The Truth About Vietnam

Listen to Frances FitzGerald and you'll begin to understand why journalists and historians are so infuriating on the subject of the Vietnam war. They've written and uttered so much in the past thirty-plus years, but they've learned nothing. Fire in the Lake, FitzGerald's Pulitzer Prize-winning attack on America's role in Vietnam, was published in 1972. Since then, she appears not to have had a contrary thought, a qualm, a regret, or even a mild pang about what she wrote. Interviewed by Brian Lamb on C-SPAN earlier this year, she insisted the war was unwinnable by the United States and its South Vietnamese allies, partly because U.S. policymakers didn't understand the North Vietnamese (whom she did not criticize). "We never even considered the possibility of a neutral Vietnam," FitzGerald said. "It seems to me we were destroying ourselves and destroying the Vietnamese."

A flood of new facts has not shaken her. The disappearance of the supposedly independent and indigenous Viet Cong once the North Vietnamese Communists seized South Vietnam, the repression and economic hardship imposed by the new regime, the executions (more than sixty thousand), the new gulag of "re-education" camps, the deaths in the camps (maybe two hundred and fifty thousand), the boat people (roughly one million), the emergence of a Vietnamese diaspora (two million), the revelation that 327,000 Chinese troops and as many as three thousand Soviets were deployed in North Vietnam to aid Hanoi during the war, the admission in North Vietnamese accounts that they would have quickly sought to topple a neutral coalition government in Saigon, the aggressive wars waged by North Vietnam, after South Vietnam's fall in 1975, against Cambodia and China -- none of this has fazed FitzGerald, caused her to revise her thinking, or prompted an apology. She is frozen in time.

And she is not alone. Sad to say, FitzGerald's view of Vietnam is the conventional wisdom today, shared by academics and the media and popularized in such movies as Apocalypse Now. It's a view that asserts America succumbed to mindless anti-communism and intervened in a war -- a civil war, really -- that it couldn't win, even while using excessive force, and wound up humiliating itself and killing fifty-eight thousand GIs and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese in vain. Notice how closely this matches the leftist critique of the late 1960s. That's what I mean by frozen in time.

Likewise, the dissenting conservative view of Vietnam. It, too, is a relic of the war years, blaming President Johnson and his aides in Washington, and the later secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, for micromanaging the war and limiting the military's ability to pursue a winning strategy. For a quarter century now, conservative politicians have feasted on this theme. President Reagan, for one, declared in 1981 that soldiers in Vietnam "who obeyed their country's call and fought as bravely and well as any Americans in our history [were] denied permission to win." And President Bush vowed pointedly in 1990 to let his military commanders, not the White House, decide tactics in the Gulf war.

Two schools of thought: both dinosaurs, both wrong. And what's amazing is that no revisionist school has come forth -- until 1999. Now, Michael Lind's Vietnam: The Necessary War and Lewis Sorley's A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam make a persuasive case for a fresh and different view of Vietnam.

Each does so by looking at the war through a new prism. Lind, who made his name as a journalist by ostentatiously abandoning conservatism, says: "I examine the Vietnam War in light of the end of the Cold War, from a centrist perspective more sympathetic to American Cold War policymakers than that of their critics on the left and the right." He also leans heavily on writings and newly disclosed documents from North Vietnam. Sorley, an ex-Army officer and CIA official, views the war from the perspective of American military officers. He spent more than a year listening to 455 tapes of meetings and conversations at U.S. military headquarters in Saigon during General Creighton Abrams's tenure as commander from mid-1968 to 1972.

Lind and Sorley don't see eye to eye on everything. But they mostly agree, and if we put their books together to synthesize the complete revisionist view, we discover four underappreciated truths about the Vietnam war:

* America was right to intervene militarily, for the worldwide consequences would have been far worse for the non-Communist world if it hadn't.

* General William Westmoreland's strategy of using massive force to "search and destroy" and maximize the enemy's death toll was bound to fail, and did.