The Only War We've Got: Early Days in South Vietnam

by Daniel Ford

It's 1964, and Dan Ford has just received a publisher's advance on his first book. He spends the money on a ticket to Saigon. Here is the war as he saw it, including the mission that became the acclaimed Burt Lancaster film "Go Tell the Spartans." "A riveting account of the Vietnam War in its openings round. Recommended to students, veterans, and historians." (Annals of Vietnam, February 2002)

171 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 1, 2001

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[KOMET · Rating 5 out of 5]

"THE ONLY WAR WE'VE GOT" is taken from the dispatches the author had been contracted to write for a national magazine in the U.S., based on his experiences as a journalist on attachment with the U.S. Army in South Vietnam between May and July 1964. At the time Ford was in-country, "there was a grand total of forty foreign reporters in the country - full-time and part-time, and of all nationalities, not just American."

Ford had written his observations and reflections of all the people he met in South Vietnam --- soldiers, airmen, and civilians alike --- from Saigon to the Mekong Delta, to further north in the Central Highlands near the Laotian border, and eastward to the shores of the Gulf of Tonkin.

Ford returned home before the end of the summer and within a few months, the Vietnam War would take on a greater urgency with the landing of U.S. combat troops on March 8, 1965. The chapters he had written and then sent home were never published after all. Indeed, it would be another 36 years before Ford would re-read those chapters. According to Ford, "[t]hey were a revelation: about the country and the sort of war we were fighting in those early days, and likewise about the young reporter who'd flown to Saigon with an innocence as grassy-green as the American involvement itself."

I was inspired to read this book because of the PBS TV documentary series on the Vietnam War that has been broadcast both last week and this week. I was born the same year Ford went to South Vietnam and have no memories of most of the events associated with that war. I was simply too young to take all that in. But my earliest memories of Vietnam are from 1973, when I watched on TV the arrival in the U.S. of freed American POWs. I grew up with the feeling as the '70s proceeded apace that most Americans simply wanted to put Vietnam as far behind them as possible, and just get on with their lives. Thus, Vietnam became for me a vague abstraction. The Second World War, by contrast, for me was very real because my Dad had fought as a GI in Europe during 1944-45 and several other relatives had also served in the U.S. military during that time. It has only been in the last 20 years (when I read David Halberstam's book 'The Best and the Brightest', a history of the Vietnam War as it passed from being a French war of reconquest in Indochina to an American war) through a slow, gradual process that I began to want to know more about the Vietnam War.

For all its 163 pages, "THE ONLY WAR WE'VE GOT" is a very engaging story replete with many of the B&W photos Ford himself took during his sojourn in South Vietnam. One passage that stands out for me concerns the meeting Ford had with a civilian aide worker who had 20 years' experience of work in underdeveloped countries. It is as follows ~

'I asked USOM Man [the name Ford gave to this civilian aide, because he didn't want to name him, for fear of possibly costing the aide his job] what better solution he had in mind. He said we should cut our military advisory group to its 1962 level - five or six thousand - put most of our money and energy into educating the people, training them to use modern agricultural techniques, and providing them with health care. "The people, " he said mournfully in his almost-German accent. "We need men and women who will work with the people, not more and more military advisors. Pah! What do military men know about the people?" It was a fair question and I decided to find out.'

[Doug DePew · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've read a lot of Vietnam memoirs. Most are by soldiers and Marines deep in the hottest years of the war. "The Only War We've Got" by Daniel Ford gives a completely different perspective. As a young Army vet and reporter, Mr. Ford was sent to Vietnam to cover what was going on there in 1964. This book is composed of his notes and dispatches home.

He takes the reader all through South Vietnam and gives us a glimpse of military activities throughout the country at that early stage of US involvement there. He participates in a wide variety of exercises ranging from US Air Force to US Navy to US Army (conventional and Special Forces). In his time in southwest Asia, he managed to sample a wide variety of units. He also had quite a bit of interaction with the native peoples. His insight is truly fascinating. The characters he meets on his journey are too interesting to be fiction. People like this only come from real life. Meeting the advisors who were running the war prior to its escalation was a real treat to me.

As the author explains in his epilogue, his attitude and that of most of the advisors he met were very naive. That's part of the magic of this book. It's difficult to step back beyond hindsight and view things the way we did when we were young. Mr. Ford has managed to do it. This book is an important addition to Vietnam literature and military history in general. I enjoyed it a lot.

[Michael Golub · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here is my current take on the important relevance of this book.
Robin Moore goes to Vietnam in Early 1964. His trip is cut short, because his letter to his brother is repurposed into a story about Vietnam published in U.S. News May 18, 1964. McNamara isn’t happy about the article titled: True Story of War in Vietnam. Safe in the USA, Robin writes his roman-a-clef novel: The Green Berets (1965), which ends up with the John Wayne movie with the same name in 1968.
In ironic order, as Robin Moore has left Vietnam, Daniel Ford arrives for 2 months. Moore was WWII bombardier and attended the Special Forces Officer Course (as a civilian). Ford did 2 years in Army in the late 50’s and worked with PSYOPS. Ford took his experiences (from his 2 months in country) and wrote the novel, Incident at Muc Wa (1967), which became the war movie, Go Tell the Spartans (1978).
This book is his journal for those 2 months in Vietnam from May to July 1964. It is a short book, but very detailed. Ford freely shares his observations of how the environment is. He explains the beauty of Vietnam. He shares the hardships: lack of water, lack of sleep, overheating, biting insects, etc. He uses all this to paint a picture in your mind of how difficult the environment must be. Most importantly, he shares the feedback of the people in this journal. It is more gentle then Robin’s approach, yet probably more lasting. Time will tell.