The Disaster That Was the Vietnam War

The Disaster That Was the Vietnam War

Deep inside Max Hastings’s monumental "Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy” sits a minute story that captures the essence of the book. As combat heated up in 1964, Hastings relates, Communist operatives strong-armed growing numbers of South Vietnamese peasants into the guerrilla force fighting to overthrow the United States-backed government in Saigon. For many young draftees, it was a soul-crushing experience, just as repugnant as conscription into the government’s army would have been if its recruiters had gotten there first. “You always criticize the imperialists,” the father of one conscript lashed out at the Communists, “but you are even worse. I want my son back.”

Hastings sees the Vietnam War in much the same way as that anguished villager. In his telling, it was a conflict without good guys, an appalling conflagration in which the brutality, cynicism and incompetence of the United States and its South Vietnamese ally were equaled only by the wickedness of their enemies, leaving the hapless bulk of the Vietnamese population to suffer the consequences. “If America’s war leadership often flaunted its inhumanity, that of North Vietnam matched it cruelty for cruelty,” Hastings contends.

It’s a depressing but also curiously refreshing and mostly convincing way of thinking about the war. All too often, as Hastings points out, historians have treated it as a morality play pitting the forces of justice against the forces of repression. Sometimes revolutionaries wear the white hats as they struggle to overthrow a corrupt South Vietnamese regime and rid their nation of American invaders bent on controlling its destiny. In other accounts, Saigon and its partner in Washington valiantly defend a flawed but democratically minded South Vietnam from Communist forces determined to subject it to Stalinist tyranny.

Hastings is hardly the first to suggest something more complicated. But the strongest tendency among chroniclers inclined to paint in shades of gray — the filmmaker Ken Burns’s recent PBS series on the war is a striking example — has been to credit all sides with fighting sincerely for principles that made sense to them. Hastings goes in a darker direction, finding rough parity not in the validity of the goals for which the rivals fought but in their insensitivity to the staggering destruction they wrought.

A British journalist and prolific military historian who once reported on the war, Hastings indicts the United States with passion and engaging snark but mostly reinforces old critiques. Although American forces often fought effectively on the battlefield, Hastings asserts, those successes proved irrelevant because Americans failed in the more important and far more delicate task of cultivating a South Vietnamese state capable of commanding the loyalty of its own people. It was as if the United States used “a flamethrower to weed a flower border.”

complete account by addressing these themes in greater detail. Actually, closer attention to the big ideas that drove each side might have reinforced his central point by underlining how much damage was done in the name of competing ideologies that meshed poorly with the needs of Vietnamese society. But Hastings is hardly wrong to place the emphasis on consequences rather than motives. In fact, he deserves enormous credit for helping us, half a century after the peak of the fighting, to see beyond old arguments about which side was right. What is visible when the blinders come off is indeed no pretty sight.