Vietnam
A comprehensive historical account of the Vietnam War from its origins through its conclusion, examining military campaigns, political decisions, and human costs.
However, both he and LeMay at the time, and some historians afterwards, displayed naïveté in failing to recognise that in all countries at all times, frustration with political leaders is the default posture of professional warriors, who are themselves almost invariably blessed with less wisdom than they suppose.
Soldiers observe wryly that the unique selling point of their profession is that they kill people. It is too much to ask of most that they should resolve political and social challenges beyond their intellect, experience, conditioning and resources.
‘The Vietnamese were being cast as the little men who weren’t there. To all intents and purposes they appeared to have become outsiders in the struggle for their country.’ This was profoundly true, profoundly important. The Americans, so proud of their own anti-colonialist heritage and mindset, were bent upon conducting a war in exactly the style of colonialist governments through the ages. Frank Scotton defined the average American’s attitude to the Vietnamese as ‘callous disregard. Americans of all grades joked about Vietnamese technology being defined by picking up one thing with two sticks or carrying two things with one stick … We were allies who understood very little of each other.’
South Vietnam was a society without leadership and without direction – and these essentials the Americans could not provide. They could not impose order on chaos. And without a government that could claim at least some tatters of legitimacy and effectiveness, how could the United States dare commit its troops and its all-important prestige?’
Combat engineer Harold Bryan once worked for an hour on a man from the 1/9th Cavalry who was standing on such a mine, but had not – yet – detonated it. The prongs proved irremovably trapped in the cleats of one of his jungle boots: the slightest movement would be lethal. Bryan attached a rope to the man’s waist, got his team to take the strain from a safe distance of twenty yards, then together snatched and swung him balletically fifteen feet before the explosion came.
meet it, so US bombing proved a godsend to North Vietnam’s leaders, empowering them to rally their citizens against a visible menace from the skies, rather than for the mere political objective of reunification.
The editors of Christianity Today, an evangelical weekly, urged more bombing.