by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I once again watched the new episode of the Ken
Burns/Lynn Novick documentary The Viet Nam War (Ken Burns gets all the credit but the two are listed as co-directors
and Geoffrey C. Ward as writer, so it’s really a collaboration among the three
of them), which was called “Resolve.” That brought back memories: I’m sure it was the use of that word as a noun
during the Viet Nam war (as in, “We have to stay in Viet Nam because we must
show our resolve”) that has given me a lifelong allergy to the word “resolve”
as a noun. Usually, “we must show our resolve” means “we’re doing something
incredibly stupid and pointless and wasteful, but by gad, we’re going
to keep doing it!” Ironically, with this,
its fourth episode, the Viet Nam War
documentary is getting as repetitive as the Viet Nam war itself: a jumble of
odd names of people and places, a battle here, a protest there, a student
strike in South Viet Nam itself when a popular commander in the Army of the
Republic of Viet Nam (ARVN) was fired by dictator Nguyen Cao “I have only one
hero — Hitler” Ky; he was also a Buddhist, and apparently Ky, like Ngo Dinh
Diem, was a Roman Catholic and was giving Catholics (who, remember, had adopted
the religion of Viet Nam’s former imperialist occupiers, the French)
preferential treatment in both the government and the military.
The open unrest
in the streets of South Viet Nam’s two major cities, Saigon and Hue, made it
even harder for the U.S. government and the war’s supporters to maintain the
fiction that we were fighting to protect the South Viet Namese people’s right
to “democracy” against the enslavement of Communism. (Historically, ironically
enough, there had not been two Viet Nams but three: the country had long been
divided into three provinces — Tonkin in the north, Annam in the center and
Cochin-China in the south — and interestingly, when Ho Chi Minh first appealed
for American aid after World War II he signed his letter not as the actual or would-be head of state of a united
Viet Nam but specifically as Annamese.) The period of the war covered by
“Resolve” was from January 1966 to June 1967, though it could have been just
about any time between the introduction of U.S. ground troops in January 1965
and the Tet offensives launched by the North Viet Namese army in February-March
1968 — the first time they had risked a major conventional offensive instead of
grinding the U.S. troops down in one guerrilla firefight after another. Tet went
badly for the North Vietnamese militarily — the U.S. and their nominal Viet
Namese allies were overwhelmed at first but quickly rallied and retook the
territory they had lost — but it was a smashing success for them politically:
it basically evaporated much of the support the U.S. population had previously
shown for the war and was the final factor in Lyndon Johnson’s determination to
bow out of the Presidency and abandon his 1968 re-election campaign. “Resolve”
is at its best on the occasions Burns and his team are able to cast Viet Nam as
the sort of war they had famously made films about before — the U.S. Civil War
and the American involvement in World War II — and one of the most interesting
points it made is that both the
U.S. officers and the actual servicemembers doing the fighting had been
conditioned in their expectations of what war was by World War II.
The
officers, including U.S. commanding general William Westmoreland (whose name I
can recall the peace movement caricaturing as “Waste-More-Land”), had come
through the ranks and had actually fought in World War II, and the grunt
soldiers — especially the ones who volunteered rather than waiting to get
drafted (Viet Nam was our last major conscript war and Burns and company really
don’t go into the dynamics of the draft and how it actually operated as they
should have — ironically, ending the draft has been one of those
be-careful-what-you-wish-for-you-might-get-it moments for the American Left,
since having a so-called “volunteer army” has actually made it easier, not harder, for more recent U.S. governments to get
into and sustain endless wars, while the growing economic inequality of
American society and the drying-up of alternative opportunities for upward
mobility has meant that the “volunteers” of today’s U.S. military look a lot
like the draftees of the previous one: largely working-class or below, and with
a far greater concentration of people of color than the population as a whole)
— had been conditioned on what “war” was by the memories of their parents and
family members who had fought in World War II and how that war had been
depicted in movies and on TV. The closest thing so far in this film to a
typical “Ken Burns hero” — Denton “Mogie” Crocker, Jr. (his nickname came from
his having been such an assertive child his parents called him “our little
mogul”), a Midwestern boy (his mom and sister were interviewed for this show)
who was so determined to fight in the war that he ran away from home at 17 and
refused to return until his parents agreed to sign the exemption that would
allow him to enlist before 18 — gets honored here with Burns’ trademarked
sepulchral-voiced readings of his letters to his family back home (in which
actor Ben Rappoport “played” Mogie) as well as interviews with his survivors.
Once he went through basic training he was sent to Viet Nam, but at first he
was only given desk work counting the casualties — a job he deliberately
screwed up so he’d be fired and reassigned to do what he really wanted, which
was actually to fight. Only as he saw what war in general and this war in particular were really like, he began to get
disillusioned, and on June 23, 1966 (ironically, his 19th birthday),
he was killed when his unit was ambushed.
One of the quirkier points made in
the documentary was that since Viet Nam was basically a guerrilla war (even
when the North Viet Namese “regulars” were sent into the country to fight
alongside the National Liberation Front guerrillas, they still fought like guerrillas, luring their enemy into devastating
ambushes and then slipping into the mountains and blending in with the local
population), the usual metric by which commanders determine whether they are
winning or losing — how much territory they are holding versus how much the
enemy is holding — didn’t apply in Viet Nam. Instead Robert McNamara, who among
other bad habits he’d picked up from his long career in the private sector (at
Ford Motor Company, where he’d risen to president before taking the job as John
F. Kennedy’s, and then Lyndon Johnson’s, secretary of defense) was an obsession
with quantification and a sense that any problem could be reduced to a statistical analysis that would in turn
generate the “right” solution, decided that the metric for success would be how
many enemy fighters the U.S. killed. General Westmoreland regularly talked of
the “crossover point,” meaning the point at which the U.S. were killing more
North Viet Namese and National Liberation Front fighters than the other side
could replace — and in early 1967 he was claiming he’d actually achieved the
“crossover point” everywhere except in the northern end of South Viet Nam near
the demilitarized zone the 1954 Geneva Agreements had set up to divide the
country. As a number of people point out in the show, this emphasis on the
sheer number of “enemy” dead as the metric of success led to some pretty
distorted command decisions; not only did it mean that battlefield commanders,
in their reports to their superiors, counted just about everyone they killed as “NVA” or “VC” whether they had been
or not (which was also a convenient way to avoid criticism of killing civilians
as “collateral damage” — just define the “enemy” so broadly that civilian
deaths virtually ceased to exist), it also meant that in planning actual
operations, battlefield commanders deliberately chose tactics that would
maximize the body counts whether that made sense either in terms of human cost
or simple military effectiveness.
Another of the anecdotes concerned a young
Marine who was shocked that when the U.S. captured NLF fighters who presumably
had information as to where the enemy was waiting to ambush U.S. soldiers, they
took them in on armored personnel carriers, tied them up and just pushed them
off the carriers with no way to break their fall, resulting in a series of
cracked ribs and other injuries. The Marine, Ben Earhardt (who was interviewed
for the program and was the one who told this story), was about to protest when
the superior officer he was going to protest to said that the U.S. spotters who
had been responsible for detecting the ambushes had it in for these people
because they could have told them
where the ambushers were and didn’t, and if Earhardt spoke on their behalf
they’d beat him up. (I couldn’t
help but reflect, as I had also with regard to the counterproductiveness —
never mind the morality, or lack of same — of the tortures inflicted by U.S.
servicemembers on similarly detained “enemy fighters” in Iraq — of the lesson
British commander John Masterman wrote in The Double-Cross System, his marvelous book about the British success in
“turning” virtually the whole German espionage network in the U.K. during World
War II, that the most important thing a country fighting a war can do to ensure
its success is to treat its prisoners of war decently, respectfully and
humanely. Apparently the old you-catch-more-flies-with-honey-than-with-vinegar
principle had never occurred to those “spotters” — neither they nor the
officers above them got it through their thick heads that they stood a better chance
of “turning” the captives and finding where the NVA and NLF forces were by
treating them respectfully than by torturing them.)
One other point about
“Resolve” was the way in which, by counterpointing anti-war and pro-war
demonstrations in the U.S., it showed how the division of the American
population into two strongly opposed camps and the resulting “polarization” of
American politics really had its roots in Viet Nam (though I would argue that
it was also due to the success of the African-American civil rights movement,
which had the unforeseen consequence of dividing white America and giving the
Republican Party and the U.S. Right in general the wedge through which they
finally destroyed the New Deal coalition and made working-class whites a
bulwark of the Republican Party
by appealing to their racism and cultural prejudices). We’re still living in
the America that was created in the 1960’s by the galvanic shocks of the civil
rights movement and the Viet Nam war, and despite a few reversals, the Right is
winning that racial and cultural war. Richard Nixon would win the White House
through allying with white supremacists like Strom Thurmond and practicing the
“Southern Strategy” that essentially flipped the two major U.S. political
parties’ traditional positions on civil rights — the Democrats, once the party
of slavery, segregation and the Ku Klux Klan, became the party of civil rights,
and the Republicans, the “Party of Lincoln,” re-invented themselves as the
party of racism and white supremacy — and though the Watergate scandal (which
was merely the tip of the iceberg of an elaborate plan by Nixon and his
campaign people to rig the 1972 election so he would not only win, but win in
such a devastating way it would end all challenges to his legitimacy) temporarily
derailed the Right-wing revolution in the U.S., it finally came to power under
Ronald Reagan in 1980 and, even more forcefully and transformationally, under
Donald Trump in 2016.
