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After Vietnam: Legacies of a Lost War

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Twenty-five years after the United States' war in Vietnam ended, the conflict continues to fascinate. As a result, this slim volume edited by Charles Neu, Professor of History at Brown University, is most valuable. It contains only five essays, but they cover a broad spectrum of issues, from the effect of the Vietnam War on American society to an assessment of the impact on the conflict on the American military to a former Secretary of Defense's "reflections" on the war and related topics. This book sheds considerable light on the most controversial foreign war in American history.

Professor Neu's opening essay sets the tone: "The legacy of the Vietnam War is an unending topic." According to Neu, the Vietnam War transformed the U.S. in various ways, including "weakening all of those Cold War assumptions that had crystallized in the late 1940s and guided American leaders through the late 1960s" and "hasten[ing] the decline of the old foreign policy establishment." The war also challenged the "belief in national righteousness and providential destiny." For combat soldiers, according to Neu: "As the war went on, the confusion deepened and old myths dissolved." In World War II, American soldiers "generally had been hailed as liberators;" in Vietnam, the peasantry was wary, if not hostile. Neu implies that this contributed to break downs in discipline, the worst of which occurred in My Lai in 1968, when 400 civilians, including women and children were killed by American troops. In concluding, Neu writes: "Most Americans sensed that the nation had entered a new era after Vietnam, one that was filled with divisions, uncertainties, and moral confusion, both at home and abroad."

The essay written by Brian Balogh. Associate Professor of History at the University of Virginia, examines the war's "domestic legacy." Balogh observes that "Vietnam shattered the myth of American invincibility" and explains: "Innocence and omnipotence lost shattered the perception of American exceptionalism." In discussing "the power of the Vietnam metaphor," Balogh asserts: "Vietnam became the cause of many of America's problems." In Balogh's view, Hollywood's treatment of Vietnam as a metaphor "contributed to the impression that the war was behind everything - or at least everything bad - that was happening to America." According to Balogh: "The war and the movement against it seemed to devour every other concern." Balogh concludes: "Metaphors are bad for history" because they are "emotional shorthand that obscures complex causal relationships."

George Herring, Professor of History at the University of Kentucky, focuses on the Vietnam War's "profound impact on a once-proud U.S. military establishment." Herring quotes an expert on military affairs that, as early as 1971, there was "a state of approaching collapse." According to Herring, the symptoms included "the hippie-like appearance of GIs in the field," rising AWOL and desertion rates, an "epidemic of `fragging' incidents," skyrocketing drug abuse, and mounting racial tensions. The reason, according to Herring was that "servicemen brought with them to Vietnam and other military posts the drug problems and racial tensions that wracked the United States," but he also acknowledges, as any honest critic must, that: "The way the war was fought contributed decisively to the military breakdown." One study blamed "the managerial revolution instituted at the Pentagon by Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara" for the services' "focus on what could be quantified rather than the more abstract and elusive concept of leadership." According to Herring: "Within ten years of the fall of Saigon, a full-scale military resurgence was under way, and, by the mid-1980s, "the military had rebuilt itself...[but] fears of another Vietnam still haunted its leaders." In particular, in Herring's view, "senior military leaders "brought from Vietnam a keen sense of the limits of public tolerance for a protracted war." Herring writes, that the Persian Gulf War was "more about Vietnam than about Kuwait, oil, and Iraq." According to Herring: "The nation's smashing and stunningly easy victory in the Persian Gulf War seemed for many Americans - military and civilian - a long-awaited vindication." Herring concludes: "The legacy of Vietnam for the military has thus been enormous."

Utilizing Vietnamese-language sources, Robert Brigham, Associate Professor of History at Vassar College, writes about politics in postwar Vietnam. According to Brigham, the Vietnamese Communist Party created "national heroes out of those who sacrificed for the revolution," and the "pantheon of champions" included Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap. At the same time, a new constitution was adopted in 1980, which created a Council of State, and, according to Brigham, this "institutionalized the [Vietnamese Communist Party's] commitment to shared power." (Brigham quotes an editor that, "[d]uring the tension of the war all decision-making was concentrated in the hands of a few men and they had become over-confident.") According to Brigham's, post-war Vietnamese society has treated the war leaders as revolutionary heroes, but their methods of governing have been dramatically altered.

Robert McNamara is the only non-academic contributor to this volume, but his perspective is worthwhile. For instance, one of his conclusions is that the "United States should never apply its economic, political, or military power other than in a multilateral context," except in the event of a "direct threat to the security" of the U.S. McNamara explains that this is the "lesson we should have learned in Vietnam: external military force has only a limited capacity to facilitate the process of nation building." I found McNamara's wide-ranging essay intelligent and well-meaning, but it addressed issues beyond Vietnam, and I suspect that some readers will join McNamara's critics (and there remain many of them) in holding that anything he has to say, except in abject apology for being the architect of U.S. Vietnam policy, is not welcomed.

These essays are selective, addressing only some of the important historical issues emanating from the Vietnam War, but the perspectives offered by Neu, Balogh, and Herring, in particular, add substance to the ongoing debate. Together, they demonstrate that the legacies of this conflict are many and complex, both in the United States and Vietnam.

This is a very good but brief review of the Vietnam War and its legacies. The editor has brought together five people who were directly or indirectly involved in the war including McNamara.

The authors discussed how the war changed the way America saw itself and the world. The war also nudged the military system to dramatically change its ways in order to better adapt to different modalities of warfare. It divided the nation and forced people to question the credibility of the executive branch.

On the other hand, the Hanoi government, which promoted a cult of leadership solidarity during the war failed to bring in new blood to the party after 1975. Inability to adapt to the complexities of running a country during peacetime caused severe economic problems as well as charges of corruption. Harsh criticisms and even rebellions from the people, members of the party, and Buddhists occured as a result but were violently suppressed. Failure to break the cult of leadership solidarity will prevent Vietnam country to move forward.