Piecework

Such details are forgotten now in what passes for public discourse on the war. That is understandable, of course; no nation can dwell forever on pain and defeat. But it remains an astonishing fact that so little was learned from the long, heartbreaking experience.

There were many valuable lessons to be learned. For instance, that technology alone cannot beat motivated infantry, a lesson that Iraq is now learning in its war with Iran. Perhaps more important, statesmen should have learned that if there is a chance to end a conflict with a deal, take the deal, no matter how imperfect (Diem turned down a 1962 offer from the Vietcong to lay down arms and join a coalition government; the Americans turned down a similar deal the following year). Our leaders should have learned to avoid, if possible, taking sides in a civil war; any city cop will tell you that he would rather face a professional murderer than intervene in a domestic dispute. We should have learned that a great nation must never enter a war unless the goals are absolutely clear, and agreed upon by a majority of citizens; then you formally declare war, instead of sliding into it a foot at a time.

Vietnam should have taught us that mindless anti-Communism is not a cause worth killing or dying for, in a world in which Communism is hardly a monolithic force. Vietnam should have taught us that nationalism, with its engines of independence and self-determination, is a more powerful force by far than Marxism, and must be understood and respected. We should have learned that in a democracy such as ours, lying is fatal, whether to the press or to the people or to ourselves. We should have learned that we can’t ever talk in the flowery pieties of democracy and freedom while supporting a right-wing military dictatorship. As citizens, we should have learned never again to place our trust in princes, or in abstraction, and never to entrust the war-making decisions to men who have not directly experienced combat.

Above all, Americans should have learned that before they go barging into some remote place in the world they must study its history. In Vietnam, the Americans were deep into the swamp before they started reading Joseph Buttinger, Bernard Fall, the accounts of the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, the thousand-year story of the tenacious Vietnamese struggle for independence from China. Discovering these things after the commitment was made led to folly, pain, death, and tragedy. Yet in Lebanon and Central America, less than ten years after Vietnam, the old mistakes are general once more; ignorance is apparently invincible, the American capacity for human folly without limit.

There is no excuse for this anymore, of course. The literature on Vietnam grows daily, filling the shelves of libraries and bookstores. The complete story of the war remains elusive, to be sure, because historians and journalists still have little access to the other side, to the men and women of Vietnam, North and South, who endured so much misery and pain for so many years. Until the Vietnamese war in Cambodia ends, until the United States, with the good grace of a defeated prizefighter, at last offers the hand of friendship to the people who won, we won’t know it all. We don’t even know all of the American part of the tragic tale. We’ll be learning about Vietnam for the rest of our lives.