by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
My “feature” last night was
the third episode in Ken Burns’ 10-part mega-series The Viet Nam War, “The River Styx,” a title which seemed at first
to be crossing his classical allusions — usually the river whose crossing is
supposed to seal one’s fate is the Rubicon, not the Styx: the Rubicon was the
real river outside Rome which Julius Caesar marched his legions across, thereby
essentially declaring war against the Roman Republic, signaling his decision to
take power as an absolute ruler, and thereby triggering his assassination —
while the Styx was the river that led into the Greco-Roman underworld, Hades,
and you usually didn’t cross it until you were already dead. As the show (two
hours long instead of the 1 ½-hour length of each of the two previous episodes)
wound on, the meaning of the title became more apparent: Burns and his
collaborators, Lynn Novick and Geoffrey C. Ward, were clearly depicting the
Viet Nam war as a sort of American descent into hell. They included actual tape
recordings of President Lyndon Johnson talking to advisors like Defense
Secretary Robert McNamara and national security advisor McGeorge Bundy (one
wonders what his parents were thinking giving him such a preposterous first
name as “McGeorge,” especially since they gave his brother, also a member of
the Johnson administration, a normal name, “William”) and his lifelong friend,
Senator Richard Russell (D-Georgia), whom Johnson remained close to even though
they had fought fiercely on opposite sides over the 1964 Civil Rights Act (Johnson
knew instinctively what hasn’t dawned on Donald Trump: you don’t personally
insult your political adversaries because you may need their vote on the next
big issue).
All the Presidents from Franklin Roosevelt through Richard Nixon
had recording equipment installed in the White House, and sometimes on the
phones as well as in person, though all of them from FDR to Johnson had a
switch by which they could control the system so they decided which
conversations they would record and which they wouldn’t: Nixon seems to be the
only President who made his taping system automatic, so it would record everything without his or anybody else’s human intervention.
Johnson’s recordings indicate a President deeply frustrated by Viet Nam, not
really believing that the U.S. had any business there but feeling hamstrung by
the political imperatives of the Cold War not to show “weakness” in the face of
self-proclaimed Communists anywhere in the world, no matter how unimportant the region might be by the
usual criteria of rational imperialists (i.e., does it have exploitable natural
resources, cheap labor pools or markets?). That’s why I’ve often said that my
answer to the question often posed about Viet Nam while the war was still going
on — was it a “mistake” of U.S. foreign policy or a deliberate act of U.S.
imperialism — was it was both: it was certainly an act of imperialism, but at
the same time the U.S. squandered far more blood and money on it than was
merited by its usefulness as an imperialist possession. (What makes that even
more ironic is that, though the U.S. lost the Viet Nam war, they finally won
the peace: today nominally “Communist” Viet Nam has, like Bangladesh, become a
source of ultra-cheap labor for multinational corporations who decide that even
China’s workers are being overpaid.) This third episode finds Ken Burns and his
collaborators in more familiar and comfortable territory than the previous two:
they can focus on individual battles and even individual soldiers (this is the
first Viet Nam War episode that featured
what’s become one of the hallmarks of the Ken Burns style: an actor reading, in
a sepulchral voice, surviving letters from a participant in the war), where
they can get out of discussing the political motives behind the war and focus
on acts of individual heroism and bravery … on both sides, for one of the
nicest things about this show is the sheer number of Viet Namese Burns, Novick
and Ward scored interviews with, on the Northern as well as the Southern side.
The show has also introduced me to a figure in the North Viet Namese government
I’d frankly never heard of before: Le Duan (whose name narrator Peter Coyote
pronounces “Lay Zwan”), who was the general secretary of the Viet Namese
Communist Party and, Burns, Novick and Ward argue, was the real ruler of North
Viet Nam during the mid-1960’s, having relegated the ostensible head of state,
Ho Chi Minh, to figurehead status. Le Duan also, it’s argued here, pursued a
much harder-line policy than Ho and was more willing to resist direct involvement
by the North Viet Namese military instead of keeping up the pretense that the
so-called “Viet Cong” (a derisive term coined by their enemies; their official
name was “National Liberation Front,” a nomenclature that would be copied by
revolutionary movements around the world). Mostly “The River Styx” is an
account of the big battles in the war during 1965, including some at places I’d
heard of (like the U.S. Marine base at Pleiku, where the first American ground
troops landed and from which they operated), others I hadn’t — including Bin
Ja, where U.S. troops fought for the first time in Viet Nam under their own
command instead of supposedly just “advising” the South Viet Namese. The show
concludes with an in-depth account of the fighting in the valley of the Ia
Drang River in November 1965 — the first time it was definitively established
that North Viet Nam was sending in regular troops from their army to fight
alongside the NLF — and it depicted such interesting American characters as
Major Charles Beckwith, who asked about the capabilities of the NLF’s fighters
said, “I’d like to have 200 of them under my command”; Lt. Col. Hal Moore, who
commanded the U.S. forces in the Ia Drang battle and was shown in an archival
TV interview; and Joe Galloway, who was ostensibly an Associated Press reporter
but got pressed into service when the unit he was covering came under attack
and Moore gave him a machine gun and a quick course on how to use it to fight
back.
Interestingly, U.S. reporters in Viet Nam were probably less censored
than in any other war, before or since; they didn’t have to submit their copy
to military censors before they dispatched it, and all they were told not to do
was write about ongoing troop movements or give their exact locations. Indeed,
it was precisely because a lot of the reporters in Viet Nam used that freedom
to portray the war in strongly unflattering terms that in later U.S. wars
reporters were virtually locked in boxes, “embedded” in individual units and
forbidden from traveling through the countryside looking for stories. One of
the most chilling moments in the film was its inclusion of a famous CBS news
report from late 1965 showing U.S. troops invading a Viet Namese village,
supposedly in search of caches of equipment and food being used by the NLF, and
literally burning down the entire village, setting fire to the thatched roofs
with Zippo lighters and destroying the entire food supply on which the
villagers were relying. The reporter, a young Morley Safer, concluded his
report that with tactics like these “it will be difficult to convince the
villagers that we are on their side” — words I remember hearing when I saw the
story as it first aired, and which vividly stuck in my mind as endemic of the
blinders with which the U.S. fought the entire war. It never seemed to occur to
anyone in the U.S. government
that if we were really serious about winning the “hearts and minds” of the Viet
Namese people the last thing we
should be doing was destroying their homes and food supplies; we were so
convinced that we knew what was best for them, that anything was better than the presumed horror of living
under a Communist government, that they’d just accept us as heroes and
liberators. It was an illusion we tragically did not abandon when it turned out so badly in Viet Nam: I
can remember President George W. Bush’s press secretary, Ari Fleischer, telling
the Iraqi people, “We come as liberators, not conquerators” [sic] — a gaffe
that led me to joke that Fleischer had been working for Bush so long he was
beginning to sound like him.
This idea that no matter how many unspeakable
atrocities we commit against a civilian population, in the end they’re going to
love us for it, has haunted us again and again in various military
misadventures, including Iraq and Afghanistan (which has now surpassed the
American Revolution and Viet Nam as the longest war the U.S. has ever been involved in — 16 years
and counting), also places we’ve gone into blessedly ignorant of the local
language and culture, and contemptuous of the idea that that might even be a
problem. If anything, President Trump’s recent fulmination at the United
Nations that he will “totally destroy” North Korea if Kim Jong “Rocket Man” Un
keeps acting up is at least being honest — if your leader gets out of line,
Trump is telling all 25 million North Koreans, we’re just going to kill you all
and we’re not even going to pretend we’re fighting a war of liberation on your behalf. The show also
parallels the rise of the U.S. anti-war movement — and the hopes of the North
Viet Namese and the NLF that the U.S. anti-war movement would eventually sap
the war-fighting spirit of the U.S. and help them defeat us — which is actually
how all guerrilla movements work:
keep the war going on for so long that ultimately your enemies get tired of it,
their populations can’t sustain the effort any longer and therefore they
withdraw and let you have your country back. (This was also one of the two
things the Confederacy was counting on in the U.S. Civil War: there were two
ways the South could have won — either by engendering enough war-weariness in
the North that Lincoln would either have been forced to settle or have been
defeated in his 1864 re-election bid, or by getting foreign intervention from
Britain and/or France the way the U.S. revolutionaries had got from France to
win their war in the 1770’s. Indeed,
they came closer than a lot of people realize; George McClellan, the Civil War
general turned anti-war Presidential candidate, was leading in the 1864
election by such a margin that in August Lincoln was convinced he was going to
lose — until Grant and Sherman won such smashing victories on the battlefield
in October 1864 that Northern voters realized the victorious end of the war was
in sight and decided to stay the course.)
Interestingly, when I looked up
episode three of The Viet Nam War on imdb.com the user review that came up was from someone or something
named “ducorp” who took the “Democrat” President Lyndon Johnson to task for not
having launched an all-out war, including the total destruction of Hanoi and
Haiphong, mining the North Viet Namese harbors and committing half a million
troops immediately instead of dribbling them in a few at a time — this was a
common view among Americans at the time and in 1968 pollsters reported that
what a lot of people they surveyed liked least about the war in Viet Nam was the deliberate
strategy of fighting a “limited war” — they got people who said, “We should go
all out to win in Viet Nam, and if we’re not willing to do that we should get
out,” and other people who said, “We should get out of Viet Nam, but if we’re
not willing to do that we should go all out to win.” Though the military
commanders in the 1990’s proclaimed the (first) Persian Gulf War as the end of
what they called the “Viet Nam Syndrome” in the U.S. — the gun-shy
unwillingness of the U.S. population to support a war elsewhere in the world
for unclear goals and aims — and then-U.S. Army chief Colin Powell proclaimed
the “Powell Doctrine” that the U.S. should never again intervene and fight
without a clear set of war aims and a willingness to end the war as soon as
those aims were achieved, the national trauma of the 9/11 attacks in 2001
changed all that and led us back into the quagmire business in Afghanistan, Iraq
(where bringing down Saddam Hussein’s repressive but secular government brought
about the formation of ISIS and created more, not less, of a terrorism threat than had existed
previously) and now quite likely North Korea, Venezuela, Iran or wherever else
the dyspeptic President currently in the White House decides his ego has been
bruised so badly he needs to use American lives and treasure to take the
miscreants down a few pegs.
