Thursday, September 21, 2017

The Viet Nam War, part 4: “Resolve” (Florentine Films/PBS, 2017)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I once again watched the new episode of the Ken Burns/Lynn Novick documentary The Viet Nam War (Ken Burns gets all the credit but the two are listed as co-directors and Geoffrey C. Ward as writer, so it’s really a collaboration among the three of them), which was called “Resolve.” That brought back memories: I’m sure it was the use of that word as a noun during the Viet Nam war (as in, “We have to stay in Viet Nam because we must show our resolve”) that has given me a lifelong allergy to the word “resolve” as a noun. Usually, “we must show our resolve” means “we’re doing something incredibly stupid and pointless and wasteful, but by gad, we’re going to keep doing it!” Ironically, with this, its fourth episode, the Viet Nam War documentary is getting as repetitive as the Viet Nam war itself: a jumble of odd names of people and places, a battle here, a protest there, a student strike in South Viet Nam itself when a popular commander in the Army of the Republic of Viet Nam (ARVN) was fired by dictator Nguyen Cao “I have only one hero — Hitler” Ky; he was also a Buddhist, and apparently Ky, like Ngo Dinh Diem, was a Roman Catholic and was giving Catholics (who, remember, had adopted the religion of Viet Nam’s former imperialist occupiers, the French) preferential treatment in both the government and the military. 

The open unrest in the streets of South Viet Nam’s two major cities, Saigon and Hue, made it even harder for the U.S. government and the war’s supporters to maintain the fiction that we were fighting to protect the South Viet Namese people’s right to “democracy” against the enslavement of Communism. (Historically, ironically enough, there had not been two Viet Nams but three: the country had long been divided into three provinces — Tonkin in the north, Annam in the center and Cochin-China in the south — and interestingly, when Ho Chi Minh first appealed for American aid after World War II he signed his letter not as the actual or would-be head of state of a united Viet Nam but specifically as Annamese.) The period of the war covered by “Resolve” was from January 1966 to June 1967, though it could have been just about any time between the introduction of U.S. ground troops in January 1965 and the Tet offensives launched by the North Viet Namese army in February-March 1968 — the first time they had risked a major conventional offensive instead of grinding the U.S. troops down in one guerrilla firefight after another. Tet went badly for the North Vietnamese militarily — the U.S. and their nominal Viet Namese allies were overwhelmed at first but quickly rallied and retook the territory they had lost — but it was a smashing success for them politically: it basically evaporated much of the support the U.S. population had previously shown for the war and was the final factor in Lyndon Johnson’s determination to bow out of the Presidency and abandon his 1968 re-election campaign. “Resolve” is at its best on the occasions Burns and his team are able to cast Viet Nam as the sort of war they had famously made films about before — the U.S. Civil War and the American involvement in World War II — and one of the most interesting points it made is that both the U.S. officers and the actual servicemembers doing the fighting had been conditioned in their expectations of what war was by World War II. 

The officers, including U.S. commanding general William Westmoreland (whose name I can recall the peace movement caricaturing as “Waste-More-Land”), had come through the ranks and had actually fought in World War II, and the grunt soldiers — especially the ones who volunteered rather than waiting to get drafted (Viet Nam was our last major conscript war and Burns and company really don’t go into the dynamics of the draft and how it actually operated as they should have — ironically, ending the draft has been one of those be-careful-what-you-wish-for-you-might-get-it moments for the American Left, since having a so-called “volunteer army” has actually made it easier, not harder, for more recent U.S. governments to get into and sustain endless wars, while the growing economic inequality of American society and the drying-up of alternative opportunities for upward mobility has meant that the “volunteers” of today’s U.S. military look a lot like the draftees of the previous one: largely working-class or below, and with a far greater concentration of people of color than the population as a whole) — had been conditioned on what “war” was by the memories of their parents and family members who had fought in World War II and how that war had been depicted in movies and on TV. The closest thing so far in this film to a typical “Ken Burns hero” — Denton “Mogie” Crocker, Jr. (his nickname came from his having been such an assertive child his parents called him “our little mogul”), a Midwestern boy (his mom and sister were interviewed for this show) who was so determined to fight in the war that he ran away from home at 17 and refused to return until his parents agreed to sign the exemption that would allow him to enlist before 18 — gets honored here with Burns’ trademarked sepulchral-voiced readings of his letters to his family back home (in which actor Ben Rappoport “played” Mogie) as well as interviews with his survivors. Once he went through basic training he was sent to Viet Nam, but at first he was only given desk work counting the casualties — a job he deliberately screwed up so he’d be fired and reassigned to do what he really wanted, which was actually to fight. Only as he saw what war in general and this war in particular were really like, he began to get disillusioned, and on June 23, 1966 (ironically, his 19th birthday), he was killed when his unit was ambushed. 

One of the quirkier points made in the documentary was that since Viet Nam was basically a guerrilla war (even when the North Viet Namese “regulars” were sent into the country to fight alongside the National Liberation Front guerrillas, they still fought like guerrillas, luring their enemy into devastating ambushes and then slipping into the mountains and blending in with the local population), the usual metric by which commanders determine whether they are winning or losing — how much territory they are holding versus how much the enemy is holding — didn’t apply in Viet Nam. Instead Robert McNamara, who among other bad habits he’d picked up from his long career in the private sector (at Ford Motor Company, where he’d risen to president before taking the job as John F. Kennedy’s, and then Lyndon Johnson’s, secretary of defense) was an obsession with quantification and a sense that any problem could be reduced to a statistical analysis that would in turn generate the “right” solution, decided that the metric for success would be how many enemy fighters the U.S. killed. General Westmoreland regularly talked of the “crossover point,” meaning the point at which the U.S. were killing more North Viet Namese and National Liberation Front fighters than the other side could replace — and in early 1967 he was claiming he’d actually achieved the “crossover point” everywhere except in the northern end of South Viet Nam near the demilitarized zone the 1954 Geneva Agreements had set up to divide the country. As a number of people point out in the show, this emphasis on the sheer number of “enemy” dead as the metric of success led to some pretty distorted command decisions; not only did it mean that battlefield commanders, in their reports to their superiors, counted just about everyone they killed as “NVA” or “VC” whether they had been or not (which was also a convenient way to avoid criticism of killing civilians as “collateral damage” — just define the “enemy” so broadly that civilian deaths virtually ceased to exist), it also meant that in planning actual operations, battlefield commanders deliberately chose tactics that would maximize the body counts whether that made sense either in terms of human cost or simple military effectiveness. 

Another of the anecdotes concerned a young Marine who was shocked that when the U.S. captured NLF fighters who presumably had information as to where the enemy was waiting to ambush U.S. soldiers, they took them in on armored personnel carriers, tied them up and just pushed them off the carriers with no way to break their fall, resulting in a series of cracked ribs and other injuries. The Marine, Ben Earhardt (who was interviewed for the program and was the one who told this story), was about to protest when the superior officer he was going to protest to said that the U.S. spotters who had been responsible for detecting the ambushes had it in for these people because they could have told them where the ambushers were and didn’t, and if Earhardt spoke on their behalf they’d beat him up. (I couldn’t help but reflect, as I had also with regard to the counterproductiveness — never mind the morality, or lack of same — of the tortures inflicted by U.S. servicemembers on similarly detained “enemy fighters” in Iraq — of the lesson British commander John Masterman wrote in The Double-Cross System, his marvelous book about the British success in “turning” virtually the whole German espionage network in the U.K. during World War II, that the most important thing a country fighting a war can do to ensure its success is to treat its prisoners of war decently, respectfully and humanely. Apparently the old you-catch-more-flies-with-honey-than-with-vinegar principle had never occurred to those “spotters” — neither they nor the officers above them got it through their thick heads that they stood a better chance of “turning” the captives and finding where the NVA and NLF forces were by treating them respectfully than by torturing them.) 

One other point about “Resolve” was the way in which, by counterpointing anti-war and pro-war demonstrations in the U.S., it showed how the division of the American population into two strongly opposed camps and the resulting “polarization” of American politics really had its roots in Viet Nam (though I would argue that it was also due to the success of the African-American civil rights movement, which had the unforeseen consequence of dividing white America and giving the Republican Party and the U.S. Right in general the wedge through which they finally destroyed the New Deal coalition and made working-class whites a bulwark of the Republican Party by appealing to their racism and cultural prejudices). We’re still living in the America that was created in the 1960’s by the galvanic shocks of the civil rights movement and the Viet Nam war, and despite a few reversals, the Right is winning that racial and cultural war. Richard Nixon would win the White House through allying with white supremacists like Strom Thurmond and practicing the “Southern Strategy” that essentially flipped the two major U.S. political parties’ traditional positions on civil rights — the Democrats, once the party of slavery, segregation and the Ku Klux Klan, became the party of civil rights, and the Republicans, the “Party of Lincoln,” re-invented themselves as the party of racism and white supremacy — and though the Watergate scandal (which was merely the tip of the iceberg of an elaborate plan by Nixon and his campaign people to rig the 1972 election so he would not only win, but win in such a devastating way it would end all challenges to his legitimacy) temporarily derailed the Right-wing revolution in the U.S., it finally came to power under Ronald Reagan in 1980 and, even more forcefully and transformationally, under Donald Trump in 2016.