Vol. 11 No. 22 · 23 November 1989
pages 16-17 | 2541 words
Losing the War
Robert Dallek
- A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam by Neil Sheehan
Cape, 861 pp, £15.95, April 1989, ISBN 0 02 402648 4
Americans struggle to come to terms with the Vietnam War. The country’s longest and only losing conflict invokes painful memories of wanton killing, government lying and moral degeneration that seem for removed from the nation’s other 20th-century wars. The films Apocalypse Now, Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, Hamburger Hill and Casualties of War present images of brave Americans overwhelmed by the brutality and senselessness of the struggle. Although American battlefield losses in World War One, Korea and Vietnam were roughly comparable and far less than in World War Two, the 58,000 dead in Vietnam seem to weigh more heavily on the country’s conscience. The respectful curiosity of visiting Americans at the Pearl Harbor Memorial, or at a Normandy cemetery I have observed, is pallid alongside the emotional reactions one sees at the Vietnam Memorial in Washington DC.
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Letters
Vol. 11 No. 24 · 21 December 1989
From Walter Livingstone
Robert Dallek’s review of A Bright Shining Lie, Neil Sheehan’s book about Vietnam (LRB, 23 November), was depressing, and not just because of the subject-matter. He quotes a galumphing piece of nonsense from Henry Kissinger (‘Psychologists and sociologists may explain some day what it is about that distant monochromatic land …’) and goes on to say that Sheehan’s book ‘reminds us of all those painful illusions’ that ‘held official America fast for so long’. He explains that ‘given American anxieties in the Fifties and Sixties’, hopes of reforming the Vietnamese state were ‘at least understandable and even forgivable’. But ‘it is more difficult to explain and forgive the many “bright shining” lies, the wilful falsehoods employed by the four Administrations from Eisenhower to Nixon.’ In other words, the fact that hundreds of thousands of South-East Asians lost their lives is of less importance in the overall scheme of things than the fact that the Government of the USA told some lies to its own people. (There was no point in lying to the Vietnamese. As someone said at the time, the secret bombing of Cambodia sure wasn’t a secret to the Cambodians.) This is all absolutely characteristic of the way in which the Vietnam War continues to be regarded by American historians as primarily an event in American history. It’s imperial history – sometimes critical imperial history, but still history full of assumptions about the marginality of the war’s real victims. If the consequences of this failure were purely historiographical, it would matter less, but the American failure to come to terms with the scale of the wrongs done during the Vietnam War is still exacting a cost. Witness the grotesque spectacle of the US’s continuing to back Pol Pot’s stooges in the UN, and vetoing a mission to investigate the possibility of sending humanitarian aid to Cambodia.
Walter Livingstone
Norwich
