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atimes.com | Mar 12th 2011
BOOK REVIEW
Smoking out Vietnam War truths
Search and Destroy: The Story of an Armored Cavalry Squadron in Viet Nam
by Keith Nolan
Reviewed by Nick Turse
In January, the United
States Department of Defense issued a press release [1]
announcing "its program to commemorate the 50th
anniversary of the Vietnam War"
and directed those interested to its rudimentary website.
VietnamWar50th.com
offers
almost no information, no facts about the war, no real substance, just a
list of objectives that
unspecified commemoration activities should meet, such
as serving to "[t]hank and honor veterans of the
Vietnam War".
The only notable
features on the site, in fact, are photos of US troops and a
prominently placed post-war quote from former
president Richard Nixon, with a
citation from the New York Times, which reads: "No event in American history
is
more misunderstood
than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is
misremembered now." (In actuality, this is a line
from
Nixon's No More
Vietnams that was reprinted in a New York Times review
which characterized the book this way: "As history, it
is second-rate, with
many
questionable assertions about the past.")
In response, Don North,
the vice president of Military Reporters and Editors -
an association of the folks who report on the Pentagon
- fired off a letter.
[2]
"[W]e
feel the choice of this quote is unfortunate as
it unfairly disparages the work
of thousands of journalists of many nations who tried to cover the
Vietnam War
fairly and
truthfully," he told the Vietnam War Commemoration Program Office.
"A discussion to assess the media role in
the war would be a valuable part of
your commemoration observances, but would not be served by using this
quote by
a president who
contributed greatly to the war's misunderstanding and was an
avowed enemy of a free press in Vietnam."
After citing author
William Hammond's exceptional study, Reporting Vietnam:
Media and Military at War - an abridged
edition of a book originally
published by the US Army Center for Military History - North noted that while
Nixon called the press "our
worst enemy" in the war, "Hammond clearly writes
that the real enemies were the contradictions and flawed
assumptions that he
and
[former president] Lyndon Johnson had created."
While it probably would
have been impolitic to do so, North (who himself
covered the war in Vietnam from 1964-1973 for ABC News
and NBC News) could have
added the Department of Defense to the list of liars.
During the Vietnam era,
the Pentagon took great pains to lie, spin, cover-up
and bury the truth about the war. As someone who has
spent the better part of
the
past decade investigating and revealing long suppressed information about
US war crimes investigations that
were kept secret and buried away, the Vietnam
War 50th anniversary commemoration program's embrace of
Nixon's quote didn't
surprise me a bit.
In recent years, a
sizeable and powerful segment of the military establishment
- dubbed the "Crusaders" [3] by Vietnam veteran
and professor of history and
international relations at Boston University, Andrew Bacevich - has embraced a
counterfeit history of the war.
Following the works of
revisionist historians like Lewis Sorley, whose A Better
War (like Nixon's No More Vietnams)
claims the US military won
the
conflict in Vietnam but gave it away on the home front, the Crusaders and
their fellow travelers have
constructed the fictional history that Nixon always
longed for and expunged the most salient feature of
the conflict: Vietnamese
civilian suffering.
Which brings me to
Vietnam War historian Keith Nolan.
In 2005, Nolan told me
about the next book he planned to write. I was skeptical
to say the least. The topic was a winner, but
Nolan wasn't the historian I
wanted to see tackle it. I viewed Nolan as a revisionist who, starting in his
teenage years, uncritically
and unquestioningly lionized American troops,
dodged troubling questions and wrote gushing tales of
valorous combat with
little hint of civilian casualties or Vietnamese suffering.
His books - 10 in all,
at that point - didn't ring true to my ear. I worried
about yet another revisionist tract, the kind of
history the Crusaders would
eat up.
But this was, he
emphasized, a new Nolan. In an e-mail to me, he wrote: "As
you've probably noticed, most who write about
Vietnam have a political ax to
grind, tend to gloss over the negatives, exaggerate the positives, and
generally produce works marred by
many sins of omission and commission. I
should know. I used to do it, too."
In addition to his
future plans, he also told me he was then working on a
history of the 1st Squadron, 1st Cavalry Regiment
or "1/1 Cav" in Vietnam. He
led me to believe it would be a different type of book than his previous works.
I was unconvinced and
more or less blew him off.
Neither I nor you will
ever see Nolan's next project - he lost a long battle
with lung cancer in 2009. What we do have is the book
on the 1/1 Cav he
mentioned in that e-mail message. It may not prove to be the book Nolan's
ultimately remembered for. But
it should be.
In Search and Destroy:
The Story of an Armored Cavalry Squadron in Viet Nam,
Nolan finally got real. Don't get me wrong, there is
still classic Nolan
infused throughout the book, but entangled with it is the real war; the war
that 20-something Nolan didn't
want to hear about and his interviewees, the men
who carried out America's wars in Southeast Asia, were
happy to see excised
from
the history books.
No longer filtering the
history as he heard it, Nolan let veterans of the 1/1
Cav speak for themselves - without varnish or censor -
blending latter-day
interviews with contemporaneous journals, letters home and court-martial and
investigations documents. The
honesty speaks volumes. The history rings true.
"I wish you could have
seen us today," a sergeant confided to his wife, "we
real[l]y messed up a big village. Burned and ran over
every dam[n] house they
had
..." A private wrote home about savage beatings of noncombatants and
continued, "Does it help the poor
farmer when we run over his rice paddy with
our tanks...? I don't think so. Anyone wearing black pajamas and
running is
considered VC
and shot. As a result, many innocent people are killed."
Another veteran
recounts an incident in which a helicopter pilot asked ground
troops if they wanted a prisoner - a young,
unarmed boy he had spotted.
Negative. The boy was gunned down in a hail of bullets. A middle-aged
civilian
is forced to do
push-ups with a bayonet to his belly (immortalized in one of
the book's photos). An officer threatens a
non-combatant with a pistol to the
head (also captured on film and reproduced in the book).
One veteran speaks of a
fellow unit-member beating villagers with an pickaxe
handle, while another recalled soldiers bashing
civilians in the head with the
butts of their rifles. And that's just three pages worth of brutality
(186-188). The specter of atrocity
lurks from cover to cover and example after
example punctuates the text.
Search and Destroy is
filled with ample evidence of American criminality
and cruelty - assaults, rapes, murder, mutilation and
mayhem. But there is also
a sensitivity toward US troops that has always been a Nolan staple. The
author
sometimes protects
identities and other times names names, but even the worst
offenders, according to testimony and documents,
are written in three
dimensions and they and their defenders are given ample say.
While we finally get
some sense of the suffering that the rural Vietnamese
endured day after day for years on end, Search and
Destroy is still
primarily
a history of American men in, out of, and en route to combat. From
stories of medals earned in
tracer-streaked firefights to the mud and mistakes
that typify real combat to feats of individual daring and
admirable
self-sacrifice,
Nolan still offers up the type of battle-centric history his
long-time readers expect. Now, however, he also
presents a truer vision of the
Vietnam War than we're used to from mainstream, combat-focused historians.
Search and Destroy is,
on its face, a micro-history - basically, a
one-year account of a single armored cavalry squadron during
the Vietnam War.
But Nolan's
book is much more than the sum of its parts. It is a clear-eyed
vision of the war that it has taken decades
to get back to - one that existed
in print (mainly due to the anti-war movement) while the conflict was
raging,
but thanks in part to
the efforts of Johnson, Nixon and the Pentagon, was
partially erased in America's culture wars, has been
further excised by
revisionist historians and marginalized in texts that aim for wide readership
or the embrace of the
"we-were-winning-when-I-left" segment of the veteran
community.
I've come to realize
that I was altogether too hard on Nolan and not nearly
trusting enough when he told me his plans almost six
years ago. I dismissed the
efforts of a man who saw the error of his ways and I sincerely regret it.
Search and Destroy
proves to me that Nolan would have done a thorough
and honest job with the big, important history he
envisioned. It was a story
that, perhaps, only a historian who had written so many flattering works about
veterans could have actually
pulled off.
There might be too much
reality for some in the book Former Nolan devotees who
believe that American troops, not millions of
Vietnamese (who didn't get to
leave the war zone after a year), suffered most as a result of the conflict
and
think that telling
history with "warts and all" means an honest accounting a
tactical maneuvers gone wrong, not how Vietnamese
lives were torn apart, may
eschew this book. One can only hope that they won't and will instead take a
page from the evolution of
Nolan.
There's a reason why
the Vietnam War has never, even in the face of later
foreign conflicts, gone away for the United States;
a reason why it remains a
festering wound on the American psyche. It stems from a failure to honestly
come to grips with the war and
what it truly meant for the people of Vietnam.
As a result of this
lack of honesty, today we're saddled with revisionist
tracts that continue to distort history and an
official 50th anniversary
program at the Pentagon that chose as its keynote quote, the self-serving
words
of a disgraced
American president who broke the law in an effort to hide the
truth about the war. And yet, while Americans
are still mired in a decades-old
battle over how the conflict is remembered, Nolan offers yet another
opportunity to face a painful reality
- a chance to begin to grapple with the
real story of the American War in Vietnam. Here's to hoping his last
and finest
effort isn't
squandered.
Notes
1. DOD
Announces Vietnam War 50th Anniversary
Commemoration Program, January
14, 2011.
2.
Pentagon-sponsored website blames media
for 'misreporting' Vietnam,
January 19, 2011.
3. See
The Petraeus Doctrine
Search and Destroy: The
Story of an Armored Cavalry Squadron in Viet Nam
by Keith Nolan. Zenith Press; First edition (July 8,
2010). ISBN-10:
0760333122.
Price US$30, 448 pages.
Nick Turse is an
investigative journalist, the associate editor of
TomDispatch.com, and currently a fellow at
Harvard University's Radcliffe
Institute. His latest book is
The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Verso Books).
You can follow
him on
Twitter @NickTurse, on Tumblr, and on Facebook. His website is
NickTurse.com.
(Copyright 2011 Asia
Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact us about sales, syndication and
republishing.)
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