Vietnam is not the Only War
[Trivia: Which 3 present-day countries are responsible for generating more dog breeds than any other countries?]
I recently finished Dereliction of Duty, a 1997 book about the Americanization of the Vietnam War, written by H.R. McMaster.1 Subtitled Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam, the book capitalized on recently declassified documents from that event and spent a lot of time articulating the rampant deception, the gap between what was happening and what was being told to Congress and the public was happening.2
The book is detailed and easy to follow; I might review it at some point. But for now, one overwhelming takeaway was simply this: Vietnam was not America’s only war. So why is it the only one that people compare new wars to?
After WWII, the French colonial empire entered a state of freefall globally, and chaos was the rule of the day. France had had a collection of territories known as French Indochina; France’s withdrawal from the region resulted in a communist North Vietnam (backed by the communist world) and a South Vietnam backed by the West as early as 1954, which promptly went to war. Other parts of French Indochina—Laos and Cambodia—also descended into civil war and were subjected to communist brutality.
As McMaster details, the decisions made by Robert McNamara’s Defense Department and Lyndon Johnson’s3 presidency were a recipe for failure. They were not risky decisions or a case study in operations failure; they were a recipe for failure.
Lyndon Johnson, catapulted into the White House after the 11/22/63 Kennedy assassination spent 1964 trying to win an election in his own right. He spent 1964 trying to fend off accusations of being soft on communism, without actually spending political capital to commit major military actions; after his huge victory, he spent early 1965 trying to ram his major “Great Society” legislation through Congress and keep everything else looking OK. Eventually they just wanted to preserve America’s credibility and loyalty on the world stage, and so tried to make their actions look like a good-faith effort—again, not actually trying to succeed, just throwing a limp-wristed effort towards not looking obviously unreliable. (That was costly and resulted in failure, pretty much the worst of both worlds.)
In light of those goals, the situation on the ground was flexible. When LBJ wanted a little more leash from Congress for some action, the “Gulf of Tonkin incident” in August 1964 was presented as Vietnamese aggression against US forces when in fact it’s unconfirmed whether any Vietnamese were present on August 4 at all. Conversely, 1965 saw LBJ and friends downplay activity to deflect from the fact that he had engaged US forces in offensive engagements.
At no point did LBJ articulate a clear end goal or construct a plan for getting there. Vietnam was the world’s highest-stakes sideshow as he focused on one other priority after another. LBJ and McNamara considered it really important that American actions were those which could be closely controlled by them in Washington, despite the fact that Vietnam was a world away. (One of the most striking developments in the book is that of veteran and diplomat Maxwell Taylor, who was deeply complicit in the administration’s lies until he relocated to Saigon as America’s Ambassador to South Vietnam in July 1964, at which point, confronted with the situation’s dire realities, he became a rare naysayer on Johnson’s team.) So they selected courses of action that they considered tightly controllable. They valued courses of action that were, in their belief, reversible, to keep their options open, so they chose one incremental step after another instead of any “the die is cast” full-blown military operation that might have actually accomplished something. The military voices provided for counsel were sidelined unless they operated within the (un)strategic framework that Johnson and McNamara refused to reconsider. And when Johnson thought in terms of end goals, the extent was telling his men to “kill more Viet Cong.”4
Johnson did not state a win condition or devise a workable plan. The stated policy objective of “secure a free and non-communist South Vietnam” faded into the background. They were, simply, not trying to win. They were trying to keep things under their tight control and out of the headlines.
So it is frustrating to see the Vietnam War become the Number One template that every American war is seen in terms of. Iraq, Afghanistan—people have a compulsion of even comparing foreign wars to Vietnam, like Ukraine and Gaza5. People just see war with Vietnam-colored glasses.
None of this applies to Kuwait. Sadam’s Iraq tried to annex a country, and secured a quick dominance, but then got driven out by a 42-country coalition inside of a year. Kuwait got freed. McMaster himself served as a captain in that war, and he stressed in his Introduction the night-and-day difference between Vietnam and Kuwait. In Vietnam, military actions and decisions had nothing to do with broader objectives; in Kuwait, there was a clear vision for victory and people took military actions that were connected to those objectives.
Kuwait was total victory, and the wages of that are that it has disappeared from our consciousness and discourse. I can’t think of a single movie about the Gulf War. I can think of multiple Best Picture-winning movies about Vietnam6 off the top of my head.
The Vietnam War lasted, all told, about 20 years. America was involved, at great cost, for 10 of those years. The whole war was about as long as WWI (4 years and change), WWII (6 years), the US Civil War (4 years), and the American Revolution (8 years) combined. Even accounting for the fact that Vietnam was never (stateside) quite so all-consuming as each of those other conflicts eventually became, it provides some perspective for how short-sighted and fictitious it is when people start comparing a one- or two-year-old conflict to “another Vietnam.”
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Answer: The UK, France, and Germany.
McMaster would go on to spend about a year as a National Security Advisor for President Trump, between Michael Flynn and John Bolton.
Obviously a version of the caveat “beware the man of one book” applies to my thoughts here.
McNamara was brought in with JFK and in leadership for 7 years; in the White House, LBJ did far more damage vis-a-vis Vietnam than JFK ever had the chance to.
This at a time when his administration was denying any offensive operations.
Biden in his infinite wisdom has personally done this.
The Deer Hunter, Platoon.