Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power (59 page)

First, the electronic age ensured that killing would be televised instantaneously. Few American military leaders, who allowed free rein to television reporters and photojournalists, realized the ramifications of this media revolution. World War I or II might have ended differently had Europeans watched the charge at the Somme firsthand, or had citizens of the United States seen the carnage at Omaha Beach while reporters editorialized on the air about the insanity of Americans charging fixed positions from a stormy sea. Film strips of the Somme, in fact, shocked the British public; and had there been more such movies, and had they been broadcast live, England may well have lost public support for the war entirely. Belatedly, the American high command finally appreciated the full extent of the revolutionary changes in media coverage of the war in Vietnam:

The picture of a few flaming Saigon houses, presented by a gloomy-voiced telecaster as an instance of the destruction caused in the capital, created the inevitable impression that this was the way it was in all or most of Saigon. This human tendency to generalize from a single fact to universal conclusion has always been a prime cause for the distorted views regarding Vietnam and certainly contributed to the pessimism in the United States after the Tet offensive in 1968. (M. Taylor,
Swords and Plowshares,
215)

This sheer spontaneity of visual images, with the accompanying requirement for split-second editing and commentary, also now put a much higher premium on journalistic integrity and competence—at a time when reporters were in demand and sent to Vietnam without much experience or guidance. Millions might see an American GI torch a rural village, but be given no immediate commentary as to why. The bombing of Hué was broadcast worldwide, creating a crescendo of anti-Americanism, while the mass graves of thousands of innocents slain by the communists in the same city were not simultaneously seen on American TV screens.

Second, Vietnam was conducted during the greatest period of cultural and political upheaval in American history—civil rights, women’s liberation, rock music, drugs, and the sexual revolution—ensuring that the war would serve as a general catalyst for antiestablishment activity of all sorts and as a rallying point for a wide variety of dissidents. Photojournalists and television teams adapted to the new media culture in their contrarian approach, and thus differed from the old print reporters of past wars. If would-be Pattons of the American military wished for brief assignments in Vietnam solely to garner combat experience and headlines for future promotions, so equally careerist journalists and reporters might find immediate fame and celebrity status should they hype an especially egregious example of American ignominy or incompetence. That so many high military officers and reporters—at odds over the war, yet so similar in the nature of their own respective careerist conduct—habitually lied to the American people was regrettable but predictable, given the nature of the American involvement.

Third, America in the early 1960s was at the peak of economic prosperity, achieving a general level of affluence never before witnessed by any civilization. The result was literally millions of dissident Americans—students, intellectuals, journalists—who had access to travel, leisure, and money without the confines of the past drudgery of constant rote labor. A lifestyle of freedom, mobility, and affluence that had once been confined to a small aristocracy was now available to millions. Whereas in the past, campus-bound poor students worked long hours and worried about grades and future employment, while professors rarely left their campuses and often taught enormous course loads, in America of the early 1960s millions of activists had the time and freedom to travel—and money to expend energy in protest and general activism.

Television had large budgets for roving correspondents, satellite transmissions, air travel, and investigative reporting. Universities offered free tuition, draft deferments, and liberal scholarships. Grants, sabbaticals, fellowships, and subsidized presses offered a formerly impoverished class of academic new opportunities to publish and disseminate criticism of the war. The antiwar movement became a multimillion-dollar industry, whose existence, like the vast expenditures in Vietnam, was entirely predicated on the enormous productivity of the American capitalist economy. The result was that often the level of protest crossed traditional boundaries of dissent and directly aided the enemy, as the North Vietnamese later confessed:

Every day our leadership would listen to world news over the radio at 9 A.M. to follow the growth of the American antiwar movement. Visits to Hanoi by people like Jane Fonda and former Attorney General Ramsey Clark and ministers gave us confidence that we should hold on in the face of battlefield reverses. We were elated when Jane Fonda, wearing a red Vietnamese dress, said at a press conference that she was ashamed of American actions in the war and that she would struggle along with us. (L. Sorley, A Better
War,
93)

In the long history of Western warfare it is hard to imagine a more difficult conflict than Vietnam, in which the American soldier had a host of enemies undreamed of by earlier combatants: citizens of his own country who often condemned his service and gave aid to the enemy, Vietnamese civilians who at any time and at any place might reveal themselves to be Vietcong terrorists and infiltrators, and his own government, which on grounds other than military logic restricted where and how he might retaliate against the enemy.

The
Mythologies
of
Vietnam

The American press and media had it mostly right relatively quickly about Vietnam: the military and administration in Washington often misled and occasionally lied about the course of the war. American tactics—especially carpet bombing of jungles and forests—were ineffectual, if not occasionally inhumane and counterproductive. The method of exemption to the draft was not equitable. The South Vietnamese government was often dishonest. The rules of engagement were comic.

So the journalists and reporters were absolutely correct that the American high command was inept in its prosecution of this strange war. Only 15 percent of some 536,000 troops in Vietnam were combat soldiers. While it was true that there were no absolutely safe areas in Vietnam due to terrorists and infiltrators, the vast majority of veterans did not have much contact with the enemy. After a year’s service, when those rare frontline GIs were at last acculturated to the rigors of war, they were abruptly sent home. Officers often saw no more than six months of combat; and some rear-echelon bases were replete with swimming pools, movie theaters, and nightclubs.

Such critical problems needed and got public exposure. Dissent was invaluable and helped to draw needed reexamination about the purpose, conduct, and very morality of the undeclared war so far from America’s borders. Military reform, needed legislation concerning the abuse of presidential power, and scrutiny over the wisdom of America’s overseas interventions all followed from the antiwar movement. After 1968 the American military fought smarter, was leaner, and under General Creighton W. Abrams eliminated many of the abuses highlighted by the media. In the end, as in the case of ancient Athens’s disastrous Sicilian expedition, there was a good case to be made that it was not in America’s interest to commit such a huge investment of treasure and lives so far from home, in a war that could not be won outright under the accepted Cold War rules of engagement, which made it nearly impossible either to cut completely the lines of communist supplies or to invade the North.

Yet within that general critique of American policy, there often arose a hysteria—the predictable license of a free, affluent Western society that so bothered critics of democracy from Plato to Hegel—which shrouded truth and left mythology in its wake. The result is that today few know whether an independent, noncommunist South Vietnam was viable either after the American victory in Tet or during the punishing bombing of the North in 1973—had the facts concerning the progress of the war or the sordid history and conduct of the North Vietnamese communists been accurately and soberly reported to the American people. Despite the media coverage, however, we can speculate that far fewer Vietnamese would have died or been exiled had the communists not conquered the entire country in 1975.

Nearly everything that was reported by the Western press about Tet was just as misleading as either the North Vietnamese claims of a great military victory or the American military’s assurance that the communist offensive had no long-term lasting political consequences that might lead to a change in U.S. policy. In Big Story the veteran reporter Peter Braestrup devoted a massive two-volume work to exposing the deception and sometimes outright lies that were promulgated by the Western media about the Tet Offensive. In his view the story of a hard-fought American victory, characterized by remarkable American bravery, did not fit well with either the sensationalism that built journalistic careers or the general antiwar sentiments of the reporters themselves.

While the South Vietnamese government was hardly Jeffersonian, it was not true that either the National Liberation Front or the North Vietnamese enjoyed massive popular support among the South Vietnamese. Before Tet the communists boasted—and it was so reported— that 10 million of 14 million South Vietnamese lived in sectors under their direct control and would thus logically welcome the Tet “liberation.” In truth, the vast majority of the South Vietnamese were living within ARVN and American security zones. Almost no one joined in the general uprising. Most felt more, not less, terrified of the communists after the failed Tet Offensive. Hué was not left completely in ruins. Far from being desolate and nearly abandoned, the city received tons of U.S. aid for reconstruction. By the end of the year, most refugees had returned and the city was pretty much functioning as it was before the fighting. Nevertheless, the media reported otherwise: “the only way Hué could be won was by destroying it.”

That erroneous remark was an echo of Peter Arnett’s famous reporting of an American officer’s summation of the fighting at Ben Tre, a village in the Mekong Delta: “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it” (D. Oberdorfer,
Tet!,
184). Yet there was little evidence—other than from Arnett himself—that any American officer said anything of the sort. It was reported as such to an astonished and outraged American public, proof as it were of the deliberate and mindless manner in which the military had responded during the Tet Offensive. Arnett never identified by name the officer who was his purported source. Nor did he produce anyone—civilian or military—who could corroborate the statement. A military investigation to ferret out the guilty officer turned up nothing. In fact, U.S. advisers at Ben Tre, who were overrun by Vietcong, may well have called in air strikes to prevent their own annihilation; and such bombing probably resulted in civilian casualties. But there was no evidence that the Americans deliberately, or as an act of official policy, destroyed Ben Tre.

Nor was the bombing of the South or North aimed at innocent civilians. The greater slaughter of innocents was accomplished through indiscriminate North Vietnamese and Vietcong artillery and guerrilla attacks. The Vietnamese landscape was not rendered barren by either American bombing or the use of herbicides. Only 10 percent of the countryside was subjected to defoliants during the spraying program between 1962 and 1971, where less than 3 percent of the population lived. During the year of Tet, new strains of imported rice were planted on 40,000 hectares. By 1969 rice production reached 5.5 million metric tons, higher than any year since World War II. By 1971 such miracle strains of American rice had resulted in the highest recorded crop in the history of South Vietnam, at some 6.1 million metric tons. By 1972, under American pressure, the South Vietnamese government was at last granting title of more than 2 million acres to nearly 400,000 farmers—at a time when there was essentially no private property in the North, where in the 1950s thousands had been branded as capitalists and either exiled or killed, often for owning as little as two acres. What ruined the Vietnamese rural economy was Vietcong infiltration of the countryside and collectivization of farmland—confirmed after 1975, when during the peace, farm production of all kinds collapsed. By the late 1970s Vietnam was one of the poorest countries in the world, near starvation in an area of Asia surrounded by the affluence of Japan, Indonesia, and South Korea. The degree that the economy improved at all in the 1980s and 1990s was predicated entirely on the introduction of modest market reforms.

Nor were all critics of the American presence in Vietnam principled dissidents. Even long after the war, many openly confessed to welcoming a communist victory and so gave a romantic view of Tet that revealed more about their own ideology than any truthful account of what transpired on the battlefield:

More generally, the Tet Offensive made a powerful contribution to the rebuilding of some sort of socialist presence in the United States. . . . As the insurgents burst into view, “shouting their slogans and fighting with nerve-shattering fury,” we realized that they were not just noble victims, but that they were going to win the war. Carried along by the momentum of their endeavor, we wanted to be associated with the Vietnamese revolutionaries (Tet made the NLF flag an emblem) and to figure out how our newly discovered vision of “power to the people” might be realized here in the United States. . . . The Offensive demonstrated that socialism was not just a moral stance or an academic persuasion, but a real possibility embodied in collective action of real people. (D. Hunt, “Remembering the Tet Offensive,” in M. Gettleman et al., eds.,
Vietnam and America,
376)

Completely ignored were the massacres at Hué, the general defeat of the North Vietnamese during Tet, and the distaste for communism in both South Vietnam and America. Instead, the murderous North Vietnamese attack and executions during a holiday truce were dubbed “swift and peaceful” (366).