By George Will
Saturday, September 16, 2017
Many Americans’ moral vanity is expressed nowadays in
their rage to disparage. They are incapable of measured judgments about past
politics — about flawed historical figures who were forced by cascading
circumstances to make difficult decisions on the basis of imperfect
information. So, the nation now needs an example of how to calmly assess
episodes fraught with passion and sorrow. An example arrives Sunday night.
For ten nights on PBS, Ken Burns’s and Lynn Novick’s The Vietnam War, ten years in the making
and 18 hours in length, tells the story of a war “begun in good faith by decent
people, out of fateful misunderstandings,” and “prolonged because it seemed
easier to muddle through than admit that it had been caused by tragic
decisions” during five presidencies. The combat films are extraordinary; the
recollections and reflections of combatants and others on both sides are even
more so, featuring photos of them then and interviews with many of them now.
A 1951 photo shows a congressman named John Kennedy
dining in Saigon. There is an interview with Le Quan Cong, who became a
guerilla fighter in 1951, at age twelve. Viewers will meet Madame Le Minh Khue,
who was 16 when she joined the “Youth Shock Brigade for National Salvation”: “I
love Hemingway. I learned from For Whom
the Bell Tolls. Like the resourcefulness of the man who destroys the
bridge. I saw how he coped with war, and I learned from that character.” As did
another combatant who loves that novel, John McCain.
Eleven years after his Saigon dinner, President Kennedy
said, “We have not sent combat troops in the generally understood sense of the
word.” Obliqueness and evasions greased the slide into a ground war of
attrition. Kennedy, his successor (who said, “Foreigners are not like the folks
I’m used to”), and their advisers were determined not to make the Munich
mistake of confronting an enemy tardily. Tapes of Lyndon Johnson’s telephone
conversations with advisers are haunting and horrifying: To national-security
adviser McGeorge Bundy: “What the hell am I ordering [those kids] out there
for?”
In 1966 alone, 18 large-scale U.S. offensives left more
than 3 million South Vietnamese — approximately one-fifth of the country’s
population — homeless. Just on the Laos portion of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, more
tons of bombs — 3 million tons — were dropped than fell on Germany and Japan
during World War II. By body counts, America was winning. As an Army adviser
says in episode four, “If you can’t count what’s important, you make what you
can count important.”
Vincent Okamoto earned in Vietnam the Army’s
second-highest honor, the Distinguished Service Cross. He recalls the platoon
he led:
“Nineteen-, 20-year-old high school dropouts . . . they looked upon military service as like the
weather: you had to go in, and you’d do it. But to see these kids, who had the
least to gain, there wasn’t anything to look forward to. . . . And yet, their infinite patience, their
loyalty to each other, their courage under fire. . . . You would ask yourself, ‘How does America produce
young men like this?’”
Or like Okamoto. He was born during World War II in
Arizona, in a Japanese-American internment camp. Karl Marlantes, a Rhodes
Scholar from Yale who voluntarily left Oxford for Marine service in Vietnam,
recalls a fellow lieutenant radioing to battalion headquarters over 20
kilometers away the fact that he had spotted a convoy of trucks. The battalion
commander replied that this was impossible because intelligence operatives
reported no trucks near there. In a Texas drawl the lieutenant replied: “Be
advised. I am where I am and you are where you are. Where I am, I see goddamned
trucks.”
Weary of hearing the prudence that was so painfully
learned in Indochina derided as the “Vietnam syndrome,” Marlantes says (in his Wall Street Journal review of Mark
Bowden’s book Hue 1968): “If by
Vietnam syndrome we mean the belief that the U.S. should never again engage in
(a) military interventions in foreign civil wars without clear objectives and a
clear exit strategy, (b) ‘nation building’ in countries about whose history and
culture we are ignorant, and (c) sacrificing our children when our lives, way
of life, or ‘government of, by, and for the people’ are not directly
threatened, then we should never get over Vietnam syndrome. It’s not an
illness; it’s a vaccination.” The Burns/Novick masterpiece is, in Marlantes’
words about Bowden’s book, “a powerful booster shot.”
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