I finished reading this on Memorial Day and realized how ignorant I was about the day-to-day execution of the war. Wawro goes into excruciating detail on the military operations and more significantly on the political machinations. First is the lack of a strategy and a post-war plan. The Pentagon missed the lessons of the early observers (military advisors and the CIA) who stated plainly that “victory” could only be achieved with buy-in from the local population; without it, winning, let alone stability, would never be attained. Once Wawro explains this premise, the rest is a simple recitation of failure at nearly every level. Part of this failure was the inability of U.S. politicians and military to grasp the hatred in the previous imperial dynamic. The French had exploited Indo-China, retreated in the face of the Japanese occupation and left after attempting to reinstitute their rule. In 1954 the French left behind an incompetent elite, despised by the majority of the people and splitting the country in half. Historically this occurred as the Cold War was flourishing and the “menace of communism” was the big fear in the West. The domino theory - if one goes the rest will topple - was the prevailing wisdom. President Eisenhower resolved to shore up South Vietnam — not with all out war, but with a slow trickle of involvement. President Kennedy was aware of the futility of escalation, but was not able to stave off the political and military momentum in support of the war. President Johnson was given bad advice by his military and civilian advisors and gingerly increased the commitment in-spite of the obvious ineptitude of the South Vietnamese leadership. On the ground the generals flailed with a lack of strategic focus. The growing U.S. presence was predicated not on stabilizing the country, rural and urban, but on brute force. The enemy was not a powerhouse but was able to observe and adjust to the lumbering U.S. juggernaut’s tactics, turning the overwhelming force into a self-perpetuating vehicle of failure. Riding the post World War Two boom, the U.S. plunged ahead, justifying the spending and troop buildup with dubious statistical rationale, but with no strategic vision and few tactical accomplishments. As LBJ escalated the war (but resisted an all-out military onslaught fearing direct involvement by the USSR and China) the U.S. domestic support hemorrhaged (the part I remember as a draft age youth). LBJ limped away from the fracas, his Great Society program undercut by the cost of the war. President Nixon took over with a cynical ruthlessness and continued the slaughter with a vision of global hegemony polished by Henry Kissinger and company. Nixon took over with 30,000 soldiers killed and left office with at 58,000 dead and with nothing to show except a further decline in the effectiveness of South Vietnamese ruling elite. A military history, Wawro’s book goes into detail criss-crossing between the warring parties and the major and minor battles of the war and spares no leader from criticism. The North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong made many foolish tactical errors, terrorized civilians and conscripted several generations of soldiers — canon fodder. Nixon’s hubris and bizarre paranoia was reflected by the invasion of Cambodia and Laos and inhumane bombing. The preordained outcome would not change, defeat and a pox on all sides. Wawro notes in his conclusion that nothing was learned and the same errors were repeated in the twenty-year conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Bonus Memorial Day read — With the Old Breed by E.B. Sledge (1981) 353 pp. A memoir of the unrelenting depravity of war. Sledge, a Marine in World War Two, fought in the Pacific and describes in intense detail fighting the Japanese on the islands of Peleliu and Okinawa. Perhaps the most horrifying aspect of the story is the casual indifference to any sense of humanity by both antagonists. Truly one of the most stomach-churning reads ever.
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