Sunday Times
16-9-18

Review: Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy 1945-1975 by Max Hastings — a masterful overview of a savage war

Few wars have been as toxic as Vietnam. Max Hastings, who was there as a young reporter, offers a balanced account of one of the most controversial of conflicts.

Review by Dominic Sandbrook

On February 25, 1969, a group of US Navy Seals landed in the Vietnamese village of Thanh Phong. The community had reportedly been infiltrated by the Vietcong, and Lieutenant Bob Kerrey had been ordered to flush them out. Almost immediately, however, the operation turned into a bloody mess. Lurking somewhere in the village, the communists launched an ambush, trapping women and children in the crossfire. But Kerrey’s men fought heroically and won the day, and their young lieutenant was awarded a Bronze Star.

Just a week later, the fortunes of war turned against him. Leading his team on a daring night assault, Kerrey was hit by a grenade and suffered terrible injuries, losing his foot. Somehow he staunched the bleeding and directed a counterattack before being airlifted to safety. After just 50 days, his war was over. Richard Nixon awarded him the Medal of Honor.

Kerrey returned home a hero. A former college football star, he later became governor of Nebraska and a US senator. At one point he dated the actress Debra Winger, famously joking that she “swept me off my foot”. But then his story took a horrible turn.

In 2001 the New York Times uncovered the truth about Thanh Phong. Kerrey’s men had been butchers, not liberators. On arrival they had slaughtered the inhabitants of one hut with knives, then rounded up at least a dozen unarmed villagers and murdered them. Half were women and children. The last to die was a screaming baby. Confronted with the evidence, Kerrey did not deny it. “It’s far more than guilt,” he said. “It’s the shame. You can never, never get away from it.”

As Max Hastings’s magnificent and moving new history shows, few wars have been as poisonous as Vietnam. In France, which fought unsuccessfully to retain its grip for 10 years after 1945, defeat was a national humiliation. In America, which committed 500,000 soldiers to Vietnam, it consumed the lives of more than 58,000 men, blighted the presidencies of Lyndon Johnson and Nixon and left deep scars that endure to this day. And for the Vietnamese it was an environmental and human disaster, taking the lives of at least 2m people and leaving the survivors under a cruel Marxist regime. Not for nothing does Hastings’s subtitle call it an “epic tragedy”.

For Hastings, this is a book with a personal history. As a young journalist he was once invited to the White House to hear Johnson defend the war. Later, he reported from the battlefield for the BBC, bullets flying overhead as he tried to deliver his pieces to camera. And, in April 1975, he was in Saigon during the last, desperate days of South Vietnam, as the communist tanks closed in. Having initially planned to cover the takeover, he lost his nerve on the last day, scrambled over the wall of the US embassy and was airlifted to safety.

Vietnam’s tragedy had begun 30 years earlier. Previously a French colony, it was occupied by the Japanese during the Second World War. When the French tried to reimpose themselves, the result was a conflict of staggering brutality. Pro-independence Vietminh guerrillas buried collaborators alive or disembowelled them in front of their neighbours, while the French responded with devastating bombing raids. One child recalled seeing “corpses beheaded, dismembered, eviscerated, even scalped”.

Exhausted, the French withdrew in 1954, leaving Vietnam to be partitioned into a communist North under the ascetic Ho Chi Minh, a former pastry chef in London’s Carlton Hotel, and a pro-western South under the corrupt Ngo Dinh Diem. But since thousands of Viet Cong fighters remained at large in the South, continued war was inevitable.

What was not inevitable was that America would become involved. Hastings shows how hubris led John F Kennedy and Johnson to escalate their military commitment, even though some advisers warned they could never win. Johnson, in particular, completely overestimated his capacity to shape the destiny of a faraway Asian country he never really understood. After sending in the first US combat troops in March 1965, the overbearing Texan compared himself to Churchill in 1940. In response, Charles de Gaulle predicted the war would last 10 years and would “completely dishonour” America. He was right.

Although Hastings deals with the high politics brilliantly, it is his account of the war on the ground that lifts this book above its competitors. Unlike almost all other military historians, he is never boring and never gets bogged down in obscure data. And he has a peerless eye for colourful and revealing details: the North Vietnamese civilian diet of stewed rat and silkworm larvae; the US lieutenant who reads Conrad and Hardy during observation patrols; the marijuana and heroin use that reaches epidemic proportions among bored soldiers; the heady, erotic atmosphere of Saigon at night. He even points out that experienced American soldiers rarely wore underpants, because the humidity bred “crotch fungus”. “Everything rotted and corroded quickly over there,” one veteran says, “bodies, boot leather, canvas, metal, morals.”

Was Vietnam a uniquely immoral war? Probably not, but it was unusually savage. During the peak of the bombing campaign, US planes dropped millions of tons of explosives on industrial towns and peasant villages alike, far more than they had on Japan. But as Hastings points out, many historians, writing from an antiwar perspective, give a simplistic and one-sided picture. The Americans certainly committed atrocities, most famously the massacre of more than 400 villagers at My Lai. But the Vietcong ruled by terror, disembowelling and castrating peasant adversaries, slitting the throats of babies, burying whole families alive when they refused to take up arms. And as the late John McCain found, they treated prisoners with sadistic brutality.

Even by Hastings’s own standards, this is a masterful performance: deftly balanced, immaculately researched and written with immense flair. He is admirably clear-sighted about the Americans’ failures: they never understood that killing thousands of Vietcong would avail them nothing unless South Vietnam could build up political authority, which it never did. But he is also clear about their opponents, repressive Marxist revolutionaries who celebrated victory by throwing 300,000 South Vietnamese into concentration camps and launching a catastrophic collectivisation programme.

The irony is that today Vietnam, still a one-party communist state, is desperate to attract American investment. In the final pages, Hastings quotes a former army medic, David Rogers, who years later returned to Vietnam as a reporter. Rogers found that his old enemies had been instructed to treat Americans especially warmly because they needed Congress to pass a trade deal. “If all you guys wanted was a McDonald’s,” he wondered, “surely we could have worked this out a long time ago?