Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975 by Max Hastings
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Comprehensive, Balanced, Absorbing, and Well-Written When two Vietnamese girls joined my high school French class in 1977, my classmates and I admired their beauty and cheerfulness and excellent French language skills, but we never thought to ask them why they had come to Orange County or what they had experienced before coming or if they missed their original country or if their families were all together or if they were fitting into school OK. Listening to Max Hastings’ Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy 1945-1975 (2018) made me regret my incurious teenage ignorance. I wish I could talk with them now. Hastings’ book provides a comprehensive and balanced account of three decades of the appalling wars in Vietnam, involving the French, Americans, Russians, Chinese, and, of course, North and South Vietnamese. He recounts corruption, incompetence, folly, carelessness, cruelty, atrocity, duplicity, and pusillanimity, but also integrity, sympathy, bravery, loyalty, capability, generosity, and understanding. From members of all sides and cultures, the full range of human behavior is on display. One of the most interesting things about the book is Hastings’ many quotes from diaries, letters, novels, documents, songs, poems, and interviews, from North Vietnamese, Viet Cong, South Vietnamese, and American soldiers, officers, doctors, leaders, advisors, politicians, etc., giving a comprehensive, absorbing, and poignant overview of what the people involved experienced and thought and felt about it. Hastings has his own view of things, presenting accounts of representative or (in)famous events and interpretations of them from the different sides involved and then giving balanced consensus or convincing conclusions. He evinces sympathy and empathy for nearly everyone, especially for the soldiers and civilians caught in the thirty-year hell of war. He is more critical of leaders, but still aware that they are human beings. He details many aspects of the war, like-- The different aircraft used (fighters, bombers, helicopters, etc.) and pilots and bases and aircraft carriers and sorties flown over hostile territory with “perilously beautiful” flak and SAMs, trying to avoid being hit and to decide when to eject from damaged planes. Being bombed, caught in an apocalypse, 30-feet in diameter bomb craters, everything shredded to pieces, ear drums bleeding, the shock and terror leading to a serene fatalism. Patrolling the jungle, foliage, rain, leeches, boobytraps, ambushes, poisonous insects, malaria. Comparing the communists’ AK47 to the Americans’ M16 (the former being superior for jungle fighting, the latter inferior for jamming). The Russian advisors teaching the North’s soldiers how to use SAM batteries. The Australian and New Zealand soldiers in the war (more careful than the Americans). The emotion felt toward a wounded soldier changing when he became KIA. Counting the days until one’s tour would be over. Using drugs, dividing by race, fragging officers, etc. Being an American prisoner of war or a South Vietnamese prisoner in a post-war re-education camp. Many appalling moments recounted by survivors: “No matter what their skin color had been in life, it all turned to tallow [in death],” looking like wax dummies. “The acrid stench of burning flesh mingled with that of cordite.” A U.S. soldier urinating into the mouth of a dead NVA soldier. A US soldier’s elbow getting shot and shattered, collapsing him in pain persisting through morphine. A U.S. soldier watching a comrade’s leg “cartwheeling through the air” after a shell hit their position. “The stench of death was everywhere. When you were eating your rations, it was like eating death.” Many memorable, impressive lines by Hastings: “Yet both Langlais and Bruno were better suited to enduring a crucifixion than inspiring a resurrection.” “Yet they persevered because a lethal cocktail of pride, fatalism, stupidity, and moral weakness prevented them from acknowledging their blunder.” “Some [US commanders] displayed folly of Crimean proportions.” “The vast majority of the three million Americans who eventually served in the country departed without holding any more meaningful intercourse with its inhabitants than a haggle about the price of sex.” “[McGovern was] oblivious to the fact that his opponent [Nixon] was at that very hour marinating the South Vietnamese leader to provide the principal dish at a communist barbecue.” “…information on North Vietnam’s wartime processes is spooned forth as meanly as gruel in a poor house.” “The just measure of any society at war is not whether soldiers spasmodically commit atrocities, but whether they are judged institutionally acceptable...” “Americans will forgive almost anything, save failure.” More things from the book will stay with me: The great degree to which decisions on the Vietnam War (by both sides) were made with an eye to domestic US election cycles. The American obsession with counting bodies (not taking and holding territory) as the measure of success, leading to falsely inflating numbers and counting peasants but not weapons among the enemy dead. The callous and duplicitous “real politic” of Kissinger. The intelligence gap whereby Saigon was a “Swiss cheese” of communist informants at every level of government and military, but the Americans had no assets in Hanoi. The North turning diastrous debacles like their botched invasions of the South in 1968 and 72 into PR victories. The ignorant, arrogant, and irresponsible behavior of the USA vis-à-vis Vietnam, leading to eerily similar tragedies in Iraq and Afghanistan. The reader Peter Noble reminds me of the superb Simon Prebble. He doesn't do anything fancy and doesn't change his voice for different figures and doesn't assume foreign accents for Vietnamese or French or Russian or American or British figures or imitate people with distinctive voices like Kissinger or Nixon. Instead, he just reads everything with great understanding and compassion. The book ends with these sobering lines: “’What was it all about,’ muses Walt Boomer. ‘It bothers me that we didn't learn a lot. If we had, we would not have invaded Iraq.’” View all my reviews
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Jefferson Peters
This blog is for book reviews. Please feel free to comment on any of the reviews! Categories
All
Archives
May 2024
Jefferson's books
by Sabaa Tahir
A Young Adult Epic Fantasy with Lots of Violence & Romance
Elias is an elite Martial soldier, Laia a naïve Scholar slave. As they alternate telling their stories (in trendy Young Adult first person, present tense narration), we soon rea...
"It must be due to some fault in ourselves"--
George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945) is an anti-totalitarian-communist allegory in which the exploited animals of the Manor Farm kick Farmer Jones out and set about running the farm. At first...
by Lu Xun
Perfect Stories of Life in Early 20th Century China
Chinese Classic Stories (1998) by Xun Lu is an excellent collection of seven short stories by perhaps the most important 20th century Chinese writer of fiction. Lu Xun (1881-1936) stu...
Fine Writing, Great Characters, Immersive World
The Surgeon's Mate (1980) is the 7th novel in Patrick O'Brian's addicting series of age of sail novels about the lives, loves, and careers of the British navy captain Jack Aubrey and the ...
An Overwritten, Oddly Compelling Gothic Father
Matthew Lewis' notorious and influential Gothic novel The Monk (1796) takes place during the heyday of the Spanish Inquisition. Ambrosio, the monk/friar/abbot/idol of Madrid, is nicknamed ...
|
My Fukuoka University