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.
