Perspective Vietnam War contains lessons for
today
By THOMAS C. FOX
My nephew sent me an e-mail last
week asking for help on a high school history project. His subject was Vietnam.
Knowing I had lived there during the war (actually close to five years between
1966 and 1972), while I assisted refugees and worked as a journalist, he wanted
to know when I first started to think the United States would not win the
war.
I replied, telling him my suspicions were aroused even
before I traveled to Vietnam. They started after I read a book by the
noted French journalist Bernard Fall, The Two Vietnams. Falls
first chapter dealt with Vietnamese recorded history, which dates back 200
years before Christ.
What I learned troubled me -- and should have troubled Washington
policy-makers. I read that Vietnamese history for millennia has been punctuated
by long and tortuous wars, followed by rebellions and revolutions. Together
they gave the Vietnamese people a sense of pride and identity and an especially
strong national character. Worse, they defined nationalism precisely through
their will to resist foreign domination.
Vietnamese national heroes have all been warriors who led battles
against foreign forces on Vietnamese soil. Many folk songs boast lengthy
struggles for independence: 1,000 years against the Chinese
100
years against the French.
None of that readily available information boded well for the poor
American foot soldiers, who began to arrive in large numbers in 1965 -- nor for
Vietnam or the United States. Washington, meanwhile, was impervious. Sen.
William J. Fulbright at the time called that attitude the arrogance of
power. He had it right. We were blinded by the emphasis we placed on
technology, at that time not smart bombs, but new attack helicopters that could
sweep in and out and get the job done.
Looking back to those horrific years, if I had to choose a single
year in which we lost the war, I would say it was 1965. It was in 1965 that we
placed large numbers of troops on Vietnamese soil, re-establishing a
time-honored template in which to view the war. The North Vietnamese and their
southern allies, the Viet Cong, of course, exploited this and sold themselves
as the true nationalists, which by virtually any interpretation of Vietnamese
history, they truly were.
During my experiences working with war refugees, I spent many
hours talking to Vietnamese farmers whose villages had been destroyed. Usually
we would drink tea together. We would sit and talk. Sometimes I heard more than
I could bear. Nothing I heard changed my initial impressions about the ways
that Vietnamese looked at war. Even the Catholics, staunchly anti-Communist,
sensed the inevitability of defeat.
Meanwhile, for every Viet Cong bullet fired, the United States
would drop five bombs, many filled with napalm. In other words, we were far
more destructive. Those bombs created fear and havoc and disdain for the United
States, not respect. Bombs never managed to break the North Vietnamese will as
Washington touted they would. Instead, they solidified a resistance that grew
over the years.
All this I shared with my nephew.
And as I did, of course, I felt troubled by the new quagmire we
seem to be getting into in Afghanistan. Vietnam cost the United States some
58,000 U.S. lives. Vietnamese dead ran between 1 and 2 million.
As far as I am concerned, the lessons of the Vietnam War had less
to do with military strategy than they had to do with history and culture and
language. Military battles always take place within a wider context, and if we
dont understand that context we are almost certain to be defeated.
I know much less about Afghanistans history and culture than
Vietnamese history and culture. I know enough, however, to realize that
insensitivity to those ingredients in life that motivate -- family, social
settings, religion, mythology, values and language -- almost assure
defeat, however one might imagine that.
Today I am deeply troubled that once again we are trying to defeat
those we call our enemy through bombs and bullets rather than strategy and
stealth. The violent images and the civilian casualties being broadcast from
Afghanistan are precisely what Islamic extremists have sought.
During the Vietnam War it became popular in Washington to say the
real war was for the minds and hearts of the people, but we never
thought through what actually was shaping those minds and hearts. It does not
seem a stretch to imagine what is shaping the minds and hearts of the Islamic
world today.
My fear is that the rain of bombs falling in and around Kabul and
other Afghan cities has already lost the war -- a war that the
United States cannot afford to lose. Some say it is early in the war; I fear it
is late.
My hope is -- and I admit I do not see much light yet at the end
of this proverbial tunnel -- that wisdom figures from historians to social
anthropologists, to religious educators will gain sway and help pull us out of
the violent path we are on.
Yes, terrorists must be locked up. But unless we first understand
the rage and motivation of those who want to do us in and respond to it as best
we can, unless we get to the roots of the divisions and work, however difficult
the task might be, to heal these, we are essentially dropping bombs on
ourselves -- only ours wont land for weeks, months, years or even decades
to come.
Thomas C. Fox is NCR publisher. He can be reached at
tfox@natcath.org
National Catholic Reporter, November 9,
2001
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