America was right to defend a Vietnamese ally against aggression.
Written: Nov 07 '09 (Updated Nov 08 '09)
Product Rating:
Pros: Rapid review of Vietnamese history. Provocative lessons. Maps. Photos. Air and land war.
Cons: Overlapping chapter themes facilitate too much repetition. Narrow focus on Indochina blurs global big picture.
The Bottom Line: A lifelong scholar of Vietnam will find little new. Most Americans, old and young, will, however, turn up more than one nugget of value: history, strategy, war and peace.
aohcapablanca's Full Review: Leonard M. Scruggs - Lessons From the Vietnam War:...
Were you an American alive 1964 - 1975? I was. And to all of us the war in Vietnam was for a time inescapable.
In the first three years of the Nixon Presidency (1969 - 1972) Vietnam was my life. First I spent a year immersed in Vietnamese language, history and culture.
But five years earlier I had already been made aware of Indochina during my first Foreign Service tour, in Hong Kong 1964 - 1966. One year a fifth of both Houses of Congress passed through Hong Kong en route and from to fact finding in Saigon and elsewhere. Thus I, although only a junior Foreign Service Officer, managed a fair amount of one-on-one face time with Congressional leaders like Senator John Tower of Texas and House Majority Whip Hale Boggs of Louisiana. I was sobered when Senator Tower came back through Hong Kong and broke into tears recalling the body bags he had witnessed in Vietnam.
After two years in Kabul and a year studying Vietnamese, I then spent two years with the American Embassy in Saigon. With our two young sons my wife was in "safe haven" teaching German at Youngstown State University.
Like me and hundreds of thousands of other Americans between 1955 and 1975, Leonard M. (Mike) Scruggs, author of LESSONS FROM THE VIETNAM WAR, served in Indochina. Scruggs was an Air Force pilot and flew combat missions in expensive aircraft blowing up inexpensive trucks when he would have preferred to be going after strategically significant targets near Hanoi.
Mike Scruggs argues convincingly that during the great Tet (New Year) Communist offensive of 1968, North Vietnamese General Giap made several mistakes. One was to assume that Communist attacks would inspire the people of the South to rise up and topple their elected leaders. But Southerners hated Communists. Southerners wanted to be free and they did not see Communists as liberators.
That perceptible, widely spread anti-Communist sentiment, by the way, tracks with my own experience as a civilian diplomat moving freely among Chinese and Vietnamese, businessmen, clergy, doctors, poets, novelists, journalists, joining a Rotary club, reviewing my Cantonese with a young soldier and learning Northern Vietnamese from a female law student at Saigon University. With her mother, a pharmicist, my teacher had joined over a million northern refugees who had fled south to freedom after the French were defeated and Vietnam was partitioned at the 17th parallel.
The USA, Scruggs asserts, was right to help a friendly nation defend itself from undeserved Northern aggression. It was a just war. Some of his most informative pages explore the evolution of "just war" theory in the West.
And the Vietnam war was arguably winnable. The North needed only to have its colossal war materiel imports from the USSR and Red China cut off. But President Johnson was too timid. Johnson treated air sorties as gently as if they were "powder puffs." He feared (remembering how the Chinese had reacted when MacArthur approached their border in Korea) to use air power against strategic targets near Hanoi, all too close to China. So he sent his warplanes chasing trucks on the Ho Chi Minh trail in Laos. Since Johnson would not let navy admirals and air force generals fight as they begged to be allowed to fight, Johnson's alternative became a land war with over 500,000 American troops in country.
A war which could have been won in two years dragged on for eight before Richard Nixon unleashed his strategic bombers for eleven days and mined the harbor of Haiphong. He could have demanded absolute surrender but settled for a sham peace treaty in early 1973 that the Communists never intended to keep and which the U. S. Congress broke its promise to fund. In less than two years Vietnam was Communist and Cambodia and Laos were lost to the free world.
The story is tragic, humbling, beautifully told.
LESSONS FROM THE VIETNAM WAR is a winning, medium-sized, popular work. It is clearly and unhysterically written, lushly illustrated and even has all the maps that a notoriously fussy reader like me could demand. Theses are forcefully presented and stay in memory. The whole book moves smoothly from point to point in a way lending itself to discussion in serious book clubs.
Some lessons:
-- American taxpayers want quick results from their wars. This means relying on more not less air power.
-- Americans are easily misled by photos, e.g., of a buddhistmonk burning himself to death, and readily generalize to more malaise in a country than there really is.
-- Americans can win a war without realizing that they have won. (That happened in Vietnam in December 1972.) And then Americans turn their attention elsehere, disdaining to put the time required into making a peace agreement or a strategy work. That would happen later in another country in which I served: Afghanistan, after the Russians had been driven out with plenty of "covert" American assistance.
LESSONS FROM THE VIETNAM WAR is a very well done composite of history, argumentation, autobiography and philosophizing. Pick it up and judge for yourself. -OOO-
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