[Update: No one has emailed me to complain about this post or anything, but I've been thinking about it and want to say the following:

I hope it does not come across as anti-American in some way because I am not anti-American. When I was young, growing up in the Bible belt south, I was extremely conservative and patriotic, and I recall when I read about Vietnam while I was in high school my slant was always "We could have won that war if we'd fully committed to winning it and let the military do what it needed to do to win it." (Another slant was that if all of the hippie protestors hadn't made it so hard on our government and military, we could have won Vietnam.)

Over time, however - and this really doesn't have anything to do with my having moved to Vietnam; I think my views have just changed - I've mellowed out a lot and at some point I came to believe that even if the above were true (and I personally think it is), the real issue wasn't whether we should win the war. The real issue was whether we should have even been at war in Vietnam in the first place. And for a long time I have thought the answer to that question is no - and reading the book discussed below just confirms my feelings in that regard.

But I did not mean to come across as anti-American in general because I'm just not. Also, my feelings about Iraq are not as strong. There are a lot of parallels between Vietnam and Iraq - so many that it's really frightening to me - but I have to just keep hoping that the leadership today is not as clueless as the leadership back in the 1960s and 1970s appears to have been, and that there is some plan out there that I just don't understand. I'm not optimistic that that's really the case, but I hope it is.

Finally, and this is almost a cliche to say - and is hopefully obvious - but any issues I have with Vietnam or Iraq are with U.S. political and military leadership, not with the troops that were actually in Vietnam - or were or are in Iraq. I have a ton of respect for those people for putting their lives on the line, and I have several friends who either were at one point or are currently in Iraq - and I hope if they read this post before I updated it here they didn't take it the wrong way. My hope is that by the time Iraq is over - and hopefully that will be sooner rather than later - it will be clear that the lives that were lost or altered as a result of this war were lost for a real reason and not for some "theory" that is subsequently debunked as I believe was the case with Vietnam and the "domino theory."]

Over the course of my life, I’ve read a lot of books about the U.S. “war” in Vietnam – which, as I either learned from this book or knew earlier but had forgotten, was never really a “War” as the U.S. never actually declared war on Vietnam – thus the Vietnam “Conflict”.  In either 9th or 10th grade, I read a book called Vietnam: A History, by Stanley Karnow – which I remember being very good.  (This is around the time I was reading stuff like Richard Nixon’s two-volume autobiography, etc., so go figure.)

I’ve also read a number of additional books on Vietnam since I’ve been over here – the best up until now being Fire in the Lake by Frances Fitzgerald.

But yesterday I just finished what was by far the best book I’ve ever read on the Vietnam “Conflict” – Vietnam: The Ten Thousand Day War by Michael Maclear.  The book does an incredible job of placing the Vietnam “Conflict” in context – starting with the century Vietnam spent as part of the French colony of Indochina (along with Laos and Cambodia – Vietnam was called “Cochin China” at the time by everyone except the Vietnamese, who called it – and still call it – Việt Nam).

The book examines the U.S. involvement in Vietnam – which began prior to 1954 when Vietnam was still a French colony.  The story of the ultimately successful struggle of the “Viet Minh” – the insurgent movement led by Ho Chi Minh – to attain Vietnam’s independence from France is very interesting – and definitely set a telling precedent for the U.S.’s subsequent experience in Vietnam.  (The chapter about the decisive battle of Dien Bien Phu made me want to read an entire book about that battle alone.)

But the most interesting, and troubling, part of the book – to me – involved how the U.S.’s involvement in Vietnam escalated to the level it ultimately did.  It’s easy, of course, to look at the Vietnam “Conflict” in retrospect and say “I can’t believe we did that,” etc.  But, honestly, after reading this book, it’s literally difficult to believe that we really made so many of the decisions we made, and took so many of the actions we took, with respect to Vietnam.   I would read certain sections and just sit there kind of numb thinking “How in the hell could we have been so blind?”

I think it would be really hard to read this book and come away with the feeling that the U.S. should have ever had anything to do with Vietnam.  The only compelling justification that the U.S. had for being in Vietnam was the “domino theory” – that if Vietnam fell to communism, the rest of Southeast Asia – and potentially countries as far away as Australia and New Zealand – could fall right along with it like a series of dominoes.  Unfortunately, that theory was ultimately proven wrong.  Vietnam did fall to communism, and currently has been a communist country for 32 years, yet the other countries in Southeast Asia never did, similarly, fall to communism.  It’s just completely tragic to think that nearly 60,000 U.S. lives – and millions of Vietnamese lives – were lost – not to mention the extreme effects Vietnam had on U.S. culture, etc. – which the book also does a good job of chronicling – for a “theory” that was ultimately demonstrated to be invalid.

There is a mind-blowing passage discussing Clark Clifford’s replacing Robert S. McNamara as the Secretary of Defense in 1968 – seven years before the war finally ended in 1975.  As one of Clifford’s first actions, he convened meetings with a number of senior military officials to discuss the U.S.’s strategy for winning the war.  He was amazed to learn that the U.S. literally did not even have a strategy for winning the war.  The only “goal” was “attrition” – basically hoping that North Vietnam would get tired of fighting and quit before America did.

It’s also hard to read this book without considering what is going on today in Iraq – there are so many parallels it’s just hard to avoid.

Here are some interesting quotes from the book:

Charles De Gaulle warning John F. Kennedy about Vietnam in May 1961:  “The ideology that you invoke will not change anything . . . . You Americans wanted, yesterday, to take our place in Indochina, you want to assume a succession to rekindle a war that we ended.  I predict to you that you will, step by step, be sucked into a bottomless military and political quagmire.“

President Lyndon Johnson admitting to his biographer, Doris Kearns-Goodwin, that his decision to commit ground troops to Vietnam was motivated in part by domestic political concerns:  “He said, ‘I knew form the start what the choice involved.’ He said if we got involved in that bitch of a war over there my Great Society was going to be dead.  And yet on the other hand, if he let the war go, and he let the South Vietnamese lose, then he was afraid that all of the old traditional anti-Democratic party feeling – you lost China, you lost Vietnam – was going to come screeching at him.“

Vietnam Ambassador (and former General) Maxwell D. Taylor telling President Johnson in 1965 that it would be an error to commit U.S. ground troops to Vietnam:  “The ‘white-faced’ soldier cannot be assimilated by the population; he cannot distinguish between friendly and unfriendly Vietnamese; the Marines are not trained or equipped for jungle guerrilla warfare.”

Activist Jerry Rubin talking about the 1968 riots at the Chicago Democratic Convention:  “I felt throughout the war that I was a patriot, a nationalist, fighting for America.  In the year 2000 without a doubt we’re going to look back at the Sixties and say that the people who represented George Washington, the real patriotism of America, were the people who were opposing the war because the war was against America’s interests.  It hurt America.”

Television commentator Eric Sevareid regarding the commitment of the North Vietnamese society to win the Vietnam “Conflict”:  “You weren’t really fighting just a military force.  You were fighting a society, a society equipped with a total faith.”

Anyway, enough rambling – the bottom line is if you want to read an excellent book on the Vietnam “Conflict”, I’d start with this one.