Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975

by Max Hastings

It seems to some historians strange that the French, who had so recently suffered a cruel occupation of their own homeland, should decline to recognize that atrocities alienate. Yet some Frenchmen derived a different message from their experience: that Nazi harshness had worked, until mid-1944 cowing an overwhelming majority of their countrymen.

No American heard Khrushchev tell Anatoly Dobrynin, who in 1962 became the Soviet ambassador to Washington, that he must never forget that an armed showdown with the US was unthinkable and thus his foremost priority was to work to prevent it: “Don’t ask for trouble.”

Frederick “Fritz” Nolting, 1961–63 ambassador in Saigon, once cautioned Defense Secretary Robert McNamara that it was “difficult, if not impossible,” to put a Ford engine into a Vietnamese oxcart. The secretary professed to agree—but went ahead with doing that anyway.

Johnson said, echoing McNamara weeks earlier, “The least desirable alternative is getting out. The second least is doing what we are doing. The best alternative is to get in and get the job done.”

Much wiser seems the view of Senator Eugene McCarthy, who said long afterward, “The moral issue as I saw it finally got down to the question of was there any proportion between the destruction and what possible good would come out of it? . . . You started with the judgment . . . about people in South Vietnam wanting to have a free society. But the price of getting it was the destruction practically of a total community. You make a pragmatic judgment . . . you don’t pursue it to all-out destruction.”

Every new arrival was given the same advice about how to treat Vietnamese: “You grab ’em by the balls and the hearts and minds will follow.”

His sergeant observed that in Korea he had seen men sight-in their rifles by firing at farmers. “Before you leave here, sir, you’re going to learn that one of the most brutal things in the world is your average nineteen-year-old American boy.”

A few reveled in the Vietnam experience. Lt. John Harrison’s Airborne company included a formidable sergeant named Manfred Fellman, who as a boy in 1945 had won an Iron Cross as a member of the Wehrmacht defending Breslau. Fellman’s request to be allowed to wear his medal in Vietnam was vetoed by an officer who said, “Think how a survivor of Auschwitz would feel, if he saw it.” Harrison, who admired the German’s warrior gifts, said, “Fellman was something, but he was always being busted for drinking problems.”

Ky damned his own reputation in the eyes of the Saigon press corps, and of a global audience beyond, by repeatedly praising the ruler of the Third Reich, as in a 1966 interview with a German correspondent, to whom he said, “I admire Hitler because he pulled your country together when it was in a terrible state in the early thirties. Our situation here in Vietnam is so desperate that we need four or five Hitlers.”

Overall, it was estimated that bombing had inflicted $300 million worth of damage on North Vietnam—but at a cost of 922 aircraft destroyed, of which the cash value was three times greater.

“The draftees who fought and died in Vietnam were primarily society’s ‘losers,’ the same men who get left behind in schools, jobs and other forms of social competition.”

Yet history’s least humane movements have also inspired and perverted young men and women to sacrifice all in their name.

Nonetheless, 23rd Division staff officer Maj. Colin Powell, later US secretary of state, produced a memorandum for the adjutant general that was an uncompromising whitewash, asserting that “relations between Americal soldiers and the Vietnamese people are excellent.”

“Don’t you go bringing no niggers here with you when you come home.”

“This country befell upon us one big atrocity. It lied. They had us naïve, young, dumb-ass niggers believin’ the war was for democracy and independence. It was fought for money. All those big corporations made billions on the war, and then America left.”

Gen. Walt Boomer says, “The Vietnam war did more to change this country than anything in our recent history. It created a suspicion and mistrust we’ve never been able to redeem.”

“What was it all about?” muses Walt Boomer. “It bothers me that we didn’t learn a lot. If we had, we would not have invaded Iraq.”