"Although two decades have passed since US combat soldiers left Indochina, Americans are still telling lies about Vietnam." So begins Robert Buzzanco's invaluable book on the military opposition to the Vietnam war. As Buzzanco points out in his introductory chapter, it is not necessarily true that the military is more hawkish and militarist than its civilian leaders. In fact they were often more open to compromise and negotiation in the early days of the cold war than many American diplomats, and actually suggested non-involvement in the opening days of the Korean war. Some of the officers Buzzanco discusses, such as General Ridgway and Shoup rejected intervention in Vietnam altogether. Most often however a large number of officers realized that plans were flawed and that victory was unlikely, but by playing bureaucratic politics they could foist the blame on the civilians and on their service rivals in the army.
The result was that over and over again officers raised the same unalterable points. You cannot bomb the North into submission, and you cannot defeat the NLF in the South with the corrupt and incompetent Southern regime we possess. Of course, much of this was the army, the navy and the air forces criticizing the other services plans. But as it turned out they were right and Buzzanco shows that the army was not stabbed in the back. A review of America's long involvement should help demonstrate this. In 1947, General George Marshall said that the French "have no prospect" of success in Vietnam. Five years later the Joint Chief of Staff were unanimously opposed to committing any American troops into Vietnam. General Matthew Ridgeway's opposition to assisting the French after Dien Bien Phu was crucial to the Geneva Accords.
Flash forward ten years and Johnson's decision to expand the war. 1964 is a year filled with concerns over the collapse of the South Vietnamese authority, concerns about NLF strength, and strategic dithering. It is important to point out that Westmoreland, along with other officers like Wheeler, Johnson, and MacDonald opposed an all-out air war because they believed the Southern regime was too fragile to survive VC counterattacks. Pacification was dying and in only about 20% of the villages were the residents willing to provide RVN officials with information about the Viet Cong. In 1965 the war escalates. The army Chief of Staff suggests US military involvement will last at least five years, and could go as long as 20. "In I Corps, where the Marines were deployed, `the communist guerrillas enjoyed essentially uncontested dominance over most of the rural population,' they [the Corps] admitted." Conservative critics have blamed LBJ for not supporting an all-out air war. But at the time army leaders were divided about the effectiveness of such a strategy. Westmoreland thought that an air war would be ineffective as long as the situation of the South was on the verge of collapse. Westmoreland and Taylor were surprised at how often the White House took the initiative in demanding the offensive.
1966 and 1967: the officers quarrel about attrition, the air war and reinforcement, each pointing out the flaws in the other's arguments and nobody really very optimistic about a solution. "Admiral Sharp...pointed out that the United States had already caused heavy damage to most of the important military targets in the DRVN by August 1965, yet no American commander was suggesting that such measures had significantly altered the military situation in Vietnam." In response to the full-scale American invasion, the Vietcong and the PAVN were stepping up their recruitment and matching the Americans. Meanwhile Maxwell Taylor pointed out that the ARVN was shirking its duties, when the whole point of intervention was supposedly to stiffen their spine. Various officers called for more reinforcements and more troops. Even though they could make no promise that this would have any real effect, it could give them an alibi after an American defeat. In January 1967 the MACV found that it had underestimated VC and PAVN major unit attacks by a factor of four. Despite much blather about having their hands tied, the air force and the army culpably failed to protect their bases from guerrilla attacks.
Finally, 1968. Supporters of the war have argued that the Tet offensive was in fact a glorious American victory. But an obtuse and biased media convinced the American public the opposite. In fact, as Clark Clifford pointed, at the time many senior military leaders were on the verge of panic. As low morale, drug abuse, and fragging ravaged the American army, Westmoreland partially admitted the obvious: the Communist goal was not to expel the Americans, but to undermine what southern faith remained the RVN's government and army. The average ARVN battalion strength was at 50%, and it had lost one-quarter of its pre-Tet strength. Even hard-line senators such as Stennis and Jackson were beginning to waver, while pacification and counter-insurgency had been ravaged. Vann, Lansdale and others pointed out ARVN Corruption, intense popular opposition to American destructiveness and the culture of euphemism and denial at military headquarters. The one flaw in this book is that more is not said about the post-1968 war, though the government has made sure that primary documents are much less available. Based on 62 sets of private papers and oral histories and firmly well documented, this is a book that will be read for years to come.
