus to be abandoned once the siege was lifted?

Veteran North Vietnamese troops had surprised and overrun the Lao and Vietnamese garrison at Lang Vei nearby, along with their American advisers, thus giving them full control of land routes into Khesanh. Soon the base was being shelled almost hourly—on some days as many as a thousand incoming artillery, rocket, and mortar rounds—in an effort to wear down the marines and destroy the airstrip. The North Vietnamese were equipped with some of the latest Soviet and Chinese weaponry, such as the 122mm heavy mortar, surface-to-surface missiles, flame-throwers,

tanks, and 130mm heavy artillery, most of it adapted from basic designs dating back to World War II and based on original German, French, and American models. Thousands of Chinese and Soviet advisers worked stealthily but feverishly in the North to unload the artillery batteries and train the Vietnamese in their use.

Despite the new lethal armament, the American counterresponse was frightening and constituted one of the most deadly artillery and air assaults in the history of infantry battle. During the nearly three-month-long siege—from January 20 to mid-April 1968—110,022 tons of bombs were dropped and 142,081 rounds of artillery fired. Some estimated that the true American total was in excess of 200,000 cannon shells. Such astonishing firepower demanded constant rearmament; and eventually more than 14,000 tons of supplies were flown into Khesanh, all under continuous fire. Thousands of North Vietnamese were incinerated in the jungle surrounding the camp. Most estimates put the enemy dead and severely wounded around 10,000—half the 20,000 believed to be involved in the original siege.

Khesanh was to become an abject communist slaughter. If back home Americans in and out of government protested that there were needless marine deaths in defending a frontier outpost, North Vietnamese were publicly silent about their own logic of sacrificing thousands of their young men in a failed effort to storm a tiny airstrip. An American air force pilot remarked of the obliteration:

In mid-February, the area looked like the rest of Vietnam, mountainous and heavily jungled with very little visibility through the jungle canopy. Five weeks later, the jungle had become literally a desert—vast stretches of scarred, bare earth with hardly a tree standing, a landscape of splinters and bomb craters. (T. Hoopes, The Limits of Intervention, 213)

Fewer than 200 Americans were killed, with 1,600 wounded, 845 of which were evacuated. No doubt the real figures were somewhat higher when one considers the fighting in and around Khesanh at Lang Vei, the overland rescue effort in April (Operation Pegasus), and the loss of transport and combat pilots. Still, for every one American killed at Khesanh, fifty North Vietnamese lost their lives—lopsided figures approaching the horrendous slaughter ratios between Spaniards and Aztecs in Mexico or British and Zulus in southern Africa.

Instead of amazement at the carnage, the American media throughout the siege forecast a terrible defeat. After the beginning of the Tet offensives, and the near simultaneous capture of the intelligence ship Pueblo in Korean waters, Life magazine warned its readers against global American reversals culminating in “the looming bloodbath at Khe Sanh.” After a month into the siege, when the level of American counterfire was well established, on March 22 Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., wrote in the Washington Post,“Whatever we do, we must not re-enact Dien Bien Phu.” He went on to warn Americans, “Let us not sacrifice our brave men to the folly of generals and the obstinance of Presidents.” Oliver E. Chub, Jr., echoed the general hysteria in the New Republic: Khesanh, he said, recalling Bismarck’s remark about the relative value of German soldiers versus intervention in the Balkans, “was not worth the life of a single Marine.” He concluded that the siege “could easily end in a military disaster unprecedented in the Vietnam war” (B. Nalty, Air Power and the Fight for Khe Sanh, 39–40). Meanwhile, within three weeks of the beginning of the siege, wings of B-52s—in a preview of the Gulf War bombing tactics years later—had worked out a grid system around the besieged base, in which three bombers blanketed a one-by-two-kilometer box every ninety minutes, around the clock, with explosives and napalm. The air force methodically began to destroy nearly every living thing within one kilometer of the marine ramparts.

The siege ended on April 6, and with it a close to the last of the fighting that had lingered after the culmination of the Tet Offensive. But then in late June, convinced that the resistance had been an overwhelming American success, the MACV ordered the base dismantled. On July 5 Khesanh was razed! The Americans destroyed in hours what the North Vietnamese communists could not in months. All the bridges on nearby Route 9, which weeks earlier had been so laboriously repaired to enable land convoys to reach the trapped marines, were systematically blown up. In the aftermath of the Tet Offensive and subsequent bombing halts, the Americans had apparently determined to abandon their previous idea of walling off the DMZ and stationing troops in forward defense areas near the North Vietnamese border. The marines who had braved constant fire for nearly three months were furious and in near revolt at the news; they felt that possession of the base, not the number of enemy killed, had signified that their lost friends had at least died for something tangible.

By April 1968 both sides in the upcoming American presidential election were talking of winding down the American military presence, either through Robert Kennedy’s promise of negotiated withdrawal, Hubert Humphrey’s hints of bombing halts, or Richard Nixon’s alternative of gradual “Vietnamization.” As Admiral Ulysses Grant Sharp, American naval commander of the Pacific fleet, put it after the amazing American victory at Khesanh, “They got so damned hysterical back in Washington over the Tet offensive that they sort of went off the deep end and decided to get the war over with even if we weren’t going to win it” (B. Nalty, Air Power and the Fight for Khe Sanh, 104). The gallant defense of the compound, terrible damage to the North Vietnamese, and abrupt abandonment of Khesanh were all emblematic of what Vietnam had become by late spring 1968, a quagmire where military operations did not necessarily have anything to do with perceptions about the value or course of the war. Khesanh, better even than Hué, revealed the incompetence of the high command, the bravery and discipline of the marines, the astonishing technological superiority of the air force—and the complete hysteria of much of the American media, which during the war habitually downplayed America’s ability to hurt the enemy, only in the aftermath of the conflict to exaggerate communist losses and suffering. The South Vietnamese ambassador to the United States, Bui Diem, perhaps best summed up the paradox of winning yet losing Tet:

Not long after, it became clear to me that the complete withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam would be only a matter of time and modalities. In that sense, the Tet attacks of 1968 could well be considered a prelude to the end of the war five years later. Thus, Tet was the climax of the Second Indochina War. Indeed, to me, Tet was the time when U.S. public opinion and misconception snatched defeat from the jaws of potential victory. (“My Recollections of the Tet Offensive,” in M. Gilbert and W. Head, eds., The Tet Offensive,133)

VICTORY AS DEFEAT

Quagmire

After Tet the American military often boasted that they had not suffered a single major defeat by enemy forces during the entire fighting in Vietnam. That brag, even for the entire decade of United States involvement, is largely valid, except for a few small compounds staffed by American advisers that were sometimes surprised and for a time occasionally overrun. Although there would be various phases of the Tet Offensive that would go on for months, the first stage of the fighting was essentially over in little less than a month. By the end of February 1968 Hué was free, and Khesanh was relieved in early April; smaller cities were liberated and secure by the end of the first week of the assaults.

Despite the sensational media coverage of the offensive, public opinion polls continued to show that a majority of American citizens supported United States involvement all through Tet—some surveys reported that 70 percent of the citizenry wished military victory rather than withdrawal. Walter Cronkite may have returned from Vietnam to announce to millions of Americans that their military was mired in stalemate and that “the only rational way out . . . would be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people” (N. Graeber, “The Scholar’s View of Vietnam,” in D. Showalter and J. Albert, An American Dilemma, 29), but most Americans were still willing to support a war they thought could be won outright. The military’s problem in Vietnam, at least in the short term, was not an absence of an approving majority back home, but the growth of a vocal, influential, and highly sophisticated minority of critics—activists who cared much more deeply about abruptly ending American involvement than did the majority of supporters in maintaining it.

In the strictly military sense the tragedy of Tet was hardly found in defeat. The calamity was that in the wake of victory the Americans failed to capitalize on the communist disarray, halted the bombing, and gave the enemy the impression of weakness, rather than exultation in its success. Indeed, the decisive victory of Tet in 1968 marked a beginning of radical American retrenchment. The great buildup of 1965–67 was soon to peak at 543,000 total troops on April 4, 1968, and would then abruptly decline so that there were fewer than 30,000 soldiers on December 1, 1972, and essentially none after the cease-fire of 1973. President Johnson seemed to grasp the nature of his own dilemma of winning battles and losing the public relations war in America when he addressed his cabinet on February 28, 1968, a month after the beginning of Tet:

We have to be careful about statements like Westmoreland’s when he came back and said that he saw “light at the end of the tunnel.” Now we have the shock of this Tet Offensive. Ho Chi Minh never got elected to anything. . . . He is like Hitler in many ways. . . . But we, the President and the Cabinet, are called murderers and they never say anything about Mr. Ho. The signs are all over here. They all say “Stop the War,” but you never see any of them over there. Then he launches the Tet attack, breaks the truce and escalates by firing on 44 cities, all at the time that we are offering a bombing pause. It is like the country lawyer who made the greatest speech of his life but they electrocuted the client. We are like that now. (L. Berman, “Tet Offensive,” in M. Gilbert and W. Head, eds., The Tet Offensive, 43)

Even the North Vietnamese admitted that they had suffered a terrible defeat. Somewhere around 40,000 Vietcong and NVA regular troops had been killed in a few weeks. More of the enemy died during the single year of 1968 than all the Americans lost during the entire involvement of the United States for more than a decade. The communist strategy of bringing local cadres into the streets proved an unmitigated disaster. Far from causing a general insurrection, it only ended up in a bloodbath, destroying the Vietcong infrastructure in the South for at least two years. After Tet there was essentially no effective military arm of the National Liberation Front (NLF) left. It had to be rebuilt from scratch without its most veteran organizers. Such were the costs of the North Vietnamese’s complete misunderstanding of the lethality of American airpower, the discipline of its troops, and the overwhelming superiority of its supply train—factors that on the battlefield could trump for a while longer the disadvantages of surprise, poor generalship, and social unrest back home.

A variety of top-ranking communists came to admit the terrible price of Tet. Colonel General Tran Van Tra, in typical doublespeak, nevertheless confessed of the losses caused by the disastrous mistake to engage the Americans directly:

We did not base ourselves on scientific calculation or a careful weighing of all factors, but in part on an illusion based on our subjective desires. For that reason, although that decision was wise, ingenious, and timely, and although its implementation was well organized and bold, there was excellent coordination on all battlefields, everyone acted very bravely, sacrificed their lives, and there was created a significant strategic turning point in Vietnam and Indochina, we suffered large sacrifices and losses with regard to manpower and material, especially cadres at the various echelons, which clearly weakened us. (R. Ford, Tet 1968, 139)

If the North Vietnamese knew they had lost the Tet Offensive, why did it seem to most Western observers that the enemy had in fact won?

Much of the problems in perception grew out of raised expectations immediately prior to the offensive. The beleaguered American military, stung by the antiwar movement, had prematurely assured the public at the beginning of 1968 that the war was winding down in an American victory. As part of the overly optimistic appraisal, it compounded the error by acknowledging that it was no longer enough for the Americans to defeat the enemy outright on the battlefield. By 1968 it was equally crucial for the military to achieve at least four other objectives if opposition at home were to cease and public support were to continue: proof that after four years of intense ground fighting, the North Vietnamese were close to capitulation; hard evidence that the South Vietnamese were at last ready to shoulder the majority of their defense obligations; assurance that America could achieve rapid withdrawal with a minimum of casualties; and confidence that South Vietnam was a liberal and humane democracy.

Tet, a clear American victory, dashed those pretensions. It showed that all these goals were now problematic; in a paradoxical way, the defeat ultimately proved the North Vietnamese long-term strategy prescient, if unconcerned with the human costs of such a sacrificial policy. As long as they were willing to suffer literally thousands of dead for a chance to engage the Americans, time was on the communists’ side. So an American intelligence officer summed up General Vo Nguyen Giap’s brutal strategy of attrition: “His is not an army that sends coffins north; it is by the traffic of homebound American coffins that Giap measures his success” (G. Lewy, America in Vietnam, 68).

As long as the Soviets and Chinese supplied top-notch weaponry, as long as the Vietcong could pose to influential American journalists, academics, and pacifists as liberationists and patriots, rather than truce breakers and terrorist killers, and as long as the American military tried to fight a conventional war under absurd rules of engagement and over corpses counted and not ground taken and held, the North Vietnamese would recruit ample fresh manpower on the promise of a free nation to come—and always kill some Americans in the terrible arithmetic of relative body counts. An Aztec herald once warned Cortés that the Mexicas could lose 250 to every one Castilian and still win. In the modern context such an admonition had a profound effect on General Westmoreland— not because there were too few Americans or too many enemy on the battlefield, but because politically there really was a set limit to the number of American fatalities to be incurred. The American political establishment may have believed that Vietnam was a proxy war in an ongoing global twenty-five-year struggle against communist tyranny; but the American people increasingly doubted the need to give up their treasure and sons so far away, when the Chinese and Russians were unlikely to reach the shores of the United States via Vietnam. Had Westmoreland been Cortés at Tenochtitlán in 1520, he would have reported the Aztec threat back to King Philip, asked for instructions, and demanded more conquistadors before advancing. In actuality, Cortés agreed with the Aztec herald’s prognosis of numerical disparity and so planned to kill 250 Aztecs for every conquistador he lost!

During the Tet Offensive a total of 800,000 refugees left their villages, many of them flocking to Saigon, which was soon to swell to nearly 4 million persons. The American-sponsored rural pacification program known as Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS) was near shambles, as hope faded that the countryside would ever be completely secure. The attack on Hué, the massacres there, and the penetration of the embassy grounds shocked many South Vietnamese. If American bureaucrats in downtown Saigon were not immune from attack, how safe were rural Vietnamese? Khesanh, heroically saved as a key base near the DMZ, was abandoned and razed—with no consideration of the symbolism involved therein in a war replete with symbolism. Undersecretary of the Air Force Townsend Hoopes summed up the American depression:

One thing was clear to us all: the Tet offensive was the eloquent counterpoint to the effusive optimism of November. It showed conclusively that the U.S. did not in fact control the situation, that it was not in fact winning, that the enemy retained enormous strength and vitality—certainly enough to extinguish the notion of a clear-cut allied victory in the minds of all objective men. . . . Even the staunch and conservative Wall Street Journal was saying in mid-February, “We think the American people should be getting ready to accept, if they haven’t already, the prospect that the whole Vietnam effort may be doomed, that it may be falling apart beneath our feet.” (The Limits of Intervention, 146–47)

After the victory of Tet the American military requested another 206,000 troops and a quarter million additional reserves—hardly a display to the American people that its armed forces were winning the war on the ground. Hoopes called that request a “stunner.” Without new battle tactics or long-term strategy, the MACV leadership envisioned an even larger American presence, exceeding the supposed 525,000-man limit. Yet the American people wondered: had not the United States a little more than twenty years earlier in Normandy defeated the German Wehrmacht with fewer troops in less time? The requests for more men were ignored.

The record-keeping of the U.S. military in Vietnam was notoriously inexact in assessing enemy dead, but by necessity it was mostly accurate in reporting American fatalities. Thus, most observers believed that Tet cost somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 American dead. The American people cared little that their boys were killing the enemy at unheard-of ratios of thirty and forty for each GI lost. They, like the military, looked instead to body counts—but, like General Giap, to American rather than North Vietnamese—and saw them soar to intolerable rates of more than three hundred or four hundred dead a week.

How odd that at the pinnacle of a lethal 2,500-year-old military tradition, American planners completely ignored the tenets of the entire Western military heritage. Cortés—also outnumbered, far from home, in a strange climate, faced with near insurrection among his own troops and threats of recall from home, fighting a fanatical enemy that gave no quarter, with fickle allies—at least knew that his own soldiers and the Spanish crown cared little how many actual bodies of the enemy he might count, but a great deal whether he took and held Tenochtitlán and so ended resistance with his army largely alive. Lord Chelmsford—likewise surrounded by critics in and out of the army, under threat of dismissal, ignorant of the exact size, nature, and location of his enemy, suspicious of Boer colonialists, English idealists, and tribal allies—at least realized that until he overran Zululand, destroyed the nucleus of the royal kraals, and captured the king, the war would go on despite the thousands of Zulus who fell to his deadly Martini-Henry rifles.

American generals never fully grasped, or never successfully transmitted to the political leadership in Washington, that simple lesson: that the number of enemy killed meant little in and of itself if the land of South Vietnam was not secured and held and the antagonist North Vietnam not invaded, humiliated, or rendered impotent. Few, if any, of the top American brass resigned out of principle over the disastrous rules of engagement that ensured their brave soldiers would be killed without a real chance of decisive military victory. It was as if thousands of graduates from America’s top military academies had not a clue about their own lethal heritage of the Western way of war.

Analogies, True and False

In the sixth and seventh books of his history of the Peloponnesian War (431–404 B.C.), Thucydides chronicles a litany of errors on the part of the Athenian leadership and its citizenry during and after their armada’s voyage to Sicily (415–413 B.C.). He tells us that there was sharp debate over the decision to send the fleet in the first place and that the allies of Athens on Sicily, who requested help from Syracusan aggression, proved to be corrupt, duplicitous, weak, and in the end worthless in battle. The chief Athenian architect of the expedition, Alcibiades, was recalled by a volatile Assembly back home before he even entered battle. He ended up giving aid to the enemy and residing in Sparta—the chief antagonist of Athens during the entire twenty-seven-year Peloponnesian War.

The other commanders, Lamachus and Nicias, were irresolute, blinkered, and paranoid about the political consequences of becoming bogged down in an unwinnable war, despite the overwhelming force they brought along from Athens. Indeed, the old conservative Nicias’s reluctance to attack Syracuse decisively, coupled with his request for massive reinforcements, seemed driven more by worry about his own political future than by strategic wisdom. While Thucydides laments that the campaign could have been won had the Athenians just supported their troops, his own history at times seems to belie those very conclusions. The Athenians, he tells us, sent not one armada, but two—men, ships, and supplies in excess of even the amount requested by their own generals.

In the end, his account of Sicily reads as Sophoclean tragedy, or, as General Omar Bradley remarked of the possibility of fighting the Chinese in the early 1950s, “the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy.” Sicily, after all, was an entirely new theater of operations, eight hundred miles by sea from Athens, against a power that had not directly attacked Athens, and at a time when the Spartan army at home was free to march up to the walls of Athens.

No wonder, Thucydides tells us, that the Athenian public quickly lost heart with the continual news of deadlock overseas and the need for ever more men and matériel. In a consensual society, ancient or modern, voices are raised when overseas military operations prove expensive, costly in lives, and without promise of eventual victory. In that sense the rise of American antiwar sentiment was predictable. Dissent at home was in line with the entire history of Western opposition to its own military practice on those rare occasions when victory proves elusive—often with results that are not necessarily negative to the long-term interests of the state, although admittedly abjectly harmful to the unfortunate soldiers in the field.

The Americans’ objectives, both local and geopolitical, were more or less clear from the start: the security of an independent noncommunist Vietnamese state in the South, and with it an end to general communist aggression in Southeast Asia. But the methods of achieving those seemingly moral goals were far less apparent. The formula for victory was never fully thought out. The eventual costs were never seriously computed. Ideally, it was believed in the early 1960s, the Americans would train a sophisticated democratic army of resistance. In two to three years this reconstituted Army of the Republic of Vietnam could perhaps defend itself, albeit, as in the Korean instance, requiring a near permanent American presence of 30,000 or so GIs along a demilitarized zone to preserve the peace. A grateful Vietnamese populace would then support this newly democratic government and willingly enlist in its army to save the country from communism, which in the past had led to so many civilian deaths and dislocations. Or so it was all thought.

Yet by 1964 the communists proved tougher, the South Vietnamese weaker, and the American people more skeptical than imagined. At that point—somewhere between late 1964 and mid-1965—President Johnson undertook a disastrous strategy of steady escalation, without changing the ground rules under which previously small American contingents had operated. The president knew nothing about military affairs. He showed no awareness that such a tremendous commitment of sending hundreds of thousands of American soldiers to Vietnam to defeat Third World communists—more than half a million troops, 1.2 million bombs a year, thousands of enemy killed each month, three hundred to four hundred dead Americans per week—raised the geopolitical and domestic stakes among friends and enemies. Failure to win with such a sizable force could only invite further Soviet adventurism in the wake of perceived American weakness, increase domestic unrest, and highlight the incompetence of the South Vietnamese government. Once empires commit such resources to military adventures, time becomes an enemy rather than an ally, as the inability to achieve immediate success sends ripples of doubt—fatal to any hegemon—beyond the battlefield to lap at uneasy allies and citizens at home.

Yet the Americans for nearly a decade went on to fight a conventional war in unconventional terrain without the presence of clearly demarcated battle lines or even a home front. Since the overall strategy was the promise to stop communism’s spread in Asia while at all costs avoiding even indirect or accidental confrontations with either the Soviets or the Chinese, a number of paradoxes arose that thwarted planners every time a change in American strategy was debated. Generally, the policy that coalesced was a reluctance to mine harbors—which was not allowed until 1972—or to wipe out key government installations in Hanoi and Haiphong in fear of killing communist foreign suppliers and consultants. There was an absolute and unquestioned prohibition on invading North Vietnam. Urban power plants and supply depots that provided the energy to unload war supplies were off limits for years. For most of the war, no allowance was given for entering Cambodia, Thailand, or Laos in force, the sites of vast enemy supply dumps and sanctuaries. Airpower and artillery strikes, along with fortified defensive bases, were emphasized, rather than ambitious guerrilla offensives and sustained counterinsurgency efforts to rid the cities and villages of Vietcong.

The irony was that in their misguided efforts to restrain the war according to murky and poorly thought-out parameters, the American administration ensured that the killing would go on for nearly a decade. In the topsy-turvy world of Vietnam, indiscriminate bombing of jungles would be seen as acceptable military practice, when the far more humane precision attacks on factories and dockyards in Hanoi would not be—and thus as a result thousands of American lives would be sacrificed in defeat. Visitors to Hanoi after the war were startled that the city seemed to have suffered little damage from bombing—despite assertions from antiwar activists that the American military had killed thousands in the streets and nearly leveled the capital.

The Johnson and Nixon administrations thought that they could achieve another Korea—a victory of sorts that had been won despite a South Korean government that was corrupt, a huge Chinese army that had entered the war, nearly 50,000 American lives that had been lost, and strict political parameters on the way that the Korean conflict had been waged. Yet they often misread the entire Korean analogy. In relative terms the Soviets and Chinese were both much weaker than the United States in 1950 than they were in 1965. In the prior war neither had posed a credible nuclear threat to American shores. But the government of the United States further underestimated the traditional Chinese fear of conventional American military power, failing to remember that the communists had lost 800,000 dead in Korea to massive American air and artillery strikes and largely had no wish to repeat that debacle in Vietnam. While it was true that precautions were needed in order not to provoke the communist nuclear powers, in most cases an inordinate concern with the Russians and Chinese unduly curtailed the range of American responses.

By 1965, as long as the Americans were convinced of the potential for wider and possibly nuclear involvement, they avoided hitting Soviet ships in North Vietnamese waters, pursuing fighter aircraft across national borders, and threatening Hanoi to such a degree that direct Soviet or Chinese intervention would be necessary to save the regime. It was seen as preferable by the Johnson administration to lose American lives to Chinese and Russian volunteers quietly than to have them killed in battle openly. In addition, American pilots had quickly dominated the skies over North Korea, but by 1972 in Vietnam there were sophisticated Soviet and Chinese air defenses—8,000 antiaircraft guns, 250 surface-to-air missile batteries, between two hundred and three hundred modern jet fighters, and thousands of foreign advisers—that meant the toll of lost American aircraft would continue to rise in any sustained bombing campaign. The terrain of Vietnam was much more heavily forested than Korea’s, making bombing accuracy more difficult as canopies of brush hid the exact location of enemy troops.

Far more important, the South Korean president, Syngman Rhee, had garnered more domestic support than any of the South Vietnamese leaders. Rhee had been able to pose as a protector of Korean autonomy against the northern puppets of Chinese Stalinists—in a manner that Ho Chi Minh had done in Vietnam by reminding the population that the Americans were merely the latest imperialists in a long line of Japanese and French aggressors who were all eventually evicted from Vietnamese ground. In Korea the Americans were convinced that their persistence had stopped a communist tidal wave headed toward Japan. Few, in contrast, believed the loss of Vietnam would result in a communist sphere of influence much larger than Southeast Asia—and few American citizens or soldiers cared about Southeast Asia. Americans in 1964 were also a different people than during the immediate postwar years of the 1950s at the beginning of the Cold War—more affluent, reform-minded, and often tired of two decades of costly and constant deterrence to worldwide communism.

Finally, in Korea the United States faced a real threat of a united communist bloc; but by 1965 many Americans sensed—no doubt often naïvely—that China and Russia were near-enemies, that Vietnam was a traditional foe of China, and that the Cambodian, Laotian, and Thai communists were never completely unified, themselves sharing a long history of antagonism toward each other and against the Vietnamese. So it became far more difficult in Vietnam to convince America’s allies or its own people that communist aggression in Vietnam endangered either Europe or America:

Vietnamese Communism, obnoxious though it might seem, presented no clear threat to American national security. Had Vietnam been in Africa or west Asia rather than on the border of China, a communist take-over from the colonial French or from a local anti-Communist regime would have occasioned only passing concern. (D. Oberdorfer, Tet!, 334)

All these considerations would have been moot had the United States won the war decisively and quickly. But that envisioned victory was impossible under the conditions in which the military conducted the war— and millions of Americans would become angry and eager to apprise their own military and political leaders of just that ignorance and incompetence.

Fault Lines

As early as 1965, three years before Tet, vast fault lines over the conduct of the war had developed inside the American military and political establishment, as the media and popular culture reached a consensus that war was not merely wrong but increasingly amoral. On the radical left, an old coalition of communists, socialists, and pacifists, teamed with assorted newer dissidents and anarchists—the entire gamut from Tom Hayden, Jane Fonda, and Abbie Hoffman to Susan Sontag, Mary McCarthy, Ramsey Clark, and the Berrigan brothers—openly advocated an American exit. They accepted, if not welcomed, defeat and saw the American role as predictably imperialist, racist, and exploitative—in character, in their view, with much of American history. Indeed, many wished to conduct war crimes tribunals to indict American generals and politicians.

Less extreme, but perhaps as naïve, were many traditional liberals who increasingly became radicalized as the war progressed. They envisioned the North Vietnamese more as European socialists and the Vietnam conflict solely as a “civil war”—despite evidence of North Vietnamese atrocities dating back to the early 1950s, direct Soviet and Chinese involvement, and almost no groundswell of support among South Vietnamese for communism. Both these factions called for immediate U.S. withdrawal and either openly advocated or were indifferent to a North Vietnamese military victory.

Middle-of-the-road Democrats still believed in the Cold War idea of containment. But after Tet, dissidents and ex-members of the Johnson administration, such as Robert McNamara, felt that the cost of victory in Vietnam was perhaps too high and too divisive in its effect on American society. Many reasoned that American troops were better deployed elsewhere, especially as bulwarks against Soviet and Chinese aggression in Europe and Korea. In general, by 1970 such moderates called for a negotiated settlement, and, barring that, a gradual but irrevocable U.S. withdrawal to save the country from tearing itself apart.

Conservatives were equally split. Those on the extreme right like Barry Goldwater and George Wallace, whose 1968 running mate was Curtis LeMay, saw no reason why the war could not be ended quickly and victoriously, through any means possible—including an invasion of the North and perhaps the use of tactical nuclear weapons. They were confident of American tactical military superiority over the North Vietnamese and the nation’s strategic edge over Russia and China. What was lacking, in their eyes, was not American power, but will.

Many more-mainstream Republicans were equally furious at the military’s rules of engagement, but believed a vigorous conventional war could bring results rather quickly without the need for full-scale invasion of the North or a declaration of war. Thus, they advocated wider bombing of North Vietnam, raids into Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand, hot aerial pursuit into purportedly neutral countries, mining of enemy harbors, and a blockade of Vietnamese waters. By 1970 Vietnamization under Richard Nixon was their creed, hoping that sustained American bombing would bolster the South Vietnamese’s own resistance.

Finally, some mainstream populists and conservative isolationists, ranging from senators such as Wayne Morse and Mike Mansfield to the editors at the Wall Street Journal, argued that Vietnam was outside the American sphere of interest altogether and not worth any American dead. Their calls for withdrawal, however, centered on the terrible waste of American lives and capital in Asia—quite unlike their counterparts on the radical Left, who seemed to worry more about Vietnamese than American dead.

Other fault lines were not so ideological. Southerners, for example, put a high premium on American “honor” and generally supported escalation if it led to victory, while those in New England and on the West Coast were more likely to advocate immediate retreat. Black and Hispanic leaders, even if sizable percentages of their constituencies were committed to serving and dying in Vietnam, saw resistance to the war as integral to larger civil rights issues and alliances with liberal whites, and so generally approved of an immediate end at any cost. Women tended to value peace more highly than victory. The educated favored reassessment, if not acknowledgment of defeat, while those without college degrees were more likely to support official U.S. policy.

In the context of identifying support for the war, the traditional rubrics “Republican” and “Democrat” began to mean little. Even the more rigid binaries “hawks” and “doves” often evolved to “fascists” and “communists,” and ultimately “war criminals” and “traitors”—all reminiscent of Thucydides’ gripping portrait of the stasis at Corcyra (Corfu; 427 B.C.) in the third book of his history. Consensual societies, Thucydides relates, when confronted with debilitating wars, steadily rip away the thin veneer of hard-won culture—civility, moderation, and honesty in expression becoming the predictable first casualties of extremism. All of these divides were to be expected in a free society at odds over the conduct and expense of a seemingly unwinnable and unpopular war. The plays of Aristophanes, tragedies of Euripides, and history of Thucydides during the Peloponnesian War offer ample precedent of antiwar dissent at the beginning of Western civilization. But what made the issue of protest much different in Vietnam from the long tradition of Western opposition to military operations were perhaps three new factors in Western culture.

First, the electronic age ensured that killing would be televised instantaneously. Few American military leaders, who allowed free rein to television reporters and photojournalists, realized the ramifications of this media revolution. World War I or II might have ended differently had Europeans watched the charge at the Somme firsthand, or had citizens of the United States seen the carnage at Omaha Beach while reporters editorialized on the air about the insanity of Americans charging fixed positions from a stormy sea. Film strips of the Somme, in fact, shocked the British public; and had there been more such movies, and had they been broadcast live, England may well have lost public support for the war entirely. Belatedly, the American high command finally appreciated the full extent of the revolutionary changes in media coverage of the war in Vietnam:

The picture of a few flaming Saigon houses, presented by a gloomy-voiced telecaster as an instance of the destruction caused in the capital, created the inevitable impression that this was the way it was in all or most of Saigon. This human tendency to generalize from a single fact to universal conclusion has always been a prime cause for the distorted views regarding Vietnam and certainly contributed to the pessimism in the United States after the Tet offensive in 1968. (M. Taylor, Swords and Plowshares, 215)

This sheer spontaneity of visual images, with the accompanying requirement for split-second editing and commentary, also now put a much higher premium on journalistic integrity and competence—at a time when reporters were in demand and sent to Vietnam without much experience or guidance. Millions might see an American GI torch a rural village, but be given no immediate commentary as to why. The bombing of Hué was broadcast worldwide, creating a crescendo of anti-Americanism, while the mass graves of thousands of innocents slain by the communists in the same city were not simultaneously seen on American TV screens.

Second, Vietnam was conducted during the greatest period of cultural and political upheaval in American history—civil rights, women’s liberation, rock music, drugs, and the sexual revolution—ensuring that the war would serve as a general catalyst for antiestablishment activity of all sorts and as a rallying point for a wide variety of dissidents. Photojournalists and television teams adapted to the new media culture in their contrarian approach, and thus differed from the old print reporters of past wars. If would-be Pattons of the American military wished for brief assignments in Vietnam solely to garner combat experience and headlines for future promotions, so equally careerist journalists and reporters might find immediate fame and celebrity status should they hype an especially egregious example of American ignominy or incompetence. That so many high military officers and reporters—at odds over the war, yet so similar in the nature of their own respective careerist conduct—habitually lied to the American people was regrettable but predictable, given the nature of the American involvement.

Third, America in the early 1960s was at the peak of economic prosperity, achieving a general level of affluence never before witnessed by any civilization. The result was literally millions of dissident Americans—students, intellectuals, journalists—who had access to travel, leisure, and money without the confines of the past drudgery of constant rote labor. A lifestyle of freedom, mobility, and affluence that had once been confined to a small aristocracy was now available to millions. Whereas in the past, campus-bound poor students worked long hours and worried about grades and future employment, while professors rarely left their campuses and often taught enormous course loads, in America of the early 1960s millions of activists had the time and freedom to travel—and money to expend energy in protest and general activism.

Television had large budgets for roving correspondents, satellite transmissions, air travel, and investigative reporting. Universities offered free tuition, draft deferments, and liberal scholarships. Grants, sabbaticals, fellowships, and subsidized presses offered a formerly impoverished class of academic new opportunities to publish and disseminate criticism of the war. The antiwar movement became a multimillion-dollar industry, whose existence, like the vast expenditures in Vietnam, was entirely predicated on the enormous productivity of the American capitalist economy. The result was that often the level of protest crossed traditional boundaries of dissent and directly aided the enemy, as the North Vietnamese later confessed:

Every day our leadership would listen to world news over the radio at 9 A.M. to follow the growth of the American antiwar movement. Visits to Hanoi by people like Jane Fonda and former Attorney General Ramsey Clark and ministers gave us confidence that we should hold on in the face of battlefield reverses. We were elated when Jane Fonda, wearing a red Vietnamese dress, said at a press conference that she was ashamed of American actions in the war and that she would struggle along with us. (L. Sorley, A Better War,93)

In the long history of Western warfare it is hard to imagine a more difficult conflict than Vietnam, in which the American soldier had a host of enemies undreamed of by earlier combatants: citizens of his own country who often condemned his service and gave aid to the enemy, Vietnamese civilians who at any time and at any place might reveal themselves to be Vietcong terrorists and infiltrators, and his own government, which on grounds other than military logic restricted where and how he might retaliate against the enemy.

The Mythologies of Vietnam

The American press and media had it mostly right relatively quickly about Vietnam: the military and administration in Washington often misled and occasionally lied about the course of the war. American tactics—especially carpet bombing of jungles and forests—were ineffectual, if not occasionally inhumane and counterproductive. The method of exemption to the draft was not equitable. The South Vietnamese government was often dishonest. The rules of engagement were comic.

So the journalists and reporters were absolutely correct that the American high command was inept in its prosecution of this strange war. Only 15 percent of some 536,000 troops in Vietnam were combat soldiers. While it was true that there were no absolutely safe areas in Vietnam due to terrorists and infiltrators, the vast majority of veterans did not have much contact with the enemy. After a year’s service, when those rare frontline GIs were at last acculturated to the rigors of war, they were abruptly sent home. Officers often saw no more than six months of combat; and some rear-echelon bases were replete with swimming pools, movie theaters, and nightclubs.

Such critical problems needed and got public exposure. Dissent was invaluable and helped to draw needed reexamination about the purpose, conduct, and very morality of the undeclared war so far from America’s borders. Military reform, needed legislation concerning the abuse of presidential power, and scrutiny over the wisdom of America’s overseas interventions all followed from the antiwar movement. After 1968 the American military fought smarter, was leaner, and under General Creighton W. Abrams eliminated many of the abuses highlighted by the media. In the end, as in the case of ancient Athens’s disastrous Sicilian expedition, there was a good case to be made that it was not in America’s interest to commit such a huge investment of treasure and lives so far from home, in a war that could not be won outright under the accepted Cold War rules of engagement, which made it nearly impossible either to cut completely the lines of communist supplies or to invade the North.

Yet within that general critique of American policy, there often arose a hysteria—the predictable license of a free, affluent Western society that so bothered critics of democracy from Plato to Hegel—which shrouded truth and left mythology in its wake. The result is that today few know whether an independent, noncommunist South Vietnam was viable either after the American victory in Tet or during the punishing bombing of the North in 1973—had the facts concerning the progress of the war or the sordid history and conduct of the North Vietnamese communists been accurately and soberly reported to the American people. Despite the media coverage, however, we can speculate that far fewer Vietnamese would have died or been exiled had the communists not conquered the entire country in 1975.

Nearly everything that was reported by the Western press about Tet was just as misleading as either the North Vietnamese claims of a great military victory or the American military’s assurance that the communist offensive had no long-term lasting political consequences that might lead to a change in U.S. policy. In Big Story the veteran reporter Peter Braestrup devoted a massive two-volume work to exposing the deception and sometimes outright lies that were promulgated by the Western media about the Tet Offensive. In his view the story of a hard-fought American victory, characterized by remarkable American bravery, did not fit well with either the sensationalism that built journalistic careers or the general antiwar sentiments of the reporters themselves.

While the South Vietnamese government was hardly Jeffersonian, it was not true that either the National Liberation Front or the North Vietnamese enjoyed massive popular support among the South Vietnamese. Before Tet the communists boasted—and it was so reported— that 10 million of 14 million South Vietnamese lived in sectors under their direct control and would thus logically welcome the Tet “liberation.” In truth, the vast majority of the South Vietnamese were living within ARVN and American security zones. Almost no one joined in the general uprising. Most felt more, not less, terrified of the communists after the failed Tet Offensive. Hué was not left completely in ruins. Far from being desolate and nearly abandoned, the city received tons of U.S. aid for reconstruction. By the end of the year, most refugees had returned and the city was pretty much functioning as it was before the fighting. Nevertheless, the media reported otherwise: “the only way Hué could be won was by destroying it.”

That erroneous remark was an echo of Peter Arnett’s famous reporting of an American officer’s summation of the fighting at Ben Tre, a village in the Mekong Delta: “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it” (D. Oberdorfer, Tet!, 184). Yet there was little evidence—other than from Arnett himself—that any American officer said anything of the sort. It was reported as such to an astonished and outraged American public, proof as it were of the deliberate and mindless manner in which the military had responded during the Tet Offensive. Arnett never identified by name the officer who was his purported source. Nor did he produce anyone—civilian or military—who could corroborate the statement. A military investigation to ferret out the guilty officer turned up nothing. In fact, U.S. advisers at Ben Tre, who were overrun by Vietcong, may well have called in air strikes to prevent their own annihilation; and such bombing probably resulted in civilian casualties. But there was no evidence that the Americans deliberately, or as an act of official policy, destroyed Ben Tre.

Nor was the bombing of the South or North aimed at innocent civilians. The greater slaughter of innocents was accomplished through indiscriminate North Vietnamese and Vietcong artillery and guerrilla attacks. The Vietnamese landscape was not rendered barren by either American bombing or the use of herbicides. Only 10 percent of the countryside was subjected to defoliants during the spraying program between 1962 and 1971, where less than 3 percent of the population lived. During the year of Tet, new strains of imported rice were planted on 40,000 hectares. By 1969 rice production reached 5.5 million metric tons, higher than any year since World War II. By 1971 such miracle strains of American rice had resulted in the highest recorded crop in the history of South Vietnam, at some 6.1 million metric tons. By 1972, under American pressure, the South Vietnamese government was at last granting title of more than 2 million acres to nearly 400,000 farmers—at a time when there was essentially no private property in the North, where in the 1950s thousands had been branded as capitalists and either exiled or killed, often for owning as little as two acres. What ruined the Vietnamese rural economy was Vietcong infiltration of the countryside and collectivization of farmland—confirmed after 1975, when during the peace, farm production of all kinds collapsed. By the late 1970s Vietnam was one of the poorest countries in the world, near starvation in an area of Asia surrounded by the affluence of Japan, Indonesia, and South Korea. The degree that the economy improved at all in the 1980s and 1990s was predicated entirely on the introduction of modest market reforms.

Nor were all critics of the American presence in Vietnam principled dissidents. Even long after the war, many openly confessed to welcoming a communist victory and so gave a romantic view of Tet that revealed more about their own ideology than any truthful account of what transpired on the battlefield:

More generally, the Tet Offensive made a powerful contribution to the rebuilding of some sort of socialist presence in the United States. . . . As the insurgents burst into view, “shouting their slogans and fighting with nerve-shattering fury,” we realized that they were not just noble victims, but that they were going to win the war. Carried along by the momentum of their endeavor, we wanted to be associated with the Vietnamese revolutionaries (Tet made the NLF flag an emblem) and to figure out how our newly discovered vision of “power to the people” might be realized here in the United States. . . . The Offensive demonstrated that socialism was not just a moral stance or an academic persuasion, but a real possibility embodied in collective action of real people. (D. Hunt, “Remembering the Tet Offensive,” in M. Gettleman et al., eds., Vietnam and America, 376)

Completely ignored were the massacres at Hué, the general defeat of the North Vietnamese during Tet, and the distaste for communism in both South Vietnam and America. Instead, the murderous North Vietnamese attack and executions during a holiday truce were dubbed “swift and peaceful” (366).

Although the South Vietnamese were corrupt and sometimes brutal, they never engaged in wholesale massacre on the scale of the North. Well before the killings at Hué, the communists had compiled a sordid record of executions and persecution that was forgotten or went ignored by critics of the war. There was never any intent on the part of the North Vietnamese to participate honestly in a national election of 1956 that would have allowed all Vietnamese to vote freely and without coercion; in 1976 such “free” elections resulted in communists winning 99 percent of the vote. When the country was originally partitioned (1954), nine out of ten refugees headed south rather than north—the total number of refugees voting with their feet eventually reaching almost a million. Well over 10,000 Vietnamese were executed during the communist land collectivization of the early 1950s; indeed, the figure may have approached 100,000—a prelude to the Cambodian holocaust of 1977–78 to come. Yet later, prominent antiwar critics pleaded:

Did we who were in Vietnam, and opposed the U.S. effort there, expect the instant eclipse of the Provisionary Revolutionary Government and the imposition of rule by the North? I didn’t. Did we anticipate reconciliation, as happened in Hungary after the revolution? That is what I hoped for. Did we foresee a whole chain of reeducation camps in which tens of thousands of people would be incarcerated without trial for indefinite periods? Did we expect the liberators to be condemned a few years later by Amnesty International as violators of human rights? Did we expect hundreds of thousands of boat people to take to the sea and leave the ancestral lands that they valued so highly? (W. Shawcross, “The Consequence of the War for Indochina,” in H. Salisbury, ed., Vietnam Reconsidered, 244)

The answers were “of course”—and plain to any sensible observer of either the atrocious civil rights record of the North Vietnamese in the decades before the war or the systematic slaughters in the Soviet Union and China by Communist Party bosses. Perhaps the greatest moral crime of the American dissidents was their later near unanimous silence about the Cambodian holocaust—truly one of the most horrible and inhumane events of the twentieth century. The few who wrote about the killing often blamed America for the Khmer Rouge—as if those who fought communism had caused a communist victory that led to a communist holocaust.

But not all criticism of the American war was mere coffeehouse academic posturing. Hundreds of Americans visited Hanoi to aid the North Vietnamese. Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda broadcast propaganda hostile to U.S. troops in the field, and purportedly named their son Troi (later changed to Troy) after a North Vietnamese hero. In the midst of the war, David Halberstam wrote a mostly favorable biography of Ho Chi Minh (Ho [New York, 1971]). Prominent liberals such as Martin Luther King falsely claimed that the North Vietnamese were influenced by the ideals of the American Constitution and that our bombing resembled Nazi atrocities during World War II. Communists such as Herbert Aptheker and Michael Myerson assured Americans that the POWs were well treated. Both men met with ranking enemy officials, were interviewed on North Vietnamese radio, and then gave lectures on the nobility of the communist cause.

In general, American visitors to North Vietnam saw the communists as “heroes,” and American prisoners as war criminals. David Dillinger, who questioned American POWs in Hanoi, called their torture the “prisoner of war hoax,” claiming that the Nixon administration had fabricated reports of tortured and innocent American prisoners. “The only verified torture associated with the American prisoners held by the North Vietnamese,” pontificated Dillinger, “is the torture of prisoners’ families by the State Department, Pentagon, and the White House” (G. Lewy, America in Vietnam,336). Anne Weills summed up best the activists’ feelings in a much later reflection: “You should understand that it was considered a great honor to be able to go to Vietnam, for us in the antiwar movement, and to meet Mm. Binh in Paris [head of the National Liberation Front delegation]. These were our heroines and heroes” (J. Clinton, The Loyal Opposition, 124). Allen Ginsberg wrote a poem: “Let the Viet Cong win over the American army! . . . and if it were my wish, we’d lose & our will/be broken/& our armies scattered” (Collected Poems, 1947–80, New York, 1984, 478).

Noam Chomsky, who visited Hanoi in 1970, years after the war was over, best summed up the antiwar activists’ persistent view of America:

We attack a country, we kill several million people, we wipe the place out, we carry out chemical warfare, we leave the place littered with bombs from which people are still dying, we carry out extensive chemical warfare with hundreds of thousands of victims, and after all of this, the one humanitarian issue is whether they are forthcoming about information about American fliers who were shot down bombing them. That’s the only humanitarian issue left. You’d have to go to Nazi Germany to find that level of cowardice and viciousness. (J. Clinton, The Loyal Opposition, 195)

To the chagrin of reporters and antiwar activists, the French journalist Jean Lacouture, whose 1968 laudatory book Ho Chi Minh was a source of Halberstam’s biography, later admitted in an interview that ideology, not truth, drove much of the reporting of the war:

My behavior was sometimes more that of a militant than that of a journalist. I dissimulated certain defects of North Vietnam at war against the Americans, because I believed that the cause of the North Vietnamese was good and just enough so that I should expose their errors. I believed it was not opportune to expose the Stalinist nature of the North Vietnamese regime, right at the time Nixon was bombing Hanoi. (G. Sevy, ed., The American Experience in Vietnam, 262)

A veteran American reporter of Asia, Keyes Beech, put the coverage of the war in some perspective a decade after the American defeat:

The media helped lose the war. Oh yes, they did, not because of any massive conspiracy but because of the way the war was reported. What often seems to be forgotten is that the war was lost in the U.S., not in Vietnam. American troops never lost a battle; but they never won the war. . . . Visitors to that miserable, impoverished capital [Hanoi] often hear their Vietnamese hosts complain about the hostile press treatment they now receive in comparison to the good old days. (“How to Lose a War: A Response from an ‘Old Asia Hand,’ ” in H. Salisbury, ed., Vietnam Reconsidered, 152)

The media likewise created an entire mythology around the American GI and the returning Vietnam veteran. Far from being driven insane by the experience, suffering from PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), or reduced to an alcoholic or drug stupor, veterans adjusted about as well as past war returnees and showed no higher incidence of mental illness than found in the general population:

The portrayal of the Vietnam vet as well-adjusted and untroubled by the war would have undermined [the] antiwar agenda, and hence evidence that Vietnam veterans were readjusting or had readjusted well to American society tended to be drowned out by excited and strident recriminations leveled against the U.S. government. (E. Dean, Shook Over Hell, 183)

Drug usage was no higher in Vietnam than among those of similar age groups in the general civilian population. Instead, most veterans later expressed remorse over the senseless loss of close friends and also over their inability to win the war, the subsequent communist takeover, relocation camps, boat people, and the Cambodian holocaust. Ninety-one percent of those who served in Vietnam later stated that they were glad to have done so.

Nor did blacks and Hispanics die in Vietnam disproportionate to their numbers in the general population, in some sort of racist plot by the American government. Thomas Thayer’s exhaustive statistical profile concluded that “Blacks did not bear an unfair burden in the Vietnam war in terms of combat deaths despite allegations to the contrary. . . . The typical American killed in combat was a white, regular, enlisted man serving in an army or marine corps unit. He was 21 years old or younger” (War Without Fronts, 114). Eighty-six percent of all dead were listed as Caucasian.

If there were generalizations to be made, it was largely a question of class. The vast majority of those who fought in Vietnam as frontline combat troops—two-thirds of whom were not drafted but volunteered—were disproportionately lower-class whites from southern and rural states. These were young men of a vastly different socioeconomic cosmos from the largely middle- and upper-class journalists who misrepresented them, the antiwar activists and academics who castigated them, and the generals of the military high command who led them so poorly. Class was the third rail that antiwar activists did not concern themselves with. Perhaps that unease explains why popular films like The Deer Hunter (which the leftist war correspondent Peter Arnett called “fascist trash”), the music of Creedence Clearwater Revival (e.g., “Fortunate Son”), and the early songs of Bruce Springsteen (e.g., “Shut Out the Light,” “Born in the U.S.A.”)— which all dealt with either ethnic or lower-class attitudes toward the inequities in the conduct of the war—were either ignored or criticized by the more elitist critics of Vietnam. Yet far from being either crazy, mutinous, or disillusioned, most of such soldiers who fought bravely in Vietnam had volunteered, and later confirmed that they were unabashedly proud of their service. Ninety-seven percent of those Americans who saw tours in Vietnam were granted honorable discharges from the military.

Such attitudes and conduct on the part of American soldiers were especially surprising in an undeclared war that lasted for more than a decade and was fought under horrific conditions. It was also rarely reported that Vietnam was a much more brutal war for those who served than was World War II—again proof of the superb record of the American soldier. Infantrymen in the Pacific, for example, on average saw forty days of combat in four years; combat soldiers in the field in Vietnam averaged more than two hundred days of contact with the enemy in a single year-long tour of duty.

Most American books about the Vietnam War published between 1968 and 1973 are not accurate. Unlike contemporary accounts of the Zulu War or Midway, they consistently garnered selective data and provided exegesis designed either to galvanize contemporary domestic public opinion or to defend past opinions, positions, and conduct of dubious accuracy or ethics. Most narratives devoted entire sections to the one hundred or so innocent civilians slaughtered by the Americans at My Lai, but almost nothing concerning the nearly 3,000 graves of those executed in cold blood by the communists at Hué. The great, unsung tragedy of the antiwar movement was that its own lack of credibility, fairness, and fondness for hyperbole did as much to tarnish the hallowed Western tradition of open dissent and careful audit of military operations as did the worst excesses of the American military in Vietnam.

AFTERMATH

A Unified Vietnam

The Americans’ war lasted another five years after Tet. With the withdrawal of American ground troops and air support from Vietnam during 1973–74, the eventual defeat of South Vietnam was assured. Soviet and Chinese support escalated without worry of American bombing. Immediately after the negotiated peace accords of 1973, the North Vietnamese sent four times as much military supplies into the South than during the war year of 1972—so confident were they of immunity from American air strikes. Unlike the situation in Korea, where the United States left thousands of troops to ensure the armistice, nearly all American soldiers were gone by March 1973. Saigon fell to a massive communist offensive on April 30, 1975. Yet the North Vietnamese had paid a terrible price for victory—at least a million combat dead, and perhaps just as many missing and wounded. In the end, the communists had four times as many war dead as did the South Vietnamese army alone.

Many charges were leveled that the Americans in more than a decade of bombing may have inadvertently killed 50,000 civilians. If true, that was a terrible and tragic consequence of the war, and reflects poorly on the air force’s often indiscriminate bombing of rural trails, jungles, and hamlets in order to interdict the flow of supplies. But as a percentage of the total North Vietnamese population, that unfortunate figure still represented a far smaller civilian toll than what occurred over Germany and Japan during World War II—and a fraction of the some 400,000 civilians that were believed killed by indiscriminate communist shelling and rocketing of cities, as well as terrorist attacks. In defeat, the United States lost 58,000 total dead and spent more than $150 billion, aside from the social and cultural costs back home.

A communist victory brought more death and even greater dislocation to the Vietnamese than did decades of war—more often slowly by starvation, incarceration, and flight, rather than by outright mass murder. The occupation by the Japanese and French had led to moderate exoduses from Vietnam in the past, but nothing in the history of the country was comparable to mass departures from South Vietnam after the communist takeover in 1975. Exact numbers are in dispute, but most scholars accept that well over 1 million left by boat; and hundreds of thousands of others crossed by land into neighboring Thailand and even China. Aggregate numbers of fleeing Vietnamese vastly exceeded the original trek south during the partition of the country in 1954 that had numbered more than a million. America alone eventually took in 750,000 Vietnamese and Southeast Asians, other Western countries another million. Those who died in leaky boats or in storms numbered between 50,000 and 100,000; to leave, most bribed communist officials—only to be robbed on the high seas by the Vietnamese navy. It should be noted as well that by 1980 the Vietnamese communists had also exiled thousands of ethnic Chinese in a countrywide campaign of ethnic cleansing.

In the first two years after the fall of Saigon (1975–77), there were almost twice as many total civilian fatalities in Southeast Asia—from the Cambodian holocaust, outright executions, horrendous conditions in concentration camps, and failed escapes by refugees—as all those incurred during ten years of major American involvement (1965–74). When asked about the thousands of doctors, engineers, and professionals sent to concentration camps, a North Vietnamese official said, “We must get rid of the bourgeois rubbish.” Yet in private, the communist chief of press relations in Ho Chi Minh City remarked of emigration to America, “Open the doors and everyone would leave overnight” (S. Karnow, Vietnam, 32, 36).

No figures exist on the numbers who died in reeducation camps— forty established in South Vietnam alone—but they are believed to have been in the thousands. The elite of the Communist Party quickly selected the most lavish of American and South Vietnamese homes for their own residences. The American Left made a good case that South Vietnam was run by a corrupt aristocracy; but such theft paled in comparison to the communist government that took over in 1975, under which even Chinese and Soviet ships had to pay bribes to unload their cargoes in Haiphong, and local officials made fortunes by providing exemptions to any who wished to leave the country or evade the camps. Most media accounts of postwar Vietnam did not suggest that the peace was more costly to Southeast Asia than was war against the Americans, that communist officials killed or drove out far more of their own countrymen in twenty-four months of armistice than had the Americans in a decade of fighting.

In the short term the scenario of the domino theory, so ridiculed by critics of the Cold War, turned out to be largely true. With the fall of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos came under communist domination; Thailand was for a time marginalized and forced to sever most ties with Americans. After 1975 the Soviet Union showed a greater, rather than reduced, tendency to intervene abroad, as fighting broke out in Afghanistan, Central America, and eastern Africa. The communist Vietnamese army grew, rather than shrank, after the war. It soon ranked as the third largest land force in the world after China and Russia—its frontline soldiers and paramilitary troops numbered 3 million—and subsequently fought both Cambodia and China. Few American activists of the past antiwar movement protested the hundreds of thousands of Asians who killed each other from 1975 to 1980. But, then, all those who died on both sides were communists.

The Vietnam experience stands as the worst-case scenario imaginable in a free society at war—a test of the institution of free criticism fundamentally distorted, in which many of the dissidents were ignorant, their tools of communication instantaneous and enormously powerful, and their sympathies more with the enemy than with their own soldiers. Yet the allowance of such a critique, even under such singular conditions, did not undermine the power of the United States in the long run. The loss of Vietnam to communism was not a harbinger of things to come, given the apparently inevitable march of democratic capitalism during the 1980s and 1990s—a tide that finally even washed away Vietnam’s former patron, the Soviet Union, and eroded orthodoxy in communist China. Today, 179 of the 192 autonomous countries in the world have some sort of genuine legislature, with elected representatives. Vietnam, like Castro’s Cuba, was, and is, on the wrong side of history.

Determinists will argue that Vietnam, sooner or later, will be free and that the American war was mostly a peripheral theater of needless American losses that did not affect the major containment of Soviet communism or the inevitable global onslaught of democratic consumer capitalism. There were dominoes, but they were too small to be of global importance. On the other hand, supporters of the war might still counter that the fighting in Vietnam did weaken communism and helped to protect the Philippines, Malaysia, and Singapore—and that the final American defeat ensured that thousands of Southeast Asians were killed or doomed to suffer in poverty and tyranny until the supposedly inevitable wave of Western-style freedom reaches them in the twenty-first century. For the millions who died in Southeast Asia immediately after the American withdrawal, and for the thousands of now rotting Americans and Vietnamese who were killed in Vietnam in a misguided crusade to prevent just those later atrocities, such “what-ifs” about the long-term future of Vietnam mean nothing.

Vietnam and the Western Way of War

The American military in Vietnam, far from being incompetent, in its daily operations reflected all the lethal elements of the traditional Western paradigm. Despite exaggerated reports of rampant drug use and sedition, the American soldier remained disciplined and well trained, even when it was clear that the war was not being fought to win, and even with a sizable number of vocal critics at home. Whatever the inequalities of the draft, civic militarism was very much still alive in America. With eventual changes in the voting age, all GIs eighteen years and older could voice their views in the national elections and express freely to journalists opinions about the conditions of their own military service. The opposite was not true of the Vietcong and North Vietnamese. Most American soldiers, it was believed, voted for leaders who advocated continued military involvement in Vietnam. When they fought in Vietnam, it was generally true that a majority of Americans wanted them there; when they began to leave, most Americans preferred that they did so. Again, voting and free speech were not characteristic of either the Vietcong or the North Vietnamese army. Ultimately, that key difference was recognized even by the communists who won. Former Vietcong general Pham Xuan An later remarked in disgust: “All that talk about ‘liberation’ twenty, thirty years ago, all the plotting, all the bodies, produced this, this impoverished, broken-down country led by a gang of cruel and paternalistic half-educated theorists” (L. Sorley, A Better War, 384).

Freedom the Americans fought for, and free they were who fought. But paradoxically, while enjoying almost no freedom during the conflict, its promise drove on many Vietnamese who joined a communist cause disguised as a war for independence. The Vietnamese peasant was assured a war of “liberation” —libertas being a very Roman republican idea, rather than one of indigenous Vietnamese heritage. But since the communists had fought continually against the Japanese, French, and Americans for some thirty years, they never had occasion to govern in peace—and thus had never been held accountable for the fulfillment of promises offered. That illusion vanished with victory in 1975, when at last a true accounting came due for three decades of democratic rhetoric. Duang Van Toai, a former supporter of the Vietcong, explained the paradox of why he and others aided a movement that was so hostile to freedom:

Like others of the opposition movement in Vietnam and in the United States, I was hypnotized by the political programs advocated by the National Liberation Front, which included the famous and correct policy of national reconciliation without reprisals and a policy of non-alignment with and independence from the Americans, the Russians, and the Chinese. . . . Under the domination of the Japanese, there were almost two million Vietnamese dying of hunger, but no one fled Vietnam. Under the Saigon governments during the war, hundreds of thousands of prisoners were arrested and jailed, but no one fled the country. Yet those who are pro-Hanoi or are hypnotized by the propaganda of Hanoi claim that the boat people are economic refugees . . . [but] among the refugees . . . were also the Vietcong, the former opposition leaders, and even the former justice minister of the Vietcong. You can imagine the situation of justice in a country if the justice minister of that country had to flee. (“Freedom and the Vietnamese,” in H. Salisbury, ed.,Vietnam Reconsidered, 225)

It was not by assurances of no free elections, no private property, and no free speech to come that the Vietcong and North Vietnamese had galvanized their army, but by the very Western notions of creating a “republic” of elected officials and a free press. The result was that Vietnamese soldiers in service to communism (itself a nineteenth-century European offshoot of Western utopian thinking that went back to Plato) fought as nationalists against foreigners in the mistaken hope of just that Western ideal of personal freedom and national autonomy. Instead, they found that in 1975, on the first occasion of real peace in three decades of war, their own government was not really a republic and they were hardly free at all. It was also another unnoted irony of the entire Vietnamese war that those who resisted the Americans did so by incorporating the promises— but never the reality—of America: empty dreams that fooled not only their own soldiers but much of the American academic and journalistic establishment as well. The Democratic Republic of Vietnam, which was the official name of communist North Vietnam, did not draw its nomenclature from the hallowed traditions of Southeast Asia or the perversions of Stalinism, but from the language of freedom of Greece and Rome. Yet there was never to be either a democracy or a republic in Vietnam.

The American economy produced a surfeit of arms, war supplies, and consumer goods in Vietnam that had the effect of drawing more than a million peasants from the countryside into an already overcrowded Saigon of 3 million persons and creating a booming economy in the process. In general, the American capitalist economy found it much easier to ship and airlift matériel thousands of miles across the seas than did China or Russia to their clients on their own front doorstep. American weapons were as a rule also better than the enemy’s, especially in areas of communications, aircraft, radar, ships, and armor. In cases where the Vietcong and North Vietnamese achieved parity—mostly in automatic rifles, mortars, antitank guns, mines, and grenades—it was solely as a result of imported Chinese and Russian arms, themselves ultimately patterned after European designs or a result of the Western tradition of research. The history of Soviet arms production and development is the story of American aid during World War II, the copying and capturing of German arms on the eastern front (1941–45), the recruiting of German scientists after the war, the constant emulation of Western designs through espionage and defection, and ultimately the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century importation of British, French, and German consultants to modernize the czarist military.

The Vietnamese drew on no indigenous scientific tradition—except for a few cases of ingenious antipersonnel bamboo and wooden traps— to craft their tools of killing. Without Western-style arms, the communists would have been annihilated. The same is true of Vietnamese military organization and discipline. North Vietnamese equivalents to terms like “division” and “general,” coupled with training in automatic arms and infantry tactics, were ultimately patterned after Soviet and Chinese exemplars—themselves borrowed from Western militaries. While the North Vietnamese made undeniable changes in battle operations to reflect native realities, it was a great irony of the war that Americans were killed by automatic rifles that looked hauntingly similar to M-14s and M-16s, and by privates, lieutenants, companies, and regiments that at the most basic organization level mirror-imaged their own. It would take a near expert to distinguish an American 81mm mortar from its North Vietnamese 82mm counterpart.

Despite the wholesale importation of Western arms and organization by the North Vietnamese, the Americans quickly learned that their own military—free, individualistic, superbly supplied, expertly equipped, eager for decisive battles of shock—was not static. Rather, the American armed forces evolved throughout the war and proved superior to the North Vietnamese, despite horrendous supply lines, the absence of clear-cut fronts and battle lines, restrictive rules of engagement that nullified traditional Western preferences for decisive battle, and domestic opposition.

No American army in 1944 would have fought the Germans in France without permission to cross the Rhine or to bomb Berlin at will. Japan would have won World War II had the United States simply fought in the jungles and occupied towns of the Japanese empire, promising not to bomb Tokyo, mine its harbors, attack its sanctuaries, or invade its native possessions, while journalists and critics visited Tokyo and broadcast to American troops from Japanese radio stations. Neither Truman nor Roosevelt would have offered to negotiate with Hitler or Stalin after the successful Normandy landings or the devastating bombing campaign over Tokyo in March 1945. GIs in World War II were killed in pursuit of victory, not in order to avoid defeat or to pressure totalitarian governments to discuss an armistice. In war it is insane not to employ the full extent of one’s military power or to guarantee to the enemy that there are sanctuaries for retreat, targets that are off limits, and a willingness to cease operations anytime even the pretext of negotiations is offered.

The American military itself did not react well to these Orwellian impositions on operations. The number of rear-echelon troops soared— somewhere between 80 and 90 percent of all soldiers who went to Vietnam never saw real combat. One-year tours of duty ensured that many green recruits would be killed in the first months of combat only to have the survivors sent home when they were battle-wise and more likely to be effective leaders in teaching others the nature of staying alive in the field. The military often turned Vietnam into an American bureaucratic nightmare: “The Military Assistance Command staff directory was more than fifty pages long. It included a chief of staff, two deputy commanders and their staffs, a deputy chief of staff for economic affairs, two deputy affairs, a staff secretariat, and three complete ‘staff groups,’ a general staff, a ‘special staff,’ and a ‘personal staff’ ” (R. Spector, After Tet, 215).

Sometimes the insistence to fight openly and directly in battle still only took on the semblance of the traditional Western war—shock battle, direct assault, overwhelming firepower—without the accompanying corollary of seizing and holding property. Blasting apart the enemy with superior fire and advancing with disciplined landed infantry was entirely in the European military tradition of Alexander the Great and Charles Martel. Taking and then abandoning real estate that was captured at great cost was not. On May 10, 1969, for example, General Melvin Zais, commander of the 101st Airborne, unleashed his troops against the infamous “Hamburger Hill” (Hill 937). In a horrendous firefight, involving direct assault on the ridge, his men suffered fifty-six dead while killing more than five hundred of the enemy. When responding to vociferous attacks at home from politicians over the apparent waste of American lives in that ten-to-one exchange—the hill was abruptly abandoned after capture— Zais inadvertently summed up the entire Western way of war and why it did not necessarily always lead to strategic victory in Vietnam:

That hill was in my area of operations, that was where the enemy was, that’s where I attacked him. . . . If I find him in another hill . . . I assure you I will attack him. . . . It is true that hill 937, as a particular piece of terrain, was of no particular significance. However, the fact that the enemy force was located there was of prime significance. (G. Lewy, America in Vietnam, 144)

A limited war that ignored the capture and protection of land, and in essence sought to avoid the defeat of an often corrupt South Vietnam, rather than to achieve victory over a battle-hardened communist army of North Vietnam—whether wisely for necessary reasons of avoiding a larger conflict, or in error due to trumped-up fears of Soviet and Chinese intervention—was a referendum on American political wisdom, not a true litmus of Western military power. Few, then and now, doubt whether America could have won the Vietnam War; many remain unsure whether it should have.

Who Lost the War?

Despite recent arguments to the contrary, the media in themselves did not lose the Vietnam War. Journalists did not snatch political defeat from military victory. Rather, they only contributed to the collapse of American power and resistance, by accentuating frequent American blunders and South Vietnamese corruption, without commensurate attention paid to North Vietnamese atrocities, the brutal history of communism in Asia, and the geopolitical stakes involved. Their ability to sensationalize relatively minor American setbacks and exaggerate modest communist victories often helped to turn public opinion and thus give them undue influence with American politicians who directed the course of the war.

Yet ultimately, the American military command itself forfeited the war, despite brave soldiers, good equipment, and plentiful supplies. The top echelon lost the conflict because they accommodated themselves without imagination to the conditions of political audit and scrutiny that made it difficult, but not impossible, to win. Conservatives and principled liberals were correct in their assessment of the absurdity of the prevailing American strategy: the former demanding Americans fight to win any war they undertake, the latter insisting America could not fight to win, given the political situation, and so should not fight. Once the nation understood the conditions under which the war was deemed necessary to be fought, and the cost required to fight it that way, it determined it was not in their interest to pay it. The military could have easily won the war it wanted to fight, but did not know how to fight the war that it was asked to win—a war that was nevertheless winnable with daring and ingenuity. So instead, they bombed incessantly and unwisely—seventy tons for every square mile in Vietnam, five hundred pounds of explosives for every man, woman, and child in the country—without ever learning why hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese were fighting on behalf of a murderous communist dictatorship that would soon enslave their country and ruin its economy. A realist of the Bismarck school, without regard to human suffering or the misery of the Vietnamese under communism, would argue that it was not in the geopolitical interest of the United States to expend such vast amounts of its manhood and capital on a relatively insignificant country, which, left to its own as a communist dictatorship, would probably become as likely a nuisance to its communist neighbors as it was to America—when the real shift in the Cold War meant the struggle was no longer over mere land, but about global economics, technology, and mass consumer culture.

If it was not the intention of the media and press people who sent home their biased and often one-sided reports to apprise America of the inconsistency of its own politicians and military command, the result was nevertheless sometimes just that. The long-held Western tradition of free speech and self-critique ultimately did not ruin America despite the ruination of its cause in Vietnam. The communists won the war and lost the peace, massacring their people and destroying their economy—all in a closed and censored society. America, despite its propensity for self-loathing, lost the war and won the peace, its model of democracy and capitalism winning adherents as never before, with its reformist military emerging stronger, not weaker, after the ordeal.

The record of Vietnam—books, motion pictures, official documents—remains a nearly exclusive Western phenomenon. Antiwar activists criticized this monopoly of information even as they themselves published and lectured in a free society and thus contributed to that very dominance of Western publication. The communist version of the war, when it did appear in print or video, was immediately subject to skepticism. Few doubted that publication of such information was not free, and the government that controlled the dissemination of knowledge was not credible. In contrast, at various times the American government and its critics were duplicitous, but rarely at the same time on the same issue. In that marketplace of conflicting accounts, most observers sensed that freedom was the guarantor of the truth, and so looked for veracity anywhere but in North Vietnamese, Chinese, or Russian accounts. The American experience in the Vietnam War—whether noble or shameful—remains an almost exclusively Western story.

WAR AMID AUDIT, SCRUTINY, AND SELF-CRITIQUE

While the manner of civilian audit, dissent, and self-critique during the Vietnam War was different from Western past practice, it was nevertheless hardly new in spirit. Pericles (“Squill-Head”) was ridiculed on the Athenian stage in the same manner that General Westmoreland (“Waste-More-Land”) was pilloried on American campuses. Pericles, not Westmoreland, branded the foreheads of his captives and was attacked by Athenian critics for doing so. Jane Fonda dallied with her nation’s enemies, precisely as did Athenian rightists who fawned over Sparta in the closing months of the Peloponnesian War. Plato, remember, in a near treasonous outburst, called the great victory at Salamis a mistake that had made the Athenians worse as a people.

To Aeschylus, war was but “the food of Ares.” Sophocles saw it as “the father of our sorrows.” Even the imperialist Pericles could dub it “an utter folly.” “They make it a wasteland and call it peace,” said Tacitus of the Roman army’s conduct in colonial wars. The stuff of Western history, drama, oratory, poetry, and art—Brueghel, Goya, and Picasso—has always been frank criticism of contemporary conflict and often of the absurdity of war in general. Euripides’ dramas, staged before nearly 20,000 voting Athenian citizens, reflect the evolving understanding of the human and material costs of battle during the Peloponnesian War. Three decades of plagues, coups, destruction of neutral states, and disaster at Sicily were far more similar to Vietnam than to World War II. Euripides’ TrojanWomen, presented not long after the Athenian slaughter of the Melians (415 B.C.), chronicles how the innocent wives, mothers, and children of the Trojans, not just soldiers, suffer the consequences of war. The comic playwright Aristophanes also wrote several plays—Acharnians, Peace, and Lysistrata—that ridicule the endless traffic in war charges that the profiteer and the megalomaniac are more interested in themselves than in the citizens. While a Spartan army marched through the countryside of Athens, the Athenian populace watched its own citizens denigrate the policy of forced evacuation and continued war with Sparta.

The conduct of Jane Fonda, Tom Hayden, and the Berrigan brothers may have been treasonous, but not to such an extent as the medizing Greeks, who in 480 B.C. joined the Persians at Salamis. Press conferences in Saigon—known as the Five O’Clock Follies—may have been acrimonious and characterized by endless charges and countercharges, but they were no less vehement than the near physical altercations that took place between Themistocles and his coadmirals on the eve before Salamis, or the hangings and near open war between the Spanish and Italians hours before the fight at Lepanto. The media may have destroyed the reputation of General Westmoreland, but no more so than the gossipy Athenian Assembly did to the hero Themistocles, who was exiled and died abroad, shunned at home. The criticism of the Vietnam War ruined Lyndon Johnson, but the storm of dissent in the Peloponnesian War led to Pericles being fined—and eventually worn out, sick, and dead before the third year of the twenty-seven-year-old conflict was over.

Just as there were no North Vietnamese dissidents in Washington protesting their own soldiers’ slaughter at Hué, so Xerxes, like the Politburo in Hanoi, brooked neither dissident nor audit. Again, remember the fate of the dismembered Phoenician admirals at Salamis or poor Pythius the Lydian, who all mistakenly believed that they could reason with the Great King. It remained a truism that a Greek at Salamis, a Roman at Cannae, a Venetian at Lepanto, an Englishman at Rorke’s Drift, and Americans at Midway and Vietnam all could vote and speak as they pleased—and this was not true of Persians, Carthaginians, Ottomans, Zulus, Japanese, and Vietnamese. Even autocrats like Alexander or Cortés commonly responded to critics among their staff and soldiers in a way that Aztec and Persian emperors were not accustomed.

Lyndon Johnson may have been destroyed by his domestic critics, but millennia earlier even the autocrat Alexander the Great did not escape the scrutiny of Western contrarians. The philosopher Diogenes, when asked by Alexander what he wished, purportedly replied that the king move out of his sunlight. Alexander was no doubt a thug and a dangerous man, who for a time derailed Western freedom, but he was an amateur autocrat compared to the Persian Achaemenids. He was far more likely to be arguing with his Macedonian generals than was Xerxes with his satraps, far more likely to be attacked in the Assembly Hall by a Demosthenes—and far more likely to be told to move out of the way on a street corner by a philosopher than was Darius at the court in Persepolis. Hernán Cortés, who gave his king a subcontinent and ships of precious metals, was nevertheless largely shunned and ostracized in his old age, his past daring and killing more an object of vituperation from clerics, censure from bureaucrats, and lawsuits from former colleagues than cause for lasting praise and commemoration from the Spanish crown.

Throughout the ordeal of Vietnam, the Congress and the president were at odds over the conduct of the war, as various generals were paraded before Congress to testify, even as congressional representatives and senators were ordered to the White House to give an account of their “disloyal” votes. But unlike Roman republicans, few American generals had their own separate military commands. American senators were rarely interfering on the field of battle. Squabbling and running to the press in Vietnam paled before the confrontation between the consuls the night before Cannae. L. Aemilius Paulus and the reckless C. Terentius Varro, elected officials both, despised each other, and so their plans for their shared army worked at cross-purposes. Fabius Maximus, whose strategy finally turned the tide of the Second Punic War, for a time was the most unpopular man at Rome, dubbed a coward for his tactics of delay. The achievement of Charles Martel at Poitiers was often ignored by later chroniclers largely because he was demonized by the church as a confiscator of ecclesiastical lands.

In the midst of his conquest, Cortés was branded a criminal by Diego Velázquez, governor of Cuba. His sojourn in Mexico City itself was interrupted when Pánfilo de Narváez arrived in Vera Cruz with a writ for his arrest. Father Bernardino de Sahagún had little good to say about his own countryman, Hernán Cortés, but wrote with empathy about the natives whom the conquistador slaughtered. For all of Cortés’s “official” letters to Charles V, we receive a somewhat different story from his contemporaries. Bartolomé de Las Casas thought the Spanish treatment of the Indians abominable, and so wrote in detail about the sins of the conquest. By the time of his death, Cortés was largely ignored, unappreciated, severely criticized in print, and in need of money. In contrast, what little we know of the critics of Montezuma come from Spanish, not Mexican, written sources. While Spaniards criticized Cortés in his success for his hubris and cruelty, Aztec lords turned on Montezuma only for his failure to eject the Spanish from Tenochtitlán. No Aztec wrote or criticized the decision to kill thousands of innocents on the Great Pyramid.

John Colenso, bishop of Natal, and his daughters devoted their lives to apprising the British public of their government’s cruelty toward the Zulus. In turn, the British press issued sensational and often inaccurate news about Isandhlwana, convincing the public to muster unnecessarily large relief contingents, but also to question whether it had all been necessary in the first place. Few careers—not Chelmsford’s or that of his successor, Sir Garnet Wolseley—were enhanced by the fighting. The Colensos were about as active on the Zulu behalf during the war and as critical of British inhumanity as American antiwar activists were sympathetic to the North Vietnamese.

The Japanese read of Midway as a great victory; wounded sailors were confined to hospitals to ensure the news of the disaster never reached the public. Admiral Yamamoto alone created the flawed plan and felt no need for much discussion and brooked no dissent. All this was in contrast to a wild American public discourse in which sensitive details of the intelligence of the battle were leaked to newspapers before the fighting had even begun. American strategy was debated in open meetings called by Admiral Nimitz, and the results sent to Washington to be ratified or rejected by an elected government. Ho Chi Minh, though a professed communist, was far more kindred to the Japanese militarists than he was to the Americans.

Vietnamese often turned to American academics, religious figures, and intellectuals in attempts to nullify American power that their own army could not. When the communist campaign to denigrate the Americans and sanctify the North Vietnamese reached the world stage, it was no accident it did so largely through Western, rather than communist or Third World, media. “American puppets” and “running dog capitalist warmongers” may have sounded neat on American campuses, but they were not the vocabulary of truth, and so were not what convinced the American public to call an end to their war in Vietnam. The New York Times and 60 Minutes alone could do what Pravda and the Daily Worker could not: prevail on the American people that the war was unwinnable and unjust. To the North Vietnamese, the loud-speaking, confusing, and fractious Americans—William F. Buckleys and Jane Fondas alike—were not so much evil or good as they were insidious.

What, then, are we to make of this final tenet of Western military practice, this strange 2,500-year-old habit of subjecting military operations to constant and often self-destructive political audit and public scrutiny? Can anything good come of a volatile Western citizenry that dictates when, where, and how its soldiers are to fight, even as it permits its writers, artists, and journalists freely and sometimes wildly to criticize the conduct of their own troops? Surely in the case of reporting the Tet Offensive and the Vietnam War—whose vehemence and absurdity make it a pivotal case study of the entire wisdom of allowing dissent and open attacks on the military—cannot the argument be made that the public license lost a war that America could have won?

If the conduct of an unbridled media and constant public scrutiny of even the most minute military operations harmed the American effort in Vietnam, it is equally true that the institutions and process of that self-recrimination helped to correct serious flaws in American tactics and strategy. The United States military in Vietnam under General Abrams from 1968 to 1971 fought a far more effective war than it had between 1965 and 1967, largely as a result of dissent in and out of the military. The bombing of 1973, far from being ineffective and indiscriminate, brought the communists back to the peace table through its destruction of just a few key installations in North Vietnam. Nixon’s so-called Linebacker II campaign was far more lethal to the war machine of Hanoi than the much-criticized indiscriminate Rolling Thunder campaign years earlier. If in 1965 the Johnson administration had no idea what was at stake in Vietnam, or what would evolve as the ultimate rules of engagement, by 1971 the Nixon government understood precisely the American dilemma. As a result of the antiwar sentiment and the freedom of dissent, Nixon knew only too well the nature of the quagmire that he was in.

More important still, Tet was not a single battle, nor was Vietnam in and of itself an isolated war. Both occurred on a worldwide canvas of the Cold War, a much larger global struggle of values and cultures. In this context, the license of the West, while it was detrimental to the poor soldiers who were asked to repel the Tet Offensive, had the long-term effect of winning, rather than forfeiting, American credibility. To defeat the West, it is often necessary not merely to repel its armies but to extinguish its singular monopoly over the dissemination of information, to annihilate not merely its soldiers but its emissaries of free expression.

This more insidious component of Western military practice, the supposedly astute and tenacious communists of North Vietnam never understood. Instead, they were confused about America in Vietnam, condemning its administration but careful to avoid blanket criticism of its people; damning its military but praising its intelligentsia; ecstatic over the slanted reporting of the news but occasionally baffled and hurt when an honest story emerged about the nature of their own thuggish regime; smug in American television’s broadcast of the “liberation” of Saigon, furious at the later coverage of the boat people. If the perplexed North Vietnamese were gladdened that the Washington Post could say worse things about its own military than they did communists, and if they were curious why an American movie star could pose in Hanoi on an artillery battery rather than put on a patriotic play at Carnegie Hall—and still come home without a prison sentence—they were equally furious when asked about the nature of the 1976 “free” elections, and surprised at the few brave reporters who finally told the world of the communist holocaust in Cambodia.

This strange propensity for self-critique, civilian audit, and popular criticism of military operations—itself part of the larger Western tradition of personal freedom, consensual government, and individualism— thus poses a paradox. The encouragement of open assessment and the acknowledgment of error within the military eventually bring forth superior planning and a more flexible response to adversity. The knowledge that military conduct is to be questioned by soldiers themselves, to be audited and scrutinized by those outside the armed forces altogether, and to be interpreted, editorialized, and often mischaracterized by reporters to the public can ensure accountability and provide for a wide exchange of views.

At the same time, this freedom to distort can often hamper military operations of the moment, as Thucydides himself saw and Plato feared in the Republic—and as was the case of the Tet Offensive in Vietnam. In Vietnam due to frankness and hysteria in place of reasoned and positive assessment, America may have prolonged its agony and lost battles in the field, but surely not the war against communism. Had America been as closed a society as was Vietnam, then it may well have won the battle but lost the war, much like the Soviet Union, which imploded after its involvement in Afghanistan—a military intervention similar to America’s in Vietnam in terms of tactical ineptitude, political denseness, and strategic imbecility, but a world apart in the Russians’ denial of free criticism, public debate, and uncensored reporting about their error. How odd that the institutions that can thwart the daily battle progress of Western arms can also ensure the ultimate triumph of its cause. If the Western commitment to self-critique in part caused American defeat in Vietnam, then that institution was also paramount in the explosion of Western global influence in the decades after the war—even as the enormous and often bellicose Vietnamese army fought for a regime increasingly despised at home, shunned abroad, and bankrupt economically and morally.

In the next few decades it shall come to pass that Vietnam will resemble the West far more than the West Vietnam. The freedom to speak out, the titillating headline, the flashy exposé, and the idea that a man in tie and suit, not one sporting sunglasses, epaulets, and a revolver, is commander in chief are more likely in the end to win than lose wars, on and off the battlefield. Thucydides, who deplored the Athenian stupidity surrounding the Sicilian expedition and had hardly a good word to say for the Athenian Assembly and its unchecked rhetoricians, was nevertheless impressed by the Athenians’ amazing propensity to correct past blunders and to persevere against unimagined adversity.

If we began this chapter with that historian’s sharp criticism of Athenian fickleness and absence of support for its own expedition, we should end by noting Thucydides’ other, less well known observation concerning such an open culture’s conduct of war. It turned out that the Syracusans fought so well against Athens, Thucydides believed, because they, too, were a free society and “democratic just as the Athenians” (The Peloponnesian War 7.55.2). He concluded that free societies are the most resilient in war: “The Syracusans proved this point well. For precisely because they were the most similar in character to the Athenians, they made war upon them so successfully” (8.96.5).

1 I have used the terms “Mexicas” and “Aztecs” (from the Nahuatl “Aztlan”) interchangeably, although Montezuma and his subjects probably called themselves “Mexicas.” The use of “Aztecs” came into common use by European chroniclers after the seventeenth century. Most of Cortés’s Spanish soldiers were Castilians, and so I employ both words to describe his conquistadors.