I’d rather pay for it.
You’ve warmed the cocles of my capitalist heart, Miquel.
I’d have to learn Silver Bayonet.
Lessons are available via Vassal!
This is great.
I don’t like the new Viet color, though. Less olive, more khaki.
Khaki is for PAVN/Viet Minh, Giap. But they are already using Red. Black/Red is LF VC.
This is the PLAF. Main Force VC:
They are all just pre-art, though. All preliminary, for playtest.
Except this. I may keep this as is. Best. Counter. Ever.
So this book is proving exceptional. I’ve been gushing back and for with @Rod_Humble on Twitter about it.
Is that a new book? I haven’t noticed it before.
Released two weeks ago-ish.
I am about to the first third of the French War. He is very unbiased. There is a LOT of calling out of the Sheehans and Karnows of the world in that he calls them “heroically naive” and essentially castigates the first generation of historians to write about the conflict as giving the Communists a free pass. In the preface he makes a comment to the effect that just because one side enages in a flawed policy/execution of policy, it doesn’t make the other side good guys.
He commented that when he was a young journalist; sure MACV and the PAO folks lied, but the US gave every journalist, even those who they knew would avidly disagree with the US’s policy/execution, etc., unfettered access to anything and the fixed/rotary transport to get there. The Communists did not. And he then goes on to say that this, in his opinion, was a mistake by the US. It’s really fascinating and well done history.
I expected as such, but I am so deep into specific works, studies and records for my own research, that I thought I couldn’t give this book the time. Now, I’ll be reading it until I am done. ;)
It wasn’t a mistake. It was part of what made us a free, informed country. Supposedly part of what we were fighting for in the fight against communism, etc.
Subverting that would have made us a lesser nation.
I don’t disagree with you. Read the book. I’m not doing his point justice. Let me provide the quote, though woefully out of context.
Hours before I myself, aged twenty-four, flew to Saigon for the first time, I sought advice from Nicholas Tomalin, a British Sunday Times reporter. He gave me the address of the Indian bookshop on Tu Do Street that offered the best rate for changing dollars on the black market. Then he said, “Just remember—they lie, they lie, they lie.” He meant the US command, of course, and he was right. Like many other Western writers then and since, however, Nick ignored the important point that Hanoi did the same. This fact does not render acceptable the deceits perpetrated by MACV (Military Assistance Command Vietnam) and JUSPAO (the Joint US Public Affairs Office), but it provides a context often absent from judgments upon the so-called credibility gap. Moreover, although American and South Vietnamese spokesmen peddled fantasies, MACV seldom barred reporters from getting out there and seeing for ourselves. In a fashion unmatched in any conflict before or since, free passage was accorded on fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters to journalists and photographers, many fiercely hostile to their carrier’s cause. Relative American openness, contrasted with the communist commitment to secrecy, in my view constitutes a claim upon a fragment of moral high ground. The egregious error committed by US statesmen and commanders was not that of lying to the world but rather that of lying to themselves.
I highly recommend that you take a listen to this podcast by Dan Carlin
It’s about an hour long interview with Max Hastings, who wrote that book.
Naturally it covers much of the same ground. @SlyFrog I urge you to give a listen too, as it would really help clarify the point that Patrick was getting at above. It’s also just a good listen with lots of interesting anecdotes.
I didn’t know he did an interview with Carlin. Downloading…
Too bad I have to listen to the Polar Express when driving up to Flagstaff tomorrow. That podcast would be a good way to pass the time.
No. I am working a crazy schedule through Christmas.
Now Strategic Command : World at War is out on the 6th! Too many wargames coming out!
I don’t really agree about the ‘moral high ground’ in this case, but I also don’t think the US commanders and statesmen were the only ones lying to themselves during the Vietnam War. There’s a tendency to see the victors of a war as the brainiest geniuses in retrospect and i’ve read some books from the North Vietnamese perspective and some of the decisions made strike me as almost Westy-esque.
One problem with studying Vietnam is that approaches to the war tend to devolve into strident attempts to justify one side or the other, or to place the war on a moral see-saw that is either up or down in one particular direction. I tend to look at these things in compartments. Vietnam as a military event is one compartment. It’s not sufficient for a real understanding of the war, but you can profitably explore the battlefield context on its own, to some extent, as long as you acknowledge that nothing is isolated from everything else. You can also explore the political or the moral sides of the story in isolation, again, as long as you realize and acknowledge that your picture is deliberately and necessarily going to be very specific and very limited.
For a fuller understanding of the whole complex package, though, you do need a pretty interdisciplinary approach, and you also have to be comfortable with some ambiguity. American policy of the early 1960s did have an aspect of well-meaning naivete to it, so you can’t paint the US involvement solely in neo-colonial terms. On the other hand, there was also a very real strain of rather blind knee-jerk opposition to anything leftist in US policy and sentiment, something that helped the Americans ignore a lot of what was going on in Southeast Asia because it didn’t fit our preconceptions.
On the other side, it’s not really helpful (or respectful to the Vietnamese) to see the struggle as some sort of pure anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist war of liberation, either. Vietnamese opposition to French colonialism is pretty hard to criticize, and it’s also hard not to sympathize with the majority of Vietnamese who were getting screwed by the pro-French colonial bourgeoisie. But the Vietn Minh were hardly choir boys, their ideology was centered more on centralized party rule than on any sort of democracy that we would recognize, and generations of conflict with the French and Japanese had created a tough, often brutal and cynical, leadership cadre that, especially after Ho’s death, began to see victory at all costs as outweighing any real ideological commitment to the peasantry.
A lot of new looks at Vietnam from the US perspective try to rehabilitate either the moral justification for intervention (the communists were cruel!) or the way the US prosecuted the war (we were winning!). Neither approach really moves me, largely because I tend to focus on the end result. It’s hard to see how the lives of the Vietnamese would have been improved overall by the application of more US force, or even by a victory of the RVN, given that government’s dreadful mismanagement and mendacity. It’s also still, after lo these many years, hard to see much downside to the US not getting involved as we did, though counterfactuals are hard to prove of course. In the event, Southeast Asia did, briefly, fall under the sway of Red governments, but today, that seems like ancient history. The horrors of Cambodia under Pol Pot certainly do point to the evil consequences of the collapse of Vietnam and the triumph of the communists, but it’s hard to say whether such atrocities would have occurred in different circumstances, say, if Vietnam had fallen in the mid-sixties.
From the military side, once you broaden the lens to get beyond the purely battlefield view, it’s hard to see much leeway for radically different approaches to the war. Given the very real limits on what the US would or could commit to SE Asia, and the very real limits of support we could expect from the ARVN and its government, and given the diffuse nature of the foe and the international framework bolstering the North Vietnamese, most of the proposed military “could have been” ideas seem woefully unrealistic. Tactically, there are tons of things we could have done (and sometimes did do, though they don’t get that much attention), but short of a situation totally unrealistic in terms of the context, there’s not much IMO that could have given us a “victory,” whatever that means. Unless that victory entailed a permanent US presence in large numbers, I can’t see a path where the RVN becomes stable, happy, and strong enough to survive, much less survive.
Wargames are best when they focus on the military campaigns and battles in some isolation, I think, and don’t attempt to make any grand political points. Not that I’m adverse to the ideology-izing of games, but it’s just damn hard to do both, make a good game and a good argument.
That is what I am attempting to do. Those, when it comes to Vietnam are woefully underrepresented. Both in games and in military histories. Sir Max’s work is surprising me more in that is interesting me. I really have less interest in a grand, sweeping history of the conflict and am more interested in unbiased, well done military histories of Campaigns and Battles, both of which have been sorely lacking from the Historiography until the last 5-10 years.