I spent most of August carrying around Vietnam: A History, by Stanley Karnow. I read snippets when I could, finally finishing around Labor Day, with the brief mention of the infamous helicopter evacuation of the last Americans from Saigon.
This is a popular, general history which doesn’t talk down to its readers. I learned much. Karnow does tell his readers about Vietnam, not just America’s role in the country’s tumult, though the focus is on the 1950s-1970s. Unlike Iraq, Vietnam has a cohesive history as a nation, although it’s not an unalloyed story of triumph. The division between North and South was the exception, not the rule.
The American presence in Iraq feels wrong because, like Vietnam, the war is disrupting our national self-image, our world presence, and our economy (and that last part does matter). Seeing that so many warned of the dangers of our involvement in Vietnam, it’s all the more tragic to watch us assume that our ability to change other people has improved. So many who supported America’s role in Vietnam at first learned the error of their ways…and yet we dragged on for years.
Read these words, from page 514, and replace one country name with another. This is from a report in October 1966 by Robert McNamara to President Johnson.
Worst of all, South Vietnam’s leadership and population were apathetic, corrupt and undisciplined, and there appeared to be no prospect of stirring them out of their torpor. “This important war must be found and won by the Vietnamese themselves. We have known this from the beginning. But the discouraging truth is that, as was the case in 1961 and 1963 and 1965, we have not found the formula, the catalyst, for training and inspiring them into effective action.”
We were in Vietnam until 1975, although the military mostly left in 1973 (aside from, ahem, the matter of bombing in Cambodia). Are we ready for another seven to ten years? (And Iraq doesn’t have the unified history that Vietnam could harken back to.)
I read the revised edition, updated in 1990 with additional interviews with some of the North Vietnamese participants who were unavailable before the initial publication in 1983. In high school, I saw some of the accompanying PBS series, as it was shown in the basement of the science center over several evenings. Thinking back, the visuals and storytelling there missed the mark with me. Now, after reading Karnow’s book, I’d take more away from the visual companion.