"We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. When the loyal opposition dies, I think the soul of America dies with it."
<<How It Was -- 'Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides' by Christian G. Appy
Reviewed by Fredrik Logevall
Sunday, June 1, 2003; Page BW09
PATRIOTS
The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides
By Christian G. Appy
Viking. 574 pp. $34.95
Christian G. Appy does not tell us when precisely he hit upon the idea of producing a full-fledged oral history of the Vietnam War, but an inspired moment it was. Five years in the making and based on hundreds of interviews with Americans and Vietnamese, Patriots is a gem of a book, as informative and compulsively readable as it is timely.
Appy talked to a wide range of people in the United States and Vietnam, some of them prominent and well known, many of them not. We encounter top generals and lowly foot soldiers, policymakers and protesters, intelligence analysts and journalists, nurses and doctors and entertainers. William Westmoreland and Vo Nguyen Giap are here, but so are singer James Brown and author Tim O'Brien, and so are Luu Huy Chao, a North Vietnamese MiG-17 pilot, and Anne Morrison Welsh, whose husband immolated himself to protest the war, and many others.
Not every prominent figure agreed to be interviewed. Among the notables missing are Henry Kissinger, Robert McNamara and South Vietnamese leader Nguyen Van Thieu. Their absence is regrettable, but the testimony of their underlings in Washington and Saigon gives important insight into the thinking in the respective governments. The late James Thomson, for example, who served as McGeorge Bundy's assistant on the National Security Council staff during the lead-up to major war in 1964-65, speaks powerfully of his deepening sense of impending doom during these months and of his belief that Lyndon Johnson's mind was by then closed, impervious to the need to give serious thought to alternatives to large-scale escalation. A few pages later, Walt Rostow, who died a few months ago and who in 1966 succeeded Bundy as national security adviser, sounds a very different message, defending U.S. intervention and insisting victory would have come quickly and easily if only the administration had moved into Laos to cut off the so-called Ho Chi Minh Trail, the route used by Hanoi to get troops and supplies to the South.
Anthony Lake, a Kissinger assistant during the war and later Bill Clinton's national security adviser, describes his decision to resign in protest over the Cambodian incursion in 1970. Many have lauded the decision over the years, but Lake is haunted by regret. He says he quickly came to feel guilty about leaving because "I knew I had more of an opportunity to argue about the conduct of the war and how to end it by being in the White House than I did by becoming a citizen again. I still believe that."
Yet it is most often the lesser-known figures in Patriots who deliver the deepest insight into the nature of this long and bloody war. The more unfamiliar they are, it seems, the more vivid is their testimony. Vu Thi Vinh, one of tens of thousands of North Vietnamese girls who volunteered to work on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, notes that they usually worked only at night and often had to subsist on "aircraft 'vegetables,' " the fungus and moss on rocks that were the only edible things left after U.S. bombing attacks. Le Cao Dai, a surgeon at a North Vietnamese army jungle hospital in the Central Highlands, talks of constantly having to move the hospital to avoid U.S. detection and of operating on patients through the night while staffers took turns pedaling the stationary bike that powered the electrical generator.
Even when the testimonies don't necessarily add much to our understanding of the war, they fascinate. Porter Halyburton, an American prisoner of war in the North from 1965 to 1973 and now a professor of strategy, tells of being shot down and finding no place to hide. His captors surrounded him and took his boots off and made him walk barefoot to the nearby village. When Halyburton returned to Vietnam not long ago, he went to the army museum in Hanoi; there, inside a Plexiglas display case, were his boots, the name visible inside.
Journalist Judith Coburn describes winning a prized seat on a helicopter going into Laos and having to relinquish it to legendary war photographer Larry Burrows. ("I was, after all, only writing for the Village Voice and I was a girl and the great Larry Burrows was there.") The chopper crashed in Laos, killing all aboard.
Appy gives his participants ample room to tell their stories, but his own contribution to the success of the volume is considerable. Previously the author of Working-Class War, a well-received study of the makeup of the American fighting force in Vietnam, he provides brief introductions to each entry and longer chapter introductions that set the historical context. Occasionally, he missteps -- he understates the early opposition to Americanization, both in Congress and in the mainstream press (congressional figures are not well represented in these pages) -- but in the main these chapter introductions, which are crucial in lending cohesion to the overall enterprise, are authoritative and elegantly written.
Patriots may at first glance seem a peculiar title for a work of this kind, but one does not have to read far into the early chapters to realize just how fitting it is. People on all sides of the war -- American and Vietnamese (North and South), hawk and dove, military and civilian -- wrestled with the meaning of patriotism. Does it mean loving one's country no matter what? Does it demand unquestioning agreement with whatever one's leaders propose to do, or does it encourage dissent based on allegiance to the nation's noblest ideals? When is it a force for good, and when does it become a rallying cry for unjustifiable use of military power?
In the United States today, even to inquire as to the meaning of patriotism seems to many people, including many in the media, to be, well, unpatriotic. One contribution of Christian Appy's fine book is to move us in the other direction, to force us into precisely such an inquiry. Reading Patriots brought to my mind Edward R. Murrow's remark half a century ago, at the height of the McCarthy era: "We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. When the loyal opposition dies, I think the soul of America dies with it." Wise words then, wise words now. •
Fredrik Logevall, co-director of the Center for Cold War Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is writing a book on the end of French involvement in Vietnam and the coming of the Americans.
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