It's a remarkable work, and I learned some things about American failures that hadn't come through in past reading:
- Mistake #1: The origins of the war came in Vietnam's nationalist struggle against brutal, terrible French colonizing forces. Hồ Chí Minh actually quoted the US Declaration of Independence in his own Declaration, and had sought connections with the US in 1946. We had the chance to bring Vietnam into the US sphere of influence, but working with a communist was too hard for the US, so we sided with the doomed French and therefore set ourselves on the side of the colonizers.
- Mistake #2: In 1954, we interfered with the peace process and fair vote that was about to go to the communists (because of mistake #1) and set up a southern government that would forever struggle with foundational legitimacy.
- Mistake #3: the person the US installed to rule was hyper-oppressive, though thanks to mistake #2 he was set up to fail. We had Ngo Diem assassinated and continued to treat Vietnam's successor governments as puppets.
- Mistake #4: because of mistakes 1-3, the South was not able to stand on its own against the north, causing the US to continuously, subtly slide deeper and deeper into a conflict without a winning strategy.
- Mistake #5: the government knew this, but kept it quiet in order to win the 1964 election for Johnson in a big way (arguably enabling Medicare and Medicaid to exist today)
- Mistake #6: when quietness was no longer an option, the US government lied as part of its losing war strategy, creating victories by manipulating metrics and body counts
- Mistake #7: the basic tactics of the war destroyed American troop morale (fighting for pointless hills, supposedly to keep violence out of the cities), because thanks to mistakes 1-5 eventually being understood, and mistake 6 destroying trust, the government lost its effectiveness to prosecute the war.
- Mistake #8: the failure of these tactics and failed military leadership created the conditions for the US to commit terrible massacres.
- Mistake #9: the US (specifically Nixon) lied to the South Vietnam government about its commitments to support that government and broke its promises by writing checks congress would not cash (thanks to mistakes 6-8)
- Mistake #10: the US failed to keep its promises to individual South Vietnamese to whom we owed debts of honor to evacuate, and even blocked for a time immigration of Vietnamese people to the US who had no viable life in Saigon.
I also learned about some failures on the part of peace activists:
- Visiting Hanoi and swallowing propaganda whole that covered the North's violations of human rights and massacres
- Raising the Viet Kong flag in protest marches, a force that was actively killing South Vietnamese civilians
- Spitting on troops that had served their duty honorably, who had no ability to influence policy
I also think the US today is still stricken with the failure to resolve Vietnam. That led to the rancor of the 2004 election, and to much of the tension today between people of a certain age.
