Tom Glenn's Blog, page 149

What the Vietnam War Tells Us about America

My sense is that we Americans have learned nothing from our defeat in Vietnam. Many of us, as I noted earlier, don’t accept that we lost the war. Others seem to have forgotten our failure to win. And many Americans now living don’t remember or never knew about the war. These days when I’m doing presentations about Vietnam, young people, not even born when Saigon fell in 1975, ask me questions like, “Whose side were we on?”

So maybe it’s worth taking the time to outline what we could have learned and didn’t.

I’ve described here our national ignorance about Vietnam and its people, its culture, and its history as we got ourselves more and more involved in combat in South Vietnam. We made little effort to understand the enemy because it was so obvious that he was inferior. In other words, our clear superiority precluded any need to know more. That attitude led to our defeat.

And that mindset reflects America’s current self-image. We are a can-do people. We get things done. We denigrate other cultures that emphasize goals other than achievement. We have little patience with societies that stress learning or beauty or piety.

We are the only nation I know of that considers learning a language other than our own as very difficult and probably not worth the effort. People in other countries accept as ordinary the need to know other languages and don’t find learning them onerous. We Americans see other languages as quaint and, frankly, inferior to American English. Not quite consciously, we expect people from other countries to learn our language.

In sum, I believe that we Americans suffer, without being aware of it, from a superiority complex. If it’s not American, it’s not up to our standard.

And thus we were in Vietnam. That country was backwards and primitive, compared to us, clearly not capable of defeating us militarily. We made little attempt to learn Vietnamese or to understand our enemy and how he fought. We never grasped his determination to win even if it cost colossal casualties. We never understood his dependence on guerrilla tactics that forced us to fight on his terms. In the end, we lost patience and withdrew. And lost the war.

Our performance in Iraq and Afghanistan suggests to me that our attitude in those wars was the same. And our losses there taught us nothing.

My sense is that unless we as Americans learn humility and acquire the ability to see other cultures as equal to ours and make the effort to learn about them and their approach to combat, we will go on losing. And we’ll be as puzzled as to why, just as we were in Vietnam.

Why I Don’t Use the Designation Viet Cong

Readers point out that in my postings about why we lost the Vietnam war, I didn’t mention the Viet Cong (VC). That was deliberate.

It was clear to me from signals intelligence, beginning in 1960, that the communist forces in Vietnam, north and south, were under the iron control of Lao Dong (Workers) Party (that is, the communist party) Central Committee in Hanoi. The party ran the government of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), as the communists called the country, and commanded the whole effort to conquer South Vietnam. In other words, there was no independent communist resistance to the South Vietnamese government and the U.S. All of it was directed by North Vietnam.

For reasons I never understood, the U.S. government bought into North Vietnamese propaganda that the anti-government communist forces in South Vietnam were independent, not under North Vietnamese direction. We termed those supposedly independent forces “Viet Cong” to distinguish them from “North Vietnamese Army” (NVA). We assumed, without evidence, that the guerrilla and local forces were VC, not NVA. Despite that, we never doubted that the VC and NVA cooperated as allies.

The term Việt Cộng in Vietnamese simply means “Vietnamese Communist.” Hence, the term could apply to all the communist forces ranged again the U.S., not just to southerners. The North Vietnamese never used the term.

Another fiction created by North Vietnam was that resistance to the U.S. and the government of South Vietnam was an organization that united all those in opposition, both communist and non-communist. That imaginary organization was named the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam, or, for short, the National Liberation front (NLF). The manifesto declaring the creation of the NLF was drafted by the Lao Dong Party in Hanoi in the early 1960s and transmitted to the communists in South Vietnam who then announced the front’s establishment. The NLF never existed.

An accurate system for labeling different military units of the NVA would have been to call them main force, local force, and guerrilla. In the ranks of all these units were people from the north, central, and southern regions of Vietnam. Their region of origin was not what distinguished them. Their participation in the NVA did.

The misidentification of the southern communists as VC has withstood the test of time. Virtually every book I have read on Vietnam preserves the distinction between the NVA and the VC and refers to the NLF as a real organization. To this day, we haven’t grasped that the enemy in Vietnam was a single entity, all of it under the firm control of the Vietnamese Communists in North Vietnam.

Why We Lost the Vietnam War (3)

Continuing my discussion of the reasons we lost the Vietnam war:

Fourth, we didn’t understand that the sheer primitiveness of Vietnamese life, by American standards, meant that destruction of infrastructure and industry, particularly in North Vietnam, had far less effect that it would have had in a more advanced country. The North Vietnamese depended largely on walkers and bicycles rather than trucks and roads for transport. They did little manufacturing but relied on China and the Soviet Union for war materiel. So the destruction of roads, bridges, and factories was far less damaging that it would have been in, say, the U.S.

Fifth, as many of us understood by 1968, victory in Vietnam would go to politicians who won the support of the South Vietnamese people, no matter what happened on the battlefield. The real battle was for “the hearts and minds” of the South Vietnamese populace. The series of incompetent and self-serving South Vietnamese governments propped up by the U.S. made winning impossible.

For all these reasons, the U.S. won every major battle in South Vietnam but lost the war.

I believe that the U.S could have won the war militarily by invading North Vietnam, maybe even with nuclear weapons. Such an assault would have risked bringing China and perhaps the Soviet Union into the war. Then it would have turned into World War III, perhaps a nuclear war. My sense is that we were wise to give up and lose the war rather than take such a risk.

And I accept the argument that if even we had won on the battlefield, we would have lost politically. No government installed or supported by the U.S. would have won allegiance from the South Vietnamese people, historically savagely determined to be independent of foreign control.

From the beginning, the war in Vietnam was a lost cause. But we Americans, and especially our government, failed to grasp that we couldn’t win.

Why We Lost the Vietnam War (2)

Continuing on the question of why Americans lost the Vietnam war: Why couldn’t we have won it?

First of all, because we never understood the enemy and the fierce resistance to foreign domination among the Vietnamese that went back millennia. From the beginning of the war, none of our leaders had any knowledge of Vietnam, its history, or its culture. We assumed that we were fighting a primitive nation, hopelessly behind the times with little modern technology. Lyndon Johnson referred to North Vietnam as “a raggedy-ass little fourth-rate country.” His subordinates shared his view. Their ignorance spread through the ranks. Throughout my thirteen years in and out of Vietnam, I never met or even knew of a single senior U.S. military or civilian leader who had any depth knowledge of Vietnam, certainly none who spoke Vietnamese.

Second, we didn’t understand how the North Vietnamese chose to conduct the war. Earlier in this blog, I quoted Mao Tse Tung’s description of guerrilla warfare: “The enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy camps, we harass; the enemy tires, we attack; the enemy retreats, we pursue.” The North Vietnamese doggedly clung to this stratagem in virtually every encounter in the war until the U.S withdrew in 1973. The only noteworthy exceptions were the battles of Dak To and Khe Sanh. Repeatedly, the North Vietnamese ambushed and harassed U.S. forces, then disappeared into the population, the jungle, the mountains or all three. The U.S. military spent most of its time looking for the enemy and not finding him.

Third, because we were so technologically superior to the enemy and so much better armed, we fought a war of attrition, measured by body count. We presumed that eventually the Vietnamese communists would suffer so many casualties they’d give up. We never appreciated their determination to achieve a unified Vietnam free of foreign domination even if every one them had to die to make it happen. Our resolve was nowhere near that strong, and we couldn’t imagine such tenaciousness.

More tomorrow.

Why We Lost the Vietnam War

My blog post of yesterday leads directly into today’s. What happened during the 1968 Tet offensive was characteristic of the war as a whole. For years, I’ve struggled with the question, why did we lose the Vietnam war. Now I’m ready to try to answer that question.

Some will argue that we didn’t lose the war. We turned the war over the South Vietnamese, and they lost it. I argue that the American people wanted us out of the war, even if that meant we lost. We were already reducing troop strength long before we signed the so-called peace accords with the North Vietnamese in 1973. But that agreement was in itself a capitulation. We agreed to withdraw all out forces from South Vietnam, but the North Vietnamese were not required to withdraw theirs. Few doubted they would resume their effort to conquer the south. Later, we reduced and finally eliminated first air support for South Vietnamese forces and then funding to aid South Vietnam. With Chinese and Soviet help pouring into North Vietnam, the South Vietnamese, stripped of our help, were overwhelmed. Nominally, our side was defeated due to decisions we made.

The contention that it was not our war I find implausible. By 1968, we had 549,500 troops committed to the war. By the time the war was finished, we had suffered 58,220 combat deaths. There can be no question that the Vietnam war was, as the Vietnamese call it, the American war.

So one way to judge the ending of the war is to say that the U.S. populace turned against the war and forced the withdrawal of U.S. forces no matter what the outcome. Another way to say the same thing is that we chose to lose the war rather than pay the price of winning it.

But that position assumes we could have won the war had we been willing to go on fighting it. I argue that short of risking World War III—against China and the Soviet Union—we could not have won the war. And ultimately, not even then.

Why not?

More tomorrow.

The Tet Offensive

Last year was the fiftieth anniversary of the Tet Offensive in Vietnam. The North Vietnamese launched attacks across South Vietnam, primarily against cities and towns. The attacks were intended to be simultaneous, all on the first day of the Tet celebration, but miscommunication led to assaults spread over several days at the end of January and the beginning of February. U.S. and South Vietnamese forces eventually drove back all the attacks. The North Vietnamese, for all practical purposes, were defeated. Their losses were enormous.

We now know that the North Vietnamese expected that there would be a general revolt among the South Vietnamese population. They thought the populace would rise up to throw off foreign domination—that is, the Americans—and destroy the forces of the South Vietnamese government.

The North Vietnamese misread the mood of the populace. They were correct in believing that the people of South Vietnam disliked the Saigon government and found it both cruel and incompetent. The people also found the presence of foreigners objectionable and wanted independence. But their overwhelming need was simply to be left alone to live their lives in peace.

The irony of the offensive is that it was a military defeat but a political victory. The U.S. government had been emphasizing the military superiority of American forces in its explanations of how the war was going to the American people. The government genuinely believed by the beginning of 1968 that the North Vietnamese side was so badly hurt that capitulation was near. It never understood that the North Vietnamese were committed to uniting Vietnam and driving out foreign influence even if it meant far higher casualty figures than the U.S. was willing to tolerate. The launching of the Tet Offensive made clear that the enemy was nowhere near defeat. The American public began to believe that its government was lying, and the war was probably unwinnable.

American public opinion turned against the war. Anti-war protests grew. The government eventually  withdrew its forces in 1973. Two years later, South Vietnam fell to the communist North Vietnamese.

Our defeat in Vietnam should have led to learning in the U.S. about what we were capable of militarily. The evidence suggests Americans failed to appreciate the lesson of their experience. Our failures in Iraq and Afghanistan indicate that we haven’t yet come to terms with reality.

The Gift and Craftsmanship (2)

I do a presentation on fiction craftsmanship, sometimes called technique. It’s the most boring of my presentations. It addresses the mundane, meticulous, annoyingly trivial writing practices that need to be mastered to persuade an editor or publisher to accept one’s work. In that course, I use the following quote:

“Regardless of how captivating your stories are, unless your submissions have correct formatting, your work will not be accepted by a publisher. Proper presentation is key to gaining interest from editors and agents, proving that you are both serious enough to abide by professional guidelines and respectful of both the editor’s and agent’s time taken to review your work.” —Tethered by Letters.

The writer of those words was addressing only formatting, but the advice applies to the whole of craftsmanship: without it, forget getting published.

Fiction craftsmanship, as I apply the term, includes all the pedestrian practices needed to see one’s work in print. They include formatting, copy editing, words and structure, and dialogue.

Some writers scorn craftsmanship, asserting that doing things by the book will not lead to good writing, which depends on creativity. They’re right. But without craftsmanship, a written piece will never be accepted for publication.

Other writers depend on craftsmanship to the exclusion of creativity. They remind me of singers who sing notes, not music.

Both creativity and craftsmanship are required to produce publishable writing. Creativity is innate; it can’t be learned. But craftsmanship is a learnable skill. The best writers are those blessed with abundant creativity who have done the hard work of learning their trade by mastering craftsmanship.

In short, the gift—the inborn genius for beautiful writing—isn’t requisite for getting into print. But craftsmanship is. The lesson for writers: No matter how talented you are, you still have to do the hard work of mastering craft to get published.

The Gift and Craftsmanship

Over the years, I’ve known and worked with perhaps a hundred writers, most of them successful to one degree or another. Of those, maybe three have what I call “the gift.” By that I mean the inborn genius for knowing how to put words together to create beauty. Two of those three are as yet unpublished. It’s because they haven’t mastered the craft. They haven’t inculcated into themselves the mechanics of fiction writing.

Until they do, their work won’t see the light of day in print.

Most published prose writers I read don’t possess the gift. Their writing is good, well thought through, well crafted. But it lacks the magic that innate understanding of English makes possible. What that tells me is that the gift is not required to be a successful writer. It’s more important in fiction, which is an art form, than it is in nonfiction. And yet I stumble across journalists who possess it. E.J. Dionne is one.

The greatest fiction writers in English all were blessed with the gift. Hemingway is one example. His ability shape sentences and paragraphs with the simplest, briefest strokes is still incomparable even today. Others with that intrinsic knowledge, it seems to me, are F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ian McEwan, and John Steinbeck. Another is Thomas Mann, but you really need to read his work in German to appreciate his genius. Most translations I’ve read don’t do him justice. In the same category is Gustave Flaubert.

I’m not a poet and don’t really understand how to write poetry, but my guess is that most successful poets are endowed with the gift. They seem to know instinctively how to put the fewest words together to create both meaning and beauty. I bow before them.

For all that, the gift is not enough to assure success in writing. In fact, it isn’t even necessary. The majority of writers lack it. What is required is craftsmanship.

More tomorrow.

The Woes and Joys of Being a Linguist (5)

But what distinguishes Chinese is its writing system, the characters. Two romanization systems have developed to express Chinese words phonetically. One is the Wade-Giles, invented in the west; the other is Hanyu Pinyin which the Chinese themselves created. Neither captures the richness of Chinese characters.

Characters consist of two elements, the radical and the phonetic. The radical suggests the meaning, the phonetic hints at the pronunciation. Chinese has 214 radicals varying from one to seven written strokes required to create them. Phonetics are limitless.

The Chinese communist government, early in its history, revised the Chinese writing system by simplifying the characters. The result is an easier system far less rich in history and meaning.

When I was studying Chinese, I spent countless hours practicing the inscribing of characters. The result was a crude competence in what is really an art form. Proper writing of characters is done with a small pointed paint brush and thick black ink that determines thickness or thinness of lines by the amount of pressure applied. The Chinese spend years perfecting their writing. Compare that with Americans, many of whom today have spent so little time on handwriting that they prefer printing to penmanship. We Americans, myself included, these days do all our writing on keyboards. As a child I was schooled in the Palmer method of hand writing. These days, I’m told, penmanship is no longer taught in schools.

In sum, much of what I learned from the study of Asian languages was the emphasis not on mathematical logic but on aesthetics—the beauty of life and people combined with an existence based on human relationships. In Chinese all that is expressed in a writing system that is, in itself, an art.

The learning of other languages, especially Asian ones, has immensely enriched my writing. It has greatly enlarged my understanding of how people think and act and the values they hold. It allowed me, for example, to create two diametrically opposed characters in Last of the Annamese, the American Chuck and the Vietnamese Thanh. The writing I used in sections of the book devoted to these very different people reflected my sense of them. Chuck’s texts are practical, down to earth. Thanh’s are serene and poetic.

Only through the knowledge of languages was any of that possible.

The Woes and Joys of Being a Linguist (4)

The profound differences in human thinking between western languages on the one hand and Vietnamese and Chinese on the other taught me to expand my own ability to think. More important, they enhanced my ability to write. As shades of meaning and nuance became clearer, I learned how to express them in English.

I wrote earlier in this blog about one of my favorite illustrations of how I learned: “One example of Asian language reasoning came to me when I was studying classical Chinese. In the text I was trying to translate were three characters, those for ‘he,’ ‘mountain,’ and ‘treasure.’ I couldn’t figure out what was meant. My teacher reminded me that in Chinese a word can function as any part of speech, and I was approaching that passage as if the second two characters were both nouns. The second of the three, ‘mountain,’ here was used as an action word. What the text meant was “He mountained the treasure,” that is, he piled it up so high it made a mountain.”

The underlying logic of western languages tends toward the mathematical. Various aspects of the past and future are clearly delineated. The distinction between what is true and not true is sharp.

In Asian languages I have studied, stress is less on facticity and more on relationships which define people and things. The difference between past and future is deemphasized and often not expressed. The discrepancy between what is and what is not is less clear. Much of the emphasis, particularly in the classical forms, is on beauty and the poetry inherent in expression.

More tomorrow