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Peace With Honor an American Reports on Vietnam 1973 1975

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The preface of Stuart Herrington's first memoir, "Stalking the Vietcong", relates the mood of the country in 1961: exhilarated, optimistic, omnipotent. He quotes Kennedy's inaugural, which included the pledge to "bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty". In "Peace With Honor?", his elegiac second memoir, we see the awful damage such grandiose promises can wreak.

Of course, any of the Cubans stranded without air support at the Bay of Pigs could have told the Vietnamese that some burdens were too heavy for the US to bear. Arthur Schlesinger explains in "A Thousand Days" how JFK didn't want to turn world opinion against his administration by supporting the invasion. That was a quick decision. In Richard Shultz' new book he details JFK's efforts to wage a covert war against Hanoi and still remain within the boundaries of all the international treaties. In other words, he decided to stop the North secretly, so as to maintain his honor--a less quick decision, but a decision all the same.

By the time of the fall of Saigon, the very notion of honor in Vietnam had become a little more than a source of bitter jokes. "Peace With Honor?" refers to President Nixon's version of honor in Vietnam, the Paris Peace Agreement. The question mark is added, I presume, because of the way Hanoi "honored" the agreement, and the way America enforced it. A ceasefire was declared, the Americans withdrew, the North regrouped, and attacked, and overran the South. "Peace With Honor?" is the final chapter of the tale that began with the pledge to "bear any burden". After fifteen long years the burden of Vietnam had become too heavy. A friend had to be betrayed and abandoned.

Herrington is unique in my experience with writers on Vietnam in that he knows the language. The Halberstams and the Karnows and the McNamaras have poured an ocean of words into explanations and perspectives of the war, but it all seems a little abstract next to Herrington's personal accounts. I doubt whether you can understand a culture or its problems, much less solve them, unless you speak to its people, and you can't speak to its people unless you know their language. Imagine trying to liberate France from the Nazis with no French speakers on your team. It could have been done, but would been much harder. Probably half the people in the Roosevelt administration knew some French. I wonder whether there was even one person in the Kennedy or Johnson or Nixon administrations that spoke Vietnamese.

"Peace With Honor?" then, is a portrait of the Vietnamese people, not just the southerners but those from the north as well, people from Hanoi and Saigon as well as peasants from the countryside. There is the heart-rending story of an 18-year-old boy drafted and killed in a few days, because his family elects not to pay off the conscription sergeant. There is the outrage and incomprehension of the South Vietnamese who watch the North violate the ceasefire with impunity and grind ever closer to their home. There is Col. Herrington's personal account of the evacuation airplane full of babies that crashed soon after take-off. He arrived to find the plane's fuselage "twisted and burning in the mud", and in the field around it "mud-covered infants strewn everywhere --some of them ashen-faced and quiet, others screaming in pain or fright". It would take the heart of a communist to view such a scene as a propaganda opportunity, and indeed that's what it became, with Hanoi's representatives claiming that the Americans were taking Vietnamese children to concentration camps.

One gets the impression from his conversations with North Vietnamese that they believed their own propaganda: an NVA Major insists Hanoi was bombed into rubble and that the socialist masses rebuilt the city, employing, according to Herrington, sophisticated aging techniques to make the buildings appear seventy years old. Another NVA Major tries to explain away the mass graves of civilians slaughtered in the city of Hue after it was taken during the Tet Offensive by saying they were caught in a crossfire. Herrington asks him whether he finds it unusual that the civilians had their hands tied behind their backs during the "crossfire".

The final third of the book finds Herrington struggling to evacuate as many people as he can from the collapsing Saigon. As for anyone who has come to know and love a culture, it was extremely painful for him to see it sacked. He spent a lot of time reassuring panic-stricken people that they would not be left behind to be reeducated or murdered. We Americans tend to view conflicts as presenting two options: stay and fight; or turn and run. But for the Saigonese in 1975 there was nowhere to run. In Cambodia, the only nearby country, the communists were arranging an even more efficient solution to the class enemy problem. Running in all other directions brought you to the sea.

So there was extreme terror and desperation. Near the end of the evacuation Herrington receives and obeys orders to leave on the final helicopter, though 420 people who have been assured of safe passage are still waiting on the embassy stairway. For the people of Vietnam this helicopter that never comes is the final betrayal.

I was reminded of the words of a novel that had been written a half a century before the war: "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy--they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made..."

This magnificent out-of-print book reveals many insights into Saigon's final days. Herrington was there, in Saigon the last several years until the last day. He spoke fluent Vietnamese; he knew the Vietnamese, ally and enemy. He felt the betrayal and tried to get as many out of Saigon as he could. Herrington's famous last words to the Vietnamese trying to to board the last choppers, "Khong co ai se bi bo lai" or "No one will be left behind." He meant that and by 1983, long before anyone (minus the CIA's Frank Snepp) had written about Saigon's collapse, had penned this magnificent book. It should be republished so that Americans and Vietnamese expatriates can understand why South Vietnam was lost thirty years ago.

At the time of the evacuation I was a Marine Corps Lance Corporal (E-3) assigned to the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. The author was a military intelligence officer assigned to the staff of one of the senior officers at the Defense Attache Office located near the airport. The author's assignments in Vietnam uniquely placed him in a position where he witnessed the results / impacts of the political decisions made by our nation's representatives in Washington and by the Vietnamese government. The book was published in 1983, very close (in historical terms) to when the events of the spring of 1975 took place. With more than 35 years of hind-sight since the evacuation of Saigon, Peace With Honor stands the test of time.