A Vietnam War biblio

Yeah, I know, I put in a cute comment about arendt's use of "Mr. Burns" -- standard academic writing would have been "Burns" or "Ken Burns." Apologies to arendt.

At any rate, the truth of the matter is that one can learn far more from reading (books y'know), from Internet research, and from watching YouTube videos than one can from watching movies and documentaries. This is true if the subject is history, science fiction, or any topic one cares to name. Print still goes a long way in displaying what cameras can't, although of course with print one has to use one's imagination to a significant extent, which is perhaps "filled in" with movie scenes which are themselves products of someone else's imagination. And even firsthand accounts are colored by the human imagination, so that's another dilemma.

ADMISSION OF BIAS: I think that history will eventually bear out my belief that the American involvement in Vietnam was colored from the outset by a fantasy of "nation-building," emanating from American universities (specifically Michigan State) as a foundational belief in the superiority of the American Way of Life, and that the escalation beginning in 1964 was a byproduct of this fantasy. Whether or not the US could have "won the war in Vietnam" is ultimately an unimportant question, because in order to "win the war" the US participants would have had to know a lot more than they bothered to investigate, and so in the end the attempt to substitute bombs and guns for human relations failed.

At any rate, here is my brief annotated bibliography on America in Vietnam. This will be short, and perhaps a bit behind the times -- I'm sure that readers will be able to fill in with stuff they've read that will add something to this short diary.

*****

Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves

The American engagement in Vietnam, from the escalation beginning in 1964 to the withdrawals and bombings of 1972, was characterized by all sorts of casual murder, as depicted for instance in the movie "Platoon." For this book Nick Turse did some hardcore research to find out what the aggregate effect was of all this casual murder, with special emphasis upon "Operation Speedy Express."

Alan Dawson, 55 Days

Judging from Amazon it appears this book is out of print. Dawson was the UPI bureau chief in Saigon; he offers in great detail what happened from the beginning to the end of the collapse of the Republic of Vietnam in 1975, arguing that the government of southern Vietnam was in economic terms a kleptocracy, and that the Vietnamese in the south might have held out for longer had they actually believed in what they were doing. But they didn't, so they didn't.

James Carter, Inventing Vietnam

It's been awhile since I read this book but I think it was centered around the Michigan State Vietnam Group Archive, the library of a group of academics who organized the nation-building project that was to be imposed upon Vietnam. The people who did this did not take into account the particulars of Vietnamese culture, nor did they care: the "strategic hamlet" program they initiated back before the escalations of 1964 et seq. paid no heed to traditional rural Vietnamese ties to specific land areas. This book is for the most part about the early history of the Vietnam conflict; it doesn't really go into detail about what happened after Diem's overthrow in 1963.

Neil Sheehan -- A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam

This is the story of the conflict in Vietnam as seen through a biography of John Paul Vann, a field adviser for the US effort. Vann understood full well and through firsthand experience how thoroughly misguided were the US efforts there; he nonetheless fooled himself into believing the war could be won, and continued in his heterodox pursuit of the war all the way up to his mysterious death in a helicopter crash in the Vietnamese wilderness in 1972. There's a lot of good side information in this longish book.

Howard Jones, My Lai: Vietnam, 1968, and the Descent Into Darkness

This is a very recent attempt to write the definitive book about the massacre at My Lai, a small community of hamlets in Quang Ngai province in Vietnam in March of 1968. Jones tries to capture the ambiguity of the event (perhaps as an attempt at rhetorical defense against expected attacks upon his book from Vietnam veterans), but readers of this book will nonetheless be impressed with the heedlessness of a war-fighting policy (Westmoreland's, during the Johnson administration) based on accumulating "body counts."

Prados, John, Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War

This is a book that attempts to show that the regime popularly called "South Vietnam" never really gained traction within the chunk of turf it claimed, and that even when the regime in the north was at its least popular, in (if I recall correctly) 1969, there was still no solid popular loyalty to the regime to the south. I can't really say whether Prados' argument is entirely borne out by the facts because I haven't really seen an account yet that contests Prados' argument on his own terms.

*****

So, OK, that's what I've got so far. I try to stay current, though since it's not really a major topic of my present-day research I can't say that I'm entirely current. Your thoughts?

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histories that have been translated into English?

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The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

Cassiodorus's picture

@UntimelyRippd I haven't put the time into French to make it work, sorry. Anyone else?

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"The war on Gaza, backed by the West, is a demonstration that the West is willing to cross all lines. That it will discard any nuance of humanity. That it is willing to commit genocide" -- Moon of Alabama

contributing these resources. Looks like we're going to go at it again. Almost impossible to believe.

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arendt's picture

DH was one of the other reporters that spoke with Vann.

B&B is much more strategic. It is about the leadership - McNamara, Bundy, Rostow, et al. The title refers to the attitude that the leadership had about itself, which seems to have been part of the problem.

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Cassiodorus's picture

@arendt Or did it include a discussion of the Eisenhower team as well?

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"The war on Gaza, backed by the West, is a demonstration that the West is willing to cross all lines. That it will discard any nuance of humanity. That it is willing to commit genocide" -- Moon of Alabama

arendt's picture

@Cassiodorus

JFK is the one who brought in the "best and brightest".

Here is the lengthiest review, but it is not interested in the chronology in the book.

NYT Review by Victor Navasky

Wow, does McGeorge Bundy come off as a compleat horses ass, a caricature of an upper class snob.

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Cassiodorus's picture

@arendt were one of whether or not the US ought to have supported Diem, or interrupted the Geneva Accords. Yes, we're going with a US-educated Catholic and his kleptocratic family to run Buddhist southern Vietnam, and no, we're not following the accords. Weren't those questions answered when Eisenhower was in the White House? Did someone among Halberstam's "good guys" have a plan to ask the Vietnamese what it was that they wanted before the shooting war got nasty? Though I'm sure "The Best and the Brightest" has earned a celebrated place in America-Vietnam historiography.

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"The war on Gaza, backed by the West, is a demonstration that the West is willing to cross all lines. That it will discard any nuance of humanity. That it is willing to commit genocide" -- Moon of Alabama

arendt's picture

@Cassiodorus

While he himself was a staunch anti-Communist, I suspect that the evil Dulles Brothers were busy twisting him in favor of their puppet, Diem.

The B&B's lack of options comes out in Burns's film: Johnson's quote about being a "jackass in a hailstorm" - can't run, can't hide, and it isn't stopping.

Once the US had committed to Diem, it couldn't back off without looking weak and unreliable. The conclusion was inevitable. Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon spent ten years postponing the inevitable, at immense cost to America. A cost we are still paying.

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Cassiodorus's picture

@arendt @arendt who care about their perceptions of how "America" looks. In the rest of the world, of course, the elites are paid off and the masses are made to feel that their feelings are unimportant.

I suppose a big theoretical discussion of the role of the capitalist state as a guarantor of capitalist business would be beyond the scope of this here diary. It should be said, though, that American entrepreneurs wouldn't touch the Republic of Vietnam, because the cost of dealing with the Very Important People of the regime was too high. Alan Dawson discusses at length the impossibility of doing business in Vietnam in "55 Days." And since the Republic of Vietnam was a black hole, sucking up money with no prospects of return, and since Nixon had gone to China and since Nixon had abandoned the gold standard for all the money that was spent on Vietnam (both of those events in 1971), there was no real capitalist reason to continue with Vietnam, so America abandoned the Republic of Vietnam. That's one theory at least.

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"The war on Gaza, backed by the West, is a demonstration that the West is willing to cross all lines. That it will discard any nuance of humanity. That it is willing to commit genocide" -- Moon of Alabama

Cassiodorus's picture

@Cassiodorus that today Vietnam is Nike's reserve of cheap teenage female labor. So they got what they wanted in the end, something Noam Chomsky figured out some time before he started shilling for Democrats.

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"The war on Gaza, backed by the West, is a demonstration that the West is willing to cross all lines. That it will discard any nuance of humanity. That it is willing to commit genocide" -- Moon of Alabama

@Cassiodorus

And that Vietnam itself was purely a proxy to demonstrate US resolve. That was the claim by an international relations professor (whose name I forgot) at a lecture I attended. He said one of the original motivations for opposing the North Vietnamese was to show Western Europe that the US would fight the USSR if they invaded West Germany. His argument was that at the time the communist parties in West Germany, Italy and France seemed to be gaining influence and it wasn't clear what the resolve of the US would be if such an invasion occurred. He also called the involvement in Vietnam a colossally stupid f**k up.

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Beware the bullshit factories.

@Timmethy2.0

... He said one of the original motivations for opposing the North Vietnamese was to show Western Europe that the US would fight the USSR if they invaded West Germany. His argument was that at the time the communist parties in West Germany, Italy and France seemed to be gaining influence and it wasn't clear what the resolve of the US would be if such an invasion occurred. ...

'...at the time the communist parties in West Germany, Italy and France seemed to be gaining influence ...'

Maybe I'm taking this the wrong way, but it kinda sounds phrased as though he??? was thinking that this was a warning to Western Europe not to allow Communist (and, I expect, socialist) Parties to gain any respectability, as the US might then attack them, rather than another, poorer country flattened as a tyrant's example, since said victimized country lacked the capacity to defend itself and its people or to strike back. Somehow, this wouldn't surprise me...

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Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.

A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.

@Ellen North @Ellen North

I think many people in Western Europe were concerned about being the next "domino". The US was isolationist prior to World War II and maybe there was some fear that would be repeated. The Soviets were probably giving support to these Western European communist parties. I think many people hadn't caught on yet to the new, MIC influenced, USA. Also there was a massive Soviet army in Eastern Europe and all the Cold War events, like the construction of the Berlin Wall, were going on.

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Beware the bullshit factories.

Lot's of good responses if you care to go over and look. A lot of very informed folks creating a bibliography.

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Cassiodorus's picture

@peachcreek So for instance the Ron Kovic and Le Ly Hayslip books were made into Oliver Stone movies. And reportage on Hue in 1968? If you wanted US involvement in Vietnam to be a matter of war aesthetics Hue 1968 would certainly be a good time and place to start. "Bloods" is certainly an aesthetic read.

That's fine, for what the NYT wants to say about Vietnam; I'm really fundamentally interested in portraying the American fantasy about Vietnam as a fantasy. The standard political modus operandi seems to be as follows: 1) assume beforehand that we know full well what reality is, 2) order the human players on the ground to enact the fantasy that we assumed to be reality, 3) reinforce the fantasy with "metrics" and other such rationalizations, and 4) continue to adjust reality to fantasy (and not vice versa) with whatever reaction seems necessary at any particular time.

The fact that this MO, which looks like a crude joke when portrayed in simplest form, has become commonplace and has been enshrined in theory as "realism" is what lends credibility to historical overviews such as Kees van der Pijl's The Foreign Encounter in Myth and Religion, in which the various tribes of humanity look pretty lost in their own collective worlds.

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"The war on Gaza, backed by the West, is a demonstration that the West is willing to cross all lines. That it will discard any nuance of humanity. That it is willing to commit genocide" -- Moon of Alabama

@Cassiodorus Yeah the NYT list is BS. It was the commenters to emptywheel offering better suggestions that I meant might be of interest. My phrasing "if you care to" was meant that way, in that it *might* be of interest. I didn't want to recommend it too strongly because there was some good stuff mixed in with a bunch of chaff.

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Cassiodorus's picture

@peachcreek and his "Phoenix Project" book. That's a good one.

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"The war on Gaza, backed by the West, is a demonstration that the West is willing to cross all lines. That it will discard any nuance of humanity. That it is willing to commit genocide" -- Moon of Alabama

Cassiodorus's picture

@peachcreek War aesthetics and human interest stories are what they wanted, and there's certainly plenty of it in the literature. No sense in denying it!

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"The war on Gaza, backed by the West, is a demonstration that the West is willing to cross all lines. That it will discard any nuance of humanity. That it is willing to commit genocide" -- Moon of Alabama

arendt's picture

to be the definitive work, even though it talks mostly about the political infighting in Washington. It was turned into a 13 part PBS series in the 1980s. BTW, Karnow was on Nixon's enemies list.

There are a large number of lengthy comments to a review posted on Goodreads.

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