Our Vietnam: The War 1954-1975

Brad Knickerbocker

As a Vietnam veteran, I have not been obsessed with the war. I don't think so, anyway. My shelf of books on the subject is fairly short: On Strategy, by Harry Summers; These Good Men, by Michael Norman; A Bright Shining Lie, by Neil Sheehan; a few others. Our Vietnam: The War 1954-1975, by A.J. Langguth, has just joined the list. It's a real doorstopper - 766 pages with footnotes and chronology - but don't be put off by the length or the subject. It reads with compelling drive and clarity, a history that will be admired and studied by scholars and journalists, a collection of character portraits and relationships that beats most bestselling fiction. Langguth was a reporter for The New York Times who went to Vietnam three times and now teaches journalism at the University of Southern California. He researched this book for six years, drawing on new information from presidential archives, interviewing many of the key players on both sides, and traveling back to Vietnam and China. There are some combat scenes as the North Vietnamese attack the South, and as the growing US forces try not to become the pitiful, helpless giant Richard Nixon warned of. The true battle story of American soldier Jack Smith (son of network television newsman Howard K. Smith) is as horrific and as vividly drawn as anything in Platoon or Full Metal Jacket. There is the recounting of My Lai and the courage it took for one GI to reveal the massacre there. But the real action takes place in Washington, Saigon, and Hanoi: the Machiavellian twists and turns, the hopes raised and dashed, the deceptions and betrayals - within as well as between the two sides (three sides, really). The portraits of Robert McNamara and Henry Kissinger stand out. McNamara, so sure of himself as the war escalated, has since made his haunted mea culpas. Kissinger (the subject of a massively researched indictment for war crimes by Christopher Hitchens in recent issues of Harper's magazine) heads a highly lucrative business advising governments and international corporations. Some readers may wish that Langguth had added a chapter of personal analysis and editorializing. But the strength of the work is that it doesn't need that to make its point. The facts on the ground - in Vietnam and in Washington - and the words of the political and military architects lead to the inevitable conclusion: After fighting Japanese invaders, French colonialists, and an American superpower playing geopolitical dominoes, the Vietnamese deserved to sort out their own independence. After the war, an American colonel I knew told his North Vietnamese counterpart, "You know, you never beat us on the battlefield." "That's true," his onetime opponent said, "but it's also irrelevant." American supporters of the war argue that weak-willed politicians and biased journalists influenced public opinion and cost the US victory. "Our Vietnam" makes clear that motive, will, and singleness of purpose were more important than military might in Southeast Asia. "The Americans thought that Vietnam was a war," said Luu Doan Huynh, who, from the time he was a teenager, fought the French and then the Americans. "We knew that Vietnam was our country." It seems unlikely that the United States would ever find itself in a 10-year war like that again. According to a recent survey by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, the only circumstance in which most Americans would favor the use of US ground troops today is a strike against a terrorist training camp. "Force protection" - taking every precaution to make sure no American serviceman is killed - has become the top priority in deployments to potentially dangerous parts of the world. It seems unlikely that another Vietnam could happen for this country. But you never know, which is a good enough reason to read this fine new history.
— The Christian Science Monitor

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

The New York Times Vietnam correspondent and sometime Saigon bureau chief during the war, Langguth has since written eight books (including Patriots: The Men Who Started the American Revolution) and now teaches journalism at USC's Annenberg School of Communications. Short on analysis yet with the comprehensiveness of a long-term, slow-cooked project, his new book sets out the politically charged policy-making story of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War completely and seamlessly. Four sections pair leaders from each side--Kennedy and Ho Chi Minh (long); Vo Nguyen Giap and Lyndon Johnson (longer); Nixon and Le Duc Tho; Le Duan and Ford--creating a personality-driven saga via dozens of individual stories. Langguth has interviewed many of the major players and mined the best primary and secondary accounts, but his interviews with lesser known but consequential American and Vietnamese eyewitnesses prove the most revelatory: William Kohlmann of the CIA; Viet Cong Lt. Ta Minh Kham; Foreign Service Officer Paul Kattenburg; former State Department director of intelligence Thomas Hughes; Nguyen Dinh Tu, a one-time South Vietnamese newspaper reporter; and many others. The result is a well-crafted and adroitly balanced account that tells a long, compelling story and sets itself apart from the Vietnam War pack. Photos not seen by PW. Agent, Lynn Nesbit. (Nov.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Economist

Our Vietnam is the most complete and compelling narrative on the war, seamlessly sinthesising the writings of [Langguth's] predecessors with his own research.

Arnold R. Isaacs

[A] dense, sober, fair-minded study, which comes out at a time when our memories of the war are beginning to be covered over by a rose-colored haze of self-forgiveness....Langguth's account of Tet and its aftermath is particularly useful because so many of the facts have become blurred by a selective, inaccurate rewriting of history.... A needed antidote to a recent rash of ideologically flavored, factually suspect histories.
—New York Times Book Review

Kirkus Reviews

An epic account of America's involvement in Vietnam by a historian who covered much of the war for the New York Times. Langguth (A Noise of War, 1994, etc.) uses the same technique he employed in his previous military histories: a painstakingly constructed narrative described through the eyes of participants. In the case of Vietnam, he has the advantage of having witnessed the events himself, and he was also able to interview various policymakers (from Saigon, Hanoi, and Washington) who plotted the course of the war, as well as to examine thousands of declassified documents. The result is a revision of the Vietnam revisionists—those who would argue that the war could have been won if the US had been able to commit all its resources and an unrelenting will to the war effort. The major events of the period are all here: the 1954 collapse of French control over its former colony at Diên Biên Phú; the flawed leadership of Ngo Dinh Diem that ended in a coup, ambivalently abetted by the Kennedy administration; the comic-opera succession of short-lived, corrupt South Vietnamese regimes that followed; the grueling guerrilla warfare; the My Lai massacre; the stop-and-start attempts at peace negotiations; and, finally, the April 1975 Communist takeover. A sprawling cast of characters is revealed with complexity and, sometimes, great sympathy: North Vietnamese Communists, as resentful toward their Chinese and Soviet allies as toward their American foes; American political and military leaders, starting out ignorant of the inept and corrupt regime they back, increasingly certain that the war effort is doomed, but thrashing about in the quagmire for cravenelectoralconsiderations; and common soldiers on all sides, enduring harrowing conditions and often fighting heroically for years. A grimly powerful procession of folly and tragedy. (b&w photos, not seen)