Victory in Iraq?

Back when we were mired in Vietnam, some wag—I forget whom—suggested a way out:  “Let’s just declare victory and leave.” 

                It seems to me that this is exactly what we’re doing in Iraq.  Despite what the neo-cons would have us believe, we haven’t won the war, nor are the Iraqi military and police ready to keep the peace.  And a large number of U.S. advisers and trainers are remaining behind, in harm's way.  I wish someone would poll a significant sample of average Iraqis, asking, “Do you feel you’re better off without Saddam than you were with him?”  I suppose it comes back to the old Marine Corps axiom:  "If you can't stand the answer, don't ask the question."  --EFP

Mere Palm Loosed Upon Seattle

I'm pleased that The Seattle Times gave me a little space to today to comment on a topic near and dear to my heart.  It is in keeping with my motto:  If you can't be insightful, at least be inciteful:  "Vietnam vets should speak up"

The Palm-Print of the Day

It's odd, but I still remember taking most of the pictures I took in Vietnam in 1967, including this one of a seamstress in the village on the northern side of the river (the Song Cam Lo) that divided our area of operations roughly in half.  Her older brother was there on the scene, and it was obvious he didn't like my photographing his sister.  He also spoke a little English, and I remember his proudly telling us "I am student."  It would be years before I would realize what an accomplishment it was to be a student in that time and place.  

      If I say so myself, I think this one is rather good.  The lighting, the expression, the selective focus, and even the canted angle all seem to work together--at least, I think they do.  The original is a Kodachrome slide, which was only ASA 25 at the time.  I must have been shooting at F2.8 at 1/30th of a second.  --EFP

Today in History

The Seattle Times reminded its readership that today is the anniversary of the introduction of U.S. combat troops in Vietnam.  It was on March 8,1965, that 3,500 Marines landed at Da Nang--initially just to guard the air base.
     Now there was a Rubicon we shouldn't have crossed.
     Who knew how it was all going to turn out?  William Lederer and Eugene Burdick did.  Lederer, in particular, tried to warn us against turning Vietnam into our own war.  But the decision makers just weren't listening.
      I sometimes wonder what America would be like today if we hadn't gotten involved in Vietnam.
      And what if President Carter had treated the takeover of our embassy in Iran as an act of war?
      And what if we had not supported and encouraged the Taliban in their war against the U.S.S.R. the 1980s?
      In the words of the poet, "Ah me, I fondly dream."  --EFP

Everything Old Is New Again!

{Korean-American Woman Marine visiting an orphanage, Yechon, Korea, 1984)


I was intrigued to read in today's Seattle Times that the Marines are forming and training "Female-Engagement Teams."  These will be teams of four or five enlisted women Marines (WMs) whose mission it will be to try to win the hearts and minds of Afghan women living in traditional villages, which bar women from speaking with men outside their families.  As part of their cultural sensitivity training, these WMs are being told to allow their pony tails to stick out from behind their helmets, so that the villagers will be able to tell that they are women; to wear head scarves under their helmets, or to don them upon removing their helmets; and to make small talk (through an interpreter, of course) and to play with the children before asking direct questions.  According to the article, the main question they are to ask is what the village most needs.
       Talk about "deja vu all over again," this was the very same question that we in Combined Action were supposed to ask in an effort to ingratiate ourselves with the people in traditional Vietnamese villages.  As I recall, when we asked this question at Papa Three, the answer was "nothing."  The village chief couldn't think of anything the village needed that we could provide.
       I wish the dedicated women Marines volunteering for this endeavor well.  I really do.  But I do have to wonder about two possible impediments.
      First, is the traditional Afghan culture as xenophobic as the village culture of Vietnam in the 1960s?   If so, Afghan women are not likely to open up to young American women, especially women who have embraced roles essentially alien and perhaps unimaginable to Afghan women.
      Second, I wonder if Afghan villages have a well-entrenched enemy infrastructure largely invisible to us, such as we faced in Vietnam?  Even if they don't, these Female-Engagement Teams, and the grunts accompanying them, are only passing through.  They're not settling in to say.  ("Clearing and Holding" is the phrase for it.)  Hence, the village women may be afraid to open up to these WMs, knowing that the Taliban could soon return to punish even the appearance of collaboration.
      The article also mentions that these WMs will be armed with M-4 rifles, a shortened version of the standard M-16s carried by the men.  The subtext seems to be that the smaller M-4, in this case, is gender appropriate.  Should they also be pink?
      Sorry,  I couldn't resist that one.  But, on a serious note, I see a mixed message that may undercut the mission here.  On the one hand, these women are supposed to be putting a kinder, gentler face on our presence.  On the other hand, they are dressed and armed like warriors.  Can these two roles really be reconciled?  It occurs to me that this was essentially our liability in CAP.  We were supposed to be both warriors and ambassadors in green.  But in our case, at least, the disconnect was not accentuated by gender.
      I worry that our cultural overtures in Afghanistan are grounded in the same naive presupposition that led to our defeat in Vietnam--namely, that, deep down inside, people everywhere are just like us.  It's just not true.  You'd think we would have learned that by now.  --EFP  

Palm the Film Pundit

[Yours truly, doing push-ups on the very spot where "Zack Mayo," portrayed by Richard Gere, had to do them in the film An Officer and a Gentleman.  It was filmed near us, at Fort Worden, in Port Townsend, WA.]

I was telling a fiend today about the two best films I've seen recently, The Messenger and The Hurt Locker, and he asked if they are "antiwar films."  I had to say "no."  They certainly are not pro-war films.  But to their credit, neither film is a preachy anti-war polemic.  They let our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan speak for themselves.  In the manner of the best imaginative recreations of past wars, these two films simply use the current wars as the backdrop for human drama.  They depict ordinary human beings doing their best to cope with extraordinary pressure.  In that respect, these films do more to call our current commitments into question than any overtly anti-war statement could do.
      The Hurt Locker, in my opinion, is the better of the two.  The portrayal of a young man who is addicted to living life in extremis, and who just can't come down from that high, certainly rings true in my experience.  As Woody Allen says in one of his films, "When you know you can die at any moment, your life becomes terribly authentic."  Ordinary life, as lived back here in "The World," can seem so shallow and phony compared to that terrible authenticity.  The Hurt Locker's director, Kathryn Bigelow, obviously understands that pull and has done a great job bringing it to the screen.  I could see The Hurt Locker winning best film at tomorrow night's Academy Awards.
      I could likewise see Woody Harrelson winning best supporting actor tomorrow night for his role in The Messenger.  He does a great job portraying an Army captain who has been only marginally successful in his career and whose bluster barely conceals his embarrassment at having drawn such a distasteful duty.  He can also barely conceal his envy of the young combat veteran assigned to assist him in making casualty calls.  They have their ups and downs, and they eventually have a somewhat predictable, drunken rapprochement.  But I think it's still a fine film, especially since the captain's young sidekick, we learn, has some demons of his own.  He wishes he had never has the experiences his captain yearns for.
     The Messenger, I must confess, did strike a personally responsive chord in me.  After Vietnam, I was stationed at Camp Lejeune with a fellow Vietnam veteran who had almost lost his left hand to a booby trap.  He spent a year in the Philadelphia Naval Hospital undergoing a series of surgeries that would eventually restore full function and sensation to his hand.  But, because he was ambulatory throughout much of his stay in the hospital, he was repeatedly assigned to accompany the bodies of enlisted Marines killed in action back to their hometowns.  He would have to stay near the body, and be at the family's beck and call, until the funeral was over.
      The stories he used to tell about those experiences appealed to my Vietnam-fueled sense of black humor at the time.  Most of the families were OK, he told me; some were actually good to him.  But others acted as if he had killed the dead Marine he had brought home.  And there were occasional perks.  He claimed to have bedded one casualty's little sister.  In another case, he had to help break up a knock-down, drag-out, hair-pulling and clothes-tearing fight at graveside between the dead Marine's mother and wife over who deserved the guy's G.I. insurance.
        It's a shame that I didn't keep a journal in those days.  I'm sure he told me other stories that would have been worth sharing.  --EFP        

Portrait of an "Ugly American"

[William Lederer, Peacham, Vermont, June 27, 1996]

A 97-year-old ugly American was buried today at Arlington.  He wasn’t physically “ugly.”  He was “ugly” in the ironically positive sense of the enduring catch phrase he and the late Eugene Burdick contributed to the American lexicon.  He was William Lederer, a retired Navy captain and co-author of The Ugly American.   

                Published at the height of the Cold War, in 1958, The Ugly American is an interlocking set of stories about a group of American innocents abroad losing the Cold War contest for hearts and minds in a thinly veiled Vietnam Lederer and Burdick call “Sarkhan.”   Their principal targets were the Foreign Service professionals and political appointees alike who were “ugly Americans” in the commonly understood sense of the term.   These were the officials who couldn’t be bothered to learn the language or honor the customs of the countries to which they were assigned and who isolated themselves in American enclaves.   Their opposite number was the title character of the book, a physically unattractive and unassuming man who committed himself to making a difference by living and working alongside the Sarkhanese on their own terms.   

                The Ugly American, Lederer and Burdick claimed in a prefatory note, was a “rendering of fact into fiction.”  The claims of venality and malfeasance, to be sure, were exaggerated.  And the book did rest on a dubious neo-colonial premise—that “all over Asia . . . the basic American ethic is revered and honored and imitated when possible.”  Today, we know better.  But, for those of us of a certain age, to reread The Ugly American is to feel a nostalgic longing for a time when we really believed that “truth, justice, and the American way” was a redundant phrase and that America would never torture or start a preemptive war.

                In June of 1996, I had the honor of interviewing William Lederer in Peacham, Vermont.  He was 85 at the time and still in good shape, mentally and physically. But he was generally wary of interviewers by then.  More than one researcher had suggested that he and Burdick belonged in the same literary camp as Harriet Beecher Stowe--“the little woman” whom Lincoln reportedly charged with “starting the great big war.”  Lederer clearly resented the insinuation that he and Burdick were in any sense responsible for the Vietnam War.  He told me, in no uncertain terms, that “The Ugly American was about incompetence in the Foreign Service—period! “

                I found Lederer to be just as defensive about the veracity of The Ugly American.  He told me a colorful but disingenuous story about the genesis of the book.  Supposedly, he and Burdick had first written an actual exposé, complete with names, dates, and places.  But, dissatisfied with that first attempt, they decided that fiction would have a greater impact.  On the spur of the moment, Lederer claimed, they burned all the copies of the manuscript, along with their documentation.  This colorful account, unfortunately, is at odds with certain letters and other documents I found among his papers housed at the University of Massachusetts. 

                Books, unfortunately, do have a way of taking on a life of their own—often one quite apart from that which their authors anticipate.  There was widespread concern in those post-Sputnik days that Americans were going soft and that we needed to stand up and be counted.  The Ugly American inadvertently contributed to the general sense of urgency and helped to make Vietnam seem like our theater of opportunity,    

                Still, The Ugly American is a call to action, not a call to arms.   Lederer and Burdick insisted that we could not prevail in Asia with “guns and money alone.”   It would take individual commitment at the grass-roots level.  Then-Senator John F. Kennedy was so impressed by the book that he bought a copy for each of his fellow senators.   The book’s legacy was the Peace Corps, not the Vietnam War.        

                Lederer and Burdick, however, were well-connected.  They could see that some in high places had a different Vietnam agenda.   Their next novel, Sarkhan, published on the eve of our direct involvement in 1965, was a fictionalized account of behind-the-scenes manipulation in order to justify a large-scale military intervention. 

                 One of the saddest fates that can befall a once prominent and influential man, I have come to realize, is to outlive his time.  Such was Captain William Lederer’s fate-- a warrior who understood that the pen could indeed be “mightier than the sword” and an “ugly American” in the best sense of the term.   --EFP 

"Tiger Papa Three" Revisited

[A Papa Three Popular Force soldier, summer, 1967]

A British Ph.D. candidate found my Combined Action Vietnam memoir, "Tiger Papa Three," and asked if I thought my experience had been "exceptional."  He also asked how Vietnam-style combined action compares to the current Provincial Reconstruction Team approach in Iraq and Afghanistan.  I thought I would share my response.  --EFP 

Dear Craig Wood,

       Thank you very much for your interest and your kind words about my CAP memoir.  I suppose I am an iconoclast when it comes to the Marine Corps' Combined Action Program in Vietnam. To be sure, some Combined Action platoons were more successful than Papa Three. The best measure of that success, I've come to realize, is how often and how aggressively they were attacked.  But many of those who celebrate, and even romanticize, the Combined Action Program tend to ignore or minimize some of the cultural and political realities of that time and place.

       First, the fact that villagers and Popular Force soldiers could be superficially friendly didn't necessarily mean that they were on our side.  The Viet Cong infrastructure was well-entrenched and pervasive throughout the countryside in Vietnam.  It had been there, in a dormant stage at least, since the First Indochina War, and it certainly came to life again with our entry into the war.  As we came to realize at Papa Three, the villagers and even our PFs had made their accommodations with that infrastructure.  They may not have all been enthusiastic supporters of that infrastructure, but many of its members may have been their friends and neighbors.  The reality was that our PFs had to live among the local VC, and we couldn't protect them once they went home. 

       Now, in hindsight, I can hardly blamed our PFs for refusing to patrol with us.  A pop culture allusion/analogy comes to mind.  In the film "Chinatown," someone asks Jack Nicholson's character what he did as a policeman in Chinatown.  His answer:  "As little as possible."  I imagine that's the way our PFs felt. I know that's the way many of us felt--if we're honest with ourselves.  We found ourselves caught up in an inscrutable (pardon the cliché) cultural contest.  When you don't even understand the game, much less feel that you can win it, it's better to try to sit it out.

        In later life, at an academic conference, a Vietnamese woman told me that my cultural insights were sound.  She told me that, even though she is Vietnamese and speaks the language, she couldn't go into a strange village and expect to be taken into anyone's confidence.  That traditional Vietnamese culture was insular and xenophobic.  How could we expect to know what was going on in the villages to which we were assigned? 

        Second, an absence of enemy contact didn't necessarily mean that a village was "pacified."  As we discovered at Papa Three, that VC infrastructure was a highly disciplined organization that could bide its time so as not to jeopardize the larger strategy.         

        Third, to my fellow CAP veterans who romanticize the program, I have always posed this question: If the program really was successful in winning the hearts and minds of villagers and PFs, why did none of these supposed allies tip us off about the impending Tet Offensive.  We now know that the VC infrastructure was helping with the NVA infiltration and the logistics of the offensive.  I have to believe that we, the Americans, were the last to know.      

        This is not to say that we couldn't and shouldn't have done better at Papa Three.  The problem was that we really weren't given enough of a cultural and historical orientation.  As I believe I pointed out in "Tiger Papa Three," the guiding premise of the program was that young Americans are inherently likeable and could win over the people.  The Marine Corps ignored the cultural conditioning of my generation and even the realities of our military indoctrination.  Most young Americans in those days were raised in an atmosphere of pervasive racism--influencing our attitudes toward Asian people as well as people of color.  Our military indoctrination likewise reinforced the prejudice that Asian people were inferior and couldn't be trusted.  It was a tall order to take those same, largely uneducated young Marines and expect them to be culturally sensitive ambassadors in green.

        As for the current conflicts, I see one important advantage that today's military enjoys.  I think that the current generation of young soldiers and Marines are much more tolerant of multiculturalism and diversity than we were. That has to help.  Also, I am told that they are getting much more of a cultural indoctrination than we got.  Finally, I understand that the PRTs represent a much more comprehensive and larger scale, coordinated effort than the Combined Action Program of old.  Our great liability, as I've written, was that Combined Action was very much an enlightened gesture of dissent against a search-and-destroy strategy that clearly wasn't working and which would ultimately prove to be self-defeating. The Marine Corps was very much going it alone, with little help or encouragement from other agencies. 

       On the other hand, I do see the same disconnect happening in Iraq and Afghanistan that proved self-defeating in Vietnam.  Every time a Predator drone strike kills 15 civilians and maybe one bad guy, we have, in effect, created more VC/Moslem extremists than we killed.  As William Lederer long ago tried to remind us, iin his book Our Own Worst Enemy, in a counterinsurgency, it’s the people that count. 

       And one other reservation comes to mind:  As I understand it, the Afghan government has even less influence and control over the people in the countryside than the late South Vietnamese government had over its people.  I'm told that it's very much a tribal society and another highly insular culture.  Can we really win hearts and minds among the  Afghan people, especially when we don't have the means to provide physical security for all those tribes dispersed throughout a country larger than Vietnam? 

        But, in all fairness, I only know what I've read and been told about Iraq and Afghanistan.  Note that I am copying Chuck Armstrong on this message.  Chuck Armstrong is a retired Marine colonel and a counterinsurgency specialist who has been involved in preparing Marines for the current conflicts.  He has also gone to Iraq and Afghanistan--several times, as I understand it.  Chuck could tell you much more than I could about how the current PRT approach is working. 

        Note that I have also copied Larry Scroggs, who served with me at Papa Three and who also served in a more successful CAP platoon.  Larry and I don't always agree on the effectiveness and legacy of the program, but he is one of the CAP veterans who deals in well-informed reasoned opinion. 

        I think you would find both Larry and Chuck both to be helpful.  Sorry to go on at such length, but I found this to be a welcome distraction from the online teaching I should be doing this morning.  Thanks again for contacting me, and good luck with your dissertation. 

Sincerely,

Ed Palm

The Death of an "Ugly American"

Late last week, I learned that William J. Lederer, co-author of the highly influential polemic The Ugly American (1958) died on December 5.  He was 97.

       A retired Navy captain before he became a best-selling author, Lederer will be buried at Arlington on February 16.

       I interviewed Lederer in Peacham, Vermont, on June 27, 1996.  (I took this photo on that occasion.)  He was generally reluctant to grant interviews by then; The Ugly American had been credited with making our Vietnam involvement seem like a national imperative--a charge Lederer vehemently denied.  But I shamelessly pulled out the old Naval Service tie.  I introduced myself as a Vietnam veteran and retired Marine major turned academic, and Lederer agreed to see me.

       Through that interview, and by combing through his papers at the University of Massachusetts, I came to understand that Lederer's legacy was the Peace Corps, not the Vietnam War.  If Lederer was "ugly," it was in the ironically good sense of the title character of his book--a man who isn't afraid to roll up his sleeves and live and work with the people of a developing nation on their own terms.  He was not one of truly "ugly Americans" who isolate themselves in American enclaves abroad and look down on the "natives."

      Lederer's mentor was the legendary CIA operative Edward Lansdale.  Both men felt that worst thing we could do would be a large-scale military intervention in Vietnam.  As revealed in The Pentagon Papers, Lansdale had an unfortunate tendency to believe that the end justified the means.  (Behind the scenes in Vietnam, he engaged in a series of dirty tricks aimed at discrediting and vilifying the Communists.)  But in the main, Lansdale and Lederer both  advocated psychological warfare.  They understood that we couldn't force American values and ideas on the people of developing nations; we had to sell people on those ideas.  Lansdale proved to be an asset to the CIA precisely because his background was in advertising, not military affairs.  And Lederer was very much his faithful disciple.  The Ugly American is essentially the gospel according to Edward Lansdale.  --EFP

Thanking Veterans Revisited

(A portrait of the blogger as a young Combined Action Marine, Vietnam, August [?], 1967]
My former colleague and friend Josh Bellin has written a wonderfully intelligent and provocative rejoinder to my piece "The Veterans Are Coming!, the Veterans Are Coming":  http://bellsyells.blogspot.com/2010/01/thank-you-for-your-service.html

     In the main, I think Josh is right.  You really can't judge a soldier's service apart from the cause in which he or she serves.  A few years ago, I made the same point about my war--the original "wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time":  http://www.seattlepi.com/opinion/255016_hero10.html   I was surprised at the time that no brickbats came my way in response to this piece (so I'll invite some now).
      My only quibble with Josh's position is that, for most of us, life just doesn't admit such moral clarity.  Three passages from Graham Greene's seminal Vietnam novel The Quiet American have always struck a resonant chord with me:
      It's not a matter of reason and justice.  We all get involved in a moment of emotion and then we cannot get out. [The observation of a French pilot.]
     Yes, but you must wager.  It is not optional.  You are embarked.  [The observation of a French policeman.]
     Sooner or later . . . one has to take sides.  If one is to remain human.  [a Vietminh agent]
    Greene's moral vision is essentially akin to the epiphany Shakespeare's Hamlet has in Act IV, Scene iv, when he sees Fortinbras' army dutifully marching off to fight and die in a senseless cause--to settle the question of this straw," as Hamlet puts it.  To expect all of life to make sense, Hamlet finally realizes, is to drive yourself insane.  To be human is to need to belong, and that need, for better or worse, often outweighs whatever scruples we may, or should, have.  --EFP

No More Vietnams?

[I took this photo at the annual "Mummer's Parade," Middletown, DE, Jan. 1, 2002]

George Will's column in today's Washington Post is a must-read.  Will makes a cogent case for why our Afghan war cannot end well.  He points out that the principal excuses for waging this war--to defeat Al Qaeda and to stabilize the Afghan government--are invalid.  Al Qaeda is not concentrated in Afghanistan, and it would take decades to establish an Afghan government that could keep Muslim extremists out of the country.  Then there is the problem of our announced intention to begin withdrawing in 2011.  Obama, ironically, is pursuing the same surge strategy in Afghanistan that Bush pursued in Iraq.  But here is the paragraph that really caught my attention:


The president's party will not support his new policy, his budget will not accommodate it, our overstretched and worn-down military will be hard-pressed to execute it, and Americans' patience will not be commensurate with Afghanistan's limitless demands for it. This will not end well.


I was happy to see such a prominent commentator acknowledge the toll this latest surge is going to take on our troops.   
     Just the other day, I head someone suggest that "this," after all, is what the troops volunteered for.  Not quite.  We don't have "volunteers" in the sense that the French Foreign Legion of old had "volunteers."  Our young "warriors" didn't enlist in search of a good war or, failing that, whatever war we've got.  Most carry a set of decidedly mixed motives, and even family ties, in their Alice Packs.  Their new service anthem should perhaps be Credence Clearwater's "Fortunate Son," which poses and answers the following musical question, Whenever I ask how much should we give,/The only answer is more, more, more!" 
      Obama, of course, insists that Afghanistan will not be another Vietnam.  We'll see.  But even neo-cons Michael Medved and Michael Savage seem to be worried about the parallels.  At the same time, some dismiss the comparison, pointing out that the number and rate of casualties in Afghanistan pale in comparison to Vietnam.  My answer:  Give them time.  We may get there yet.
      And if we do, I'd like to suggest an appropriate memorial.  We could just build another V-shaped wall parallel to the existing Vietnam Memorial.  Viewed from above, it would resemble a corporal's chevron, visually driving home the parallels between the two wars.  --EFP 

The Service Obligation of Old: An Afterthought

(Elvis's Jungle Room, Graceland, Memphis, 2004)

I was just thinking about how attitudes toward military service have changed in my lifetime.  In 1957, when he was drafted, Elvis Presley knew that he had to go.  The country was still in that World War II mindset, and Elvis's fans would have turned against him as a "draft dodger."  But In 1967, when the former Cassius Clay refused induction, he became even more of a folk hero than he already was.
      Personally, I have no problem with the stance that Clay took.  Our Vietnam commitment was wrongheaded, and Clay--now Muhammed Ali--resisted the draft openly and with a willingness to accept the consequences.  I am merely holding him up as an example of how radically the mood of the country had changed in ten short years.
      And now, we extol everyone who serves, in any capacity whatsoever, as a "hero,"  Go figure!  --EFP

Vietnam Revisited--by Way of Afghanistan

("Patriotic Caddy," Smyrna, Delaware, December, 2005)

Back in the mid-eighties, when I was the Marine Officer Instructor with the Naval ROTC unit at Berkeley, a fellow officer offered a bit of unsolicited advice about my past service. “It’s OK to be a Vietnam veteran in today’s military,” my colleague cautioned, “so long as you don’t dwell on it or refer back to it.” He was right. The military in those days seemed intent on dismissing Vietnam as an aberration and a predominantly political failure with no relevance to how we might fight future wars.
     Last Sunday’s coordinated attack in Afghanistan, which claimed 8 American lives, suggests that the military is still refusing to heed the lessons of Vietnam and that today’s soldiers and Marines are doomed to repeat that sad history. In its coverage of the attack, the CBS Evening News included an animation, complete with a 3-D look at the terrain. I was appalled to see that this isolated American outpost, manned by only 140 soldiers, was situated in a narrow valley. The Taliban was firing down on the outpost from the high ground on at least two sides. What was the brass thinking in placing these soldiers in such an untenable tactical situation? Does the name "Dien Bien Phu" still mean anything to anyone in the Pentagon?
     I am referring, of course, to the disastrous 1954 defeat that ended the First Indochina War. The French, thinking they would lure the Viet Minh out into the open, established a large base—a series of outposts, actually—in the valley of Dien Bien Phu, which also happened to be ringed by high mountains. The French commander assumed that the Viet Minh would never be able to bring any heavy weapons into those mountains. He assumed wrong. The Viet Minh disassembled and carried their artillery pieces up into the mountains, piece by piece. Deadly artillery fire began to rain down on the French outposts, and the rest is history.
      I certainly cannot claim to be a tactician, but as first an enlisted Marine and later an officer, I learned that securing and holding the high ground was key to success. What was the point, then, in establishing that outpost in such a vulnerable position? It was one small outpost in one ravine among many in those mountains. It certainly could not have impeded, in any significant sense, the infiltration of Taliban fighters coming down from their mountain hideouts. Likewise, I can’t believe that it could yield any important intelligence. Perhaps the point was to establish a base from which we could launch patrols. But, again, I know from Vietnam that there is a better way to do that than by making sitting ducks of small units in static bases. What about “air mobility”? We used it extensively in Vietnam—sometimes to good effect.
      If the whole point was simply to draw enemy fire—to lure them out in the open—I would again remind the military that it was a bad idea at Dien Bien Phu. It didn’t work out so well at Khe Sahn either. One could argue, of course, that using a small unit as bait paid off last Sunday in Afghanistan. We lost 8, the Taliban 50—so we won! Perhaps, but how would you like to have been one of the soldiers considered expendable in order to achieve such a victory? Again, I have to believe that there are better ways to do it.
     There is no doubt about. Leaving aside the larger issue of whether we really do need to stay the course in Afghanistan, we certainly need a new strategy. In the meanwhile, look for lots of hemming and hawing and excuses a-plenty. As one of my favorite Vietnam writers once observed, “There is nothing so embarrassing as when things go wrong in a war.”  --EFP

Dr. Palm Prescribes a Good Book

 (South Vietnamese Popular Force soldier, 1967.  Ed Palm Photo)

Another summer has come and gone, and I was just remembering the reading George Bush claimed to have done over the summer a couple years ago. If were appointed Professor General of the United States, and given the authority to make mandatory reading assignments, I would have all our policy makers and high-ranking military officers read the novel from which I’ve lifted the following excerpt:

“They were only war casualties,” he said. “It was a pity, but you can’t always hit your target.       Anyway they died in the right cause. . . . In a way you could say they died for democracy,” he said.

     These are the cavalier sentiments of Alden Pyle, the title character of The Quiet American (1955), Graham Greene’s classic tale of America’s clandestine involvement in the Vietnam of the early 1950s. The novel is set during the waning days of France’s struggle to hold on to their Indochina empire against the Communist Vietminh, and Pyle is an earnest young CIA agent intent on cultivating a “Third Force”—a nationalist, democratic movement that would be both anti-Communist and anti-colonial. The “war casualties” Pyle dismisses in the passage quoted above were, in essence, the fruits of his labors. The renegade Vietnamese general he had cultivated and supplied with plastic explosives had set off a bomb in a crowded marketplace.
     What sets this novel apart from run-of-the-mill spy and adventure stories, however, is the way in which everything Pyle says and does is filtered through a wonderfully engaging first-person narrator who prides himself on being anything but engaged. A cynical middle-aged British journalist whose name, significantly, is Thomas Fowler, this narrator is as worldly-wise and disaffected as Pyle is naïve and committed. Fowler holds himself aloof from the war and the carnage he is paid to witness. He does not take sides. Rather, he stands on the traditional journalistic canons of fairness and objectivity:

The human condition being what it was, let them  fight, let them love, let them murder, I would not be involved. My fellow journalists called themselves correspondents; I preferred the title of reporter.  I wrote what I saw. I took no action—even an opinion is a kind of action.

     The Quiet American is very much an exposition on the difficulty of maintaining such a posture of detachment in the face of individual human suffering. As a French Air Force captain has occasion to tell Fowler, human commitment is not always a “matter of reason or justice”: “We all get involved in a moment of emotion and then we cannot get out.” The point is later reiterated by a Vietminh agent who maintains that “sooner or later . . . one has to take sides. If one is to remain human.”
      Circumstances and events eventually bring Fowler to that “moment of emotion” and to a momentous decision to try to put a stop to Pyle’s—and, by implication, America’s—involvement in Vietnam’s affairs. But it is a decision tainted by self-interest. Pyle and Fowler, who begin as casual friends, fall out not only over ideology but also over Fowler’s Vietnamese mistress. The outcome is, at first, emotionally satisfying, but it also challenges the reader to stop and think about what has really been gained and by whom.
     The Quiet American, in sum, is a wonderful historical romance, in the literal as well as the literary sense. The historical backdrop is real. Greene lived and worked as a reporter in Vietnam in the early fifties, and he saw how America was playing both ends against the middle. Officially, we were encouraging France to stay the course in what we then viewed as the struggle against an international Communist conspiracy. But, behind the scenes, a real-life Alden Pyle by the name of Edward Lansdale was indeed trying to raise that “Third Force” of Vietnamese nationalists who could eventually force out the French. And we wonder why the French don’t like us very much.
      But Greene’s novel is finally much more than a thinly veiled and dated polemic about America’s meddling and misdeeds in Vietnam. Its major themes are universal, and the mindset that first took us into Vietnam, and kept us there far too long, is endemic to the American character. The conviction that America has a manifest destiny and a mandate to reshape the world in its image continues to haunt the popular mind and to influence our policy makers. Greene could see how we were destined to make fools of ourselves by acting on this conviction. Would that more Americans had read The Quiet American and that we had heeded Greene’s warning. --EFP

The Sound of Toppling Dominoes

"If Indo-China goes . . . "
"I know the record.  Siam goes.  Malaysia goes.  Indonesia goes. What does 'go' mean?"

                   --Graham Greene, The Quiet American (1955)

I don't normally watch C-Span.  It's a little too much like watching paint dry. While channel surfing this morning, however, I caught a few minutes of C-Span's coverage of Thursday's meeting of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.  Senator Dick Lugar was restating (but not necessarily endorsing) the main argument we're hearing these days for our military commitment to Afghanistan:  We have to stabilize Afghanistan to ensure that Pakistan remains stable.  Lugar went on to claim that Pakistan now seems fairly stable, suggesting that Pakistan would be OK regardless of what happens in Afghanistan.

     Anyone hear the sound of toppling dominoes?  All this is sounding depressingly familiar to those of us who were drilled in the domino theory that took us in to Vietnam.   

     A further historical irony here is how our bombings and our incursion into Cambodia did actually destabilize that country, setting the stage for the Khmer Rouge takeover.  I have to wonder if the current plan to escalate the conflict in Afghanistan may not just make the situation worse.  We could be creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.  By trying to keep Pakistan's government from falling, we could be creating the climate for that fall.  --EFP 

Afghanistan: Between a Rock and a Hard Place

According to an AP story in today’s paper, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen told Congress on Tuesday that victory in Afghanistan will require more troops.  I don’t doubt that is true.  We have only 65,000 troops there now.  Over half a million U.S. troops couldn’t control Vietnam, and according to my trusty atlas, Afghanistan is twice as large as Vietnam (251,825 square miles compared to 127,258).  The question is, where are these extra troops supposed to come from? 

 It’s no secret, of course, that America’s All-Volunteer Force has been stretched to the breaking point.  Almost from the beginning of the so-called Global War on Terror, the troops have endured involuntary extensions—of their enlistments as well as their tours of duty in Iraq or Afghanistan.  In 2007, when Bush embarked upon the “surge” in Iraq, some soldiers and Marines were facing their third or even their fourth tour of duty in one of the combat zones.  The operational tempo had been stepped up to less than a one-to-one ratio, meaning that the troops were not even guaranteed as much time back in the States as they spend on deployment before they have to deploy again.

 

The irony is that, for all the lip service about supporting our “heroes” in uniform, the troops got precious little real consideration from the people who got them into this mess.  The way in which former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once dismissed criticism of his decision to extend the Alaskan Stryker Brigade’s tour in Iraq, for instance, seems fairly typical of his administration’s attitude:  “These people are all volunteers. . . They all are there doing what they’re doing because they want to do it.”  

The fact of the matter is that America never has had, or ever will have, professional soldiers in the devil-may-care mold of the fabled French Foreign Legionnaires of old.  The great majority of our soldiers aren’t just looking for a good war.  The typical volunteer today is carrying family ties and a set of decidedly mixed motives in his or her Alice Pack.  I hope President Obama keeps this in mind. 

If our Vietnam debacle taught us nothing else, it should have taught us that Americans support wars that are short, decisive, and clearly tied to our national interest.  (Pardon me, but I forget which military historian first made and documented this observation.)  I hope Obama keeps this in mind as well. 

We used to refer to Vietnam as a quagmire.  The metaphor was appropriate, Vietnam being a wet, tropical country.  What metaphor should we employ now—“quick sand”?  Part of Afghanistan is desert.  But, judging from the television coverage, the toughest fighting has taken place in rocky, mountainous terrain.  It’s a cliché, I realize, but we seem to be stuck between a “rock and a hard place.”  We don’t have the troops or the public support to prevail. 

--EFP

Thinking About My Generation

Author’s Preface:  I wrote this a couple years ago, when neo-conservatives and media pundits alike seemed eager to marginalize my generation and its contributions.  I never managed to place it then, but I think it’s still relevant today.  An America that wages preemptive wars, keeps political prisoners, that tortures people (and waterboarding is torture), and in which we demonize disagreement is not the America I grew up in. We seem to have lost our core values and our equilibrium on 9/11—especially our traditional commitment to civility and our respect for divergent opinion.  And that holds true in the political and academic spheres. (I took this photo at UC Berkeley in 1985.)

…………………………………………………………

Some comedian from my generation--the fabled post-World-War-II-baby-boom generation—once observed that “it would be terribly embarrassing to have a coronary while wearing blue jeans.”  His point, of course, was that we baby boomers were refusing to grow old gracefully.  And his point was well-taken.  We invented the youth culture.  But, like it or not, our charter members are now over 60, and media pundits have challenged us to point to something else we’ve done for America. 

            If the World War I generation was the “lost generation” and the World War II generation was the “greatest generation,” what were those of us who came of age during the Vietnam War?  I’ve got it:  We’re the Peter Pan generation.  We refused to grow up—that is, if you count an inability to reconcile the world the way it is with the world we were led to expect as a mark of adolescence.

            But we can explain.

            Raised in relative prosperity and nurtured by the great American myths that had seemingly been validated by the outcome of World War II, we “held these truths to be self-evident”:   “Truth, justice, and the American way” is a redundant phrase, and America had always been, and always would be, on the side of right.  

            Of course, the civil rights movement, coming as it did on the eve of our Vietnam involvement, marked the beginning of my generation’s painful trek from innocence to experience.  But the journey’s end proved to be Vietnam, where our American dream turned into a nightmare.

            We found that the people we had been sent to save were not much impressed with us and really weren’t interested in being saved on our terms.  We discovered that the search-and-destroy strategy we were employing was horribly disproportionate to the end we sought.  (We were willing to destroy Vietnam in order to save it, but the acronym for “winning hearts and minds,” fittingly, is “WHAM”!)   Worse yet, we learned that our government had been misrepresenting the war and had even lied to us about how and why we got into it in the first place.

            As a result of all this, we developed bad attitudes.  We complained, we protested, we whined, we resisted, and we overreacted.  At times, we made things worse than they had to be.  There was no excuse for the My Lai massacre, for instance, and the Kent State tragedy didn’t have to happen.  But at least we took a stand.  We dramatized what was wrong with our war, and we helped end it.  That was no small accomplishment.

            What the people who sent us to Vietnam forgot is that we were raised to believe that questioning authority was not just a right; it was an obligation. If that was a bad attitude, then maybe we could use some more bad attitudes today.

            By the by, I’m now over 60, and I would be proud to have my first coronary in my blue jeans.  It had to be said.

--EFP

"Puff the Magic Dragon": A War Story

Blogger’s Preface:  It occurred to me that, in terms of the potential for self-defeating collateral damage, Predator drones probably come in second to another weapons system we’re employing in Afghanistan.  I wrote this commentary about a year ago, but I think it’s still relevant.  The photo is of a Vietnamese Popular Force Soldier.  I took it in 1967.  --EFP

  “A dragon lives forever, but not so little boys.”

            That line resonates with me as a Vietnam veteran.  It comes from “Puff the Magic Dragon,” the sixties hit by Peter, Paul and Mary.  I couldn’t help but think of that song and that line [last year] when I read that Afghan President Hamid Karzai was  complaining that the indiscriminate use of our firepower in his country is killing more civilians than the Taliban.  As it turns out, I know something about how airpower in particular can prove to be not only immoral but also self-defeating in an insurgency.         

I was especially concerned to learn that one of the weapons we’re falling back on in Afghanistan is the AC-130 Specter gunship.  The Specter is essentially a new and improved version of a weapon I knew as “Puff the Magic Dragon.”  The “Puff” of my day was an updated version of the venerable old C-47 transport plane.  Puff sported the latest in electrically driven 7.62 mm Gatling guns capable of firing 6,000 rounds per minute.  Puff also carried a seemingly inexhaustible supply of parachute flares and, in our area at least, was employed primarily at night in hopes of catching concentrations of North Vietnamese Army troops out in the open. 

Watching Puff in action could be an amazing spectacle, an awesome sound and light show.  The extremely rapid rate of fire made the tracers blend into an unbroken stream of fire stretching between the plane and the ground, and the overlapping reports of the guns would meld into an eerily familiar sound—sort of like the loudest and longest fart you’ve ever heard.  Rumor had it Puff could put one round in every square yard of a football field with just one pass.  We believed that.  As it turned out, we had good cause to believe it.

“We,” in this case, were the members of a Combined Action Platoon.  We were 12 enlisted Marines and one Navy corpsman sent out to live and work in a Vietnamese village alongside the village’s self-defense force—Popular Forces, or “PFs,” for short.  While we were supposed to train and inspire the PFs to root out the VC infrastructure and to keep the VC out of their village, in the main, ours was not to search and destroy.  Ours was to win hearts and minds. 

Our platoon, “Papa Three, was trying to win those elusive hearts and minds in a village called Cam Hieu.  We had established a permanent compound (complete with wire, sandbag bunkers, and a tin-roofed wooden building or “hooch.”) on a hill alongside South Vietnam’s northernmost East-West route, Highway 9.  We were not out in the jungle.  We were just seven kilometers west of Dong Ha in Quang Tri province. 

On clear nights, from up on our hill, we had a ringside seat to the war.  We could see B-52 strikes up on the DMZ—and we used to watch “Puff the Magic Dragon” work out on the hills to the south and west of our position.   

But one night in early November of 1967 was different.  Always, before, Puff used to stay two or three miles away from our compound.  On this night, however, he first appeared only about a mile to our west, and he seemed to be working toward us. 

"Do you suppose he knows we're here?" one Marine asked.

"Of course he knows we’re here," Doc,” our corpsman answered. "He has the location of all friendly units plotted."

The next thing we knew, one of Puff’s flares blazed forth almost directly over our compound, bathing us all in an eerie yellow light. 

We heard the buzz and cracking of bullets before we heard Puff's distinctive report.  Most of us instinctively dove into a long trench the Seabees had dug when they first built our compound.   Fortunately, for most of us, the ditch was deep enough and the angle of fire was steep enough that the bullets hit over our heads.  I was stung by some rock fragments and dirt kicked up by bullets that must have hit within inches of my head.  But I wasn’t hurt.  Others were not so lucky.  

            One Marine, who had been asleep in our “hooch,” took a round through the thigh.  Another Marine, who had frozen out in the open instead of jumping into the trench, was hit at the top of one buttock.  The round came out at the bottom.

            (I still remember that Marine.  Every unit has one.  He was the guy who never got the word, who never quite got with the program.  Even after he got hit, he didn’t take cover.  He kept hopping up and down at the edge of the trench, pitifully holding his rear and hollering, “I’m hit!  I’m hit!”

            When he hopped within arm’s reach, another Marine and I reached up and grabbed his pants’ legs and pulled him into the trench.  He landed right on his wounded buttock—resulting in an even louder and somewhat bitter complaint, but at least he was then as safe as the rest of us.)  

            Unfortunately, the fire must have come down at a steeper angle on the eastern half of our compound, where our PFs used to segregate themselves.   One was hit squarely on the top of his head.  The bullet came out just beneath his nose.  Two others had been hit, one in the forearm and the other in the abdomen.  That PF, too, died.  

            Fortunately, our radio operator had gotten though to our headquarters in time.  If Puff had made a second pass, all of us would have been killed.  

            The next day, a delegation of PFs accused us of deliberately calling in Puff to get even with them.  They had long been refusing to patrol with us.  So much for “Combined Action.”

            The two wounded Marines came back in a couple of weeks.  They said they received Purple Hearts and that their wounds were listed as due to “enemy artillery.”  They also said the pilots visited them in the hospital and apologized, explaining that it is difficult to know exactly where you are over Vietnam at night. 

            To the best of my knowledge, no one came out to our village to apologize to the families of the PFs who had died or the one who was wounded.  

            “Collateral damage,” that’s what we called it in Vietnam when we injured or killed innocent civilians or allies, or when we destroyed a town like Ben Tre in order “to save” it.   Now, forty years after Puff inflicted collateral damage on my unit in Vietnam, the Specter, also known as “the witch,” is working out over Afghanistan and Iraq.  And whereas Puff fired only 7.62-mm copper-jacketed rounds, Son of Puff, the Specter, also fires 25-, 40-, and 105-mm explosive shells.   

That’s a lot of potential for collateral damage.  I just hope that the people now employing the Son of Puff remember that “a dragon lives forever, but not so little boys.”  

--EFP

Journalists Then and Now

The nineteenth-century romantic poet Shelley, on a day when he must have been especially full of himself, proclaimed that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”  Fat chance!  Poets have never exercised much moral authority over the masses, then or now.  Poor Shelley!  He was born too soon, and he responded to the wrong calling.  Journalists, for better or worse, are the moral arbiters of our time. 

            That, as conservatives complain, is a lot of trust and confidence to repose in a group of people who weren’t elected and whose values and concerns supposedly no longer reflect those of mainstream America.  But what’s the alternative?  To trust those in power to tell us “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?”   Doesn’t anyone remember Watergate or the disingenuous claims of  progress we got throughout our Vietnam ordeal?   And more recently, it was déjà vu all over again with the Bush administration’s complaints that the so-called “liberal media” were getting it wrong in Iraq.  When we finally throw in the towel on Iraq, be prepared for another stab-in-the-back theory. 

            I am referring, of course, to the point of view--still widely held among neo-cons--that the press misrepresented the situation and undermined our efforts in Vietnam.  The ultimate example of how the press supposedly “got it wrong” is widely held to have been the Tet Offensive of 1968.  The revisionists argue that what the press sensationalized as a disaster and a defeat was actually a victory for our side.  And so it was—but only in the most narrow tactical sense. 

What the revisionists fail to appreciate is how Tet put the lie to the administration’s carefully orchestrated campaign of optimism.  Throughout the fall of 1967, administration spokesmen, General Westmoreland included, had maintained that we were winning and that the enemy was no longer capable of mounting a major offensive.  But, suddenly, at the end of January 1968 the enemy proved resilient enough to mount coordinated attacks throughout South Vietnam, occupying such high visibility objectives as the Citadel in Hue and, for a time, even the U.S. Embassy grounds in Saigon. Our forces weren’t defeated—true enough--but our national leadership was discredited, and that’s worse in a democratic republic. 

            The American public seems to have forgotten that then, as with now, we faced an ever-widening “credibility gap.”  Contrary to popular neo-conservative belief, the press did start off “on the team” in Vietnam.  But, early on, reporters like Neil Sheehan and David Halberstam began to notice that the reality of that war didn’t match the official rhetoric.  Obvious defeats were being characterized as victories, and the means we employed were becoming increasingly disproportionate to our professed ends—and ultimately self-defeating.

            Call me a deranged Vietnam vet, if you like, but I’ve always thought that the press did us a great service, and not a disservice, in Vietnam.  The reporters may not have always gotten it right, but in the main, they showed the American public that we didn’t know what we were doing in Vietnam.  If that was “stabbing us in the back,” then I think that what we need are a few more backstabbers today. 

            We especially need such people—independent as opposed to “embedded” journalists—who can look into whether the upcoming “surge” in Afghanistan is really working.  One sign of hope was the Associated Press’s refusal to pull a photo of a mortally wounded Marine.  In making the request, Secretary of Defense Gates, supposedly, was only trying to spare the Marine’s family any unnecessary anguish.  Such was the Bush administration’s excuse for barring photos of the flag-draped aluminum transfer cases coming back from Iraq.  The American public deserves to see the real face of the war they’re being asked to support.  As it now stands, the “embedded” journalists indeed seem to be “in bed” with their units.  We’re seeing and hearing only what the Pentagon wants us to see and hear.  I had hoped for better from the Obama administration. 

            What was good for Bush is good Obama.  We need to know what is really happening behind the scenes?  Where is the independent corroboration of this administration’s claims?

            The irony is that neo-cons are already charging the media with being in bed with the Obama administration—which, of course, is touting victory in Afghanistan as a national imperative.  It is only a matter of time before the media breaks with Obama and Gates over this war.  Up until now, the right has seemed disposed to attack anything Obama supports.  Will people like Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham, and Ann Coulter  end up siding with the liberal media over Afghanistan?  War sometimes makes for strange bedfellows. 

 The media, in my view, have become too restrained and too polite.  We are just not seeing the same adversarial, and even confrontational, spirit we used to see in reporters during the Vietnam era.  That was when we just assumed that officialdom couldn’t be fully trusted and had to be vigorously challenged.

As I suggested with my opening, the real danger with a fully re-empowered media is not a matter of bias, one way or another, but rather one of hubris.  Witness, for instance, all the airtime and attention they gave to ABC news correspondent Kimberly Dosier when she was wounded in Iraq.  Would that a wounded Marine or soldier would get half as much attention.  Dosier’s own news organization clearly considered her to be of a higher caste, and therefore more newsworthy, than a mere combatant.  From time to time, journalists perhaps do need to be reminded that they themselves are not the story. 

--Edward F. Palm