Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy: 1945-1975

by Max Hastings

For almost two months in the spring of 1954, President Eisenhower and his foremost policy-makers promoted a military intervention which they were willing, and in some cases eager, to undertake. As would often be the case in Washington’s deliberations through the ensuing twenty years, they were unconcerned with the interests or wishes of the Vietnamese people. They merely perceived looming in Asia a new communist triumph that would raise the prestige of China, while lowering that of the West. Such an outcome must dismay the Republican domestic constituency, rendered fractious and dangerous by McCarthyite fever.

However deplorable the conduct of powerful Vietnamese, they could not have robbed their own people without the active or passive complicity of thousands of Americans, some of them relatively exalted.

US largely turned a blind eye to large scale criminal money laundering involving the war in Vietnam.

There was once a strike while a Soviet delegation was visiting COSVN: their Russian guests were afterwards embarrassed that they had visibly soiled their trousers. Tang wrote: ‘The visitors could have forgone their shame; their hosts were well-accustomed to the same experience.’

We’d pretty much all shit ourselves in similar circumstances!

As for Saigon soldiers’ health, a man was more likely to contract cholera or malaria than to die in battle. Nurse Phyllis Breen, one day fitting a catheter to a South Vietnamese soldier, was appalled to see a huge tapeworm emerge.