Conversations with History: Neil Sheehan

welcome to a conversation on international affairs I'm Harry Kreisler of the Institute of International Studies our topic today is remembering the Vietnam War and our guest is Neil Sheehan a writer and journalist mr. Sheehan covered the Vietnam War for the New York Times his paper later won the Pulitzer Prize for his articles on the Pentagon Papers mr. Sheehan has just written a new book published by Random House called a bright shining lie John Paul van and America in Vietnam mr. Sheehan welcome to Berkeley thank you thank you for asking me to come it was quite a test miss undertaking writing of this book it took you 16 years 16 years to the publication I lost time I mean I had an auto accident in which a kid would like to drive down the road the wrong side of the road broke 10 of my bones that cost me a year and I had to take time out to lecture and earn a living but to the extent I could but yes it was 15 years the better part of 15 years to of research and writing in the new year to publication and and you got involved with Vietnam and John Paul van as a war correspondent right that's right I went to Vietnam it was my first assignment as a reporter for the UPI and I never got away from the war I started out there in 62 I met John Van when I went out my first helicopter operation in May of 62 in the Mekong Delta and then after three years in Vietnam for the UPI and the New York Times I came back I was sent to Washington to cover the Pentagon in 66 so they were the protests against the draft controversy over West Mall a soup requests the unraveling of McNamara then they sent me to the White House to cover the last six months of Johnson in office then I got the Pentagon Papers in 71 I never got away from the war not because I was obsessed with it in those years but because it was the event of my generation and I'd started out covering it and so I stayed with it and after all of this experience both there and here you chose this Colonel to to focus on as a metaphor for American involvement why that choice well it was it was an accident to begin with an accident mrs. John van Rossum was my friend I had known him in those three years had been in Vietnam and I'd see him periodically afterwards and when he was killed I went to his funeral at Arlington in 1972 and it was like an extraordinary class reunion here were all the figures of Vietnam in this Chapel Westmoreland this man had left the army as a renegade lieutenant-colonel and gone back to Vietnam as a civilian and ended the war holding a general position even though he was a civilian and Westmoreland was his chief pallbearer and a few minutes before the ceremony started Edward Kennedy the last of the Kennedy brothers came in and I thought of the older brother who set the country to war to fight this war in Vietnam in 62 when I first went there already buried in this the cemetery and here was the youngest brother who turned against the war coming he was a friend of Vance and over sitting with the family was Daniel Ellsberg who was about to go on trial for copying the Pentagon Papers he and van had remained best friends despite going and totally opposite directions on the war and I I was very moving it was it was I realized that we were burying more than John van we were burying the whole era of the war we were burying that era of boundless self-confidence that led us to Vietnam and by that time John had come to personify the war he'd spent the better part of ten years there everyone else would go for a year or two three at the most he spent the better part of ten and I realized that if I wrote a book about him I could I could write a history of the war I could put the two together and people might be able to understand the war because they would be reading about it in human terms through life of a man whose life turned out to be like a novel and and he had really influenced that that group that band of war correspondents who who first clued America into what was going on in Vietnam during the last period of the Kennedy administration that's right oh yes he didn't fluence to us enormous Lee because in his first year in Vietnam and it was our first it was my first assignment as a reporter David Halberstam who was also there was on his second overseas assignment but his really his first American War and Van van had an extraordinary mind he had this incredible capacity to relate to human beings he he was a wonderful actor he can manipulate people he could he could sense human issues at the same time he had he had a capacity to deal with hard facts like statistics he was a statistician usually those qualities seemed to cancel out cancel each other out but they didn't in him and so in that first year we were faced with the problem of covering a war where the advisors in the field were telling us we were losing the war and that's what we could also see when we went out in operations which is pretty frequent the general in Saigon a man named Paul Harkin's would always saw the world through rose-colored glasses and kept seeing it through them he would maintain we were winning the war you were caught between the two it was an adversarial relationship and van helped us to understand the war in a way that other advisers couldn't because he he was fearless he would he would work down on a tactical level and he could apply what he saw down there at the strategic level and he gave us perspectives information that we wouldn't have good that we didn't get from other advisors he shaped our reporting it was because he because we were we were trying to come to grips with this ourselves and this man helped us come to grips with it in a way we wouldn't have been able to without it and there was a there was a moral outrage in what he was telling you about the war that that you wound up conveying to the audience back home in the United States yes there was a moral outrage on several levels first of all you got to remember that in that period of time this country was at the High Noon of its power we thought that whatever we wanted to do was right and good simply because we were Americans and we would succeeded it because we're Americans and Van embodied that and so did the reporters we wanted to see this country win the war just as much as those advisors did well what we felt we would help to do that by reporting the truth and so there was the moral outrage over this general and the ambassador in saigon who kept denying the truth we would see i realize i discovered later on that they believed these delusions we thought they were lying to us i discovered later on they believed what they were saying they were really deluded men and then there was the moral outrage over the way the war was being conducted van had a keen sense of honor as a soldier and he was enraged at the bombing and shelling of this of peasant Hamlet's which was routine but routinely done by the Vietnamese and American generals he thought first of all this was terrible when I say keen sense of honour as a soldier he'd gone to Vietnam to fight other men not to kill somebody's mother or sister or kid and he felt that first of all this was wrong as secondly it was stupid because it was going to turn the population against us and of course he was quite right so there was a sense of moral outrage on several levels conveyed yes and and I have a quote here from the book he you quote him at one point is saying this is a political war and it calls for the utmost discrimination in killing the best weapon in killing is a knife and and the quote goes on to emphasize his criticism of the indiscriminate bombing which was really the way that we that we chose to pursue the war the generals were fighting another war they were still fighting World War two and it made no sense in this Vietnam context and they also I turned out it turned out when I got at the records they also understood what they were doing I mean they thought that they could you know mouths they don't have this saying of of emptying of the the guerrilla fish the girls as fish swimming in the sea that metaphor well they were going to empty the sea they were the and the Vietnamese generals on the Saigon side thought that they could terrify their peasantry into into ceasing to support the guerrillas I think the American generals turned out later on deliberately wanted to to empty these areas of population now in the book is the the the the story of John Paul van and and you his decline his tragedy his end comes after an evolution of his thinking on the war but but if we look at the beginning very early he really is saying to win this we have to take it over yes stock and barrel you have a quote to take over command of this operation lock stock and barrel yeah so so in part that was his frustration basically he felt that he knew how to win it the people in Washington didn't understand how to win it but but to ultimately he his thinking evolved to where he saw that we would have to take it over that's right John believed that if he always believed that if you fought the war the right way you could win the war and in those earlier years he had a keener grasp of reality than any other American I knew in Vietnam any other American official and when he came back after his first year his first year there was as a military advisor and he'd seen things than in mainly military terms then he came back as a civilian an advisor in the pacification program and he he then began to rethink even his first year and he realized that this Saigon regime we were supporting was corrupt in that it was the remainder of the French colonial system that it had no roots in its own society and what he wanted to do he saw the only way he felt we could win the war in Vietnam was to take over the country and remake the society what he called harness the revolution that is a social revolution that was going on in the countryside that the Communists were using as as a fuel for the further for the engine of their of their own war he wanted to create carry out land reform he wanted to stop the corruption he wanted to give the Vietnamese government they could believe in and he felt the only way you could do that was to take it over because if you simply tried to work through the Vietnamese regime that was there it would never change that they were incapable of changing and and that no matter what force the United States applied there if we would always be building on sand because ultimately Vietnamese would have to run this country and if it was these Vietnamese in Saigon they wouldn't be able to run anything the place would collapse interestingly enough he said in in in a letter to someone which you quote in the middle of the the book that the that basically I am convinced that everything the the NFL is is doing is the right way to go that the great majority of the people support it in what it is doing I'm paraphrasing here and at one point toward the end of this quote he says if I were a lad of eighteen faced with the same choice whether to support the Saigon government or the NFL and an um and a member of the rural community I would surely choose the NFL he si said that it was an extraordinary letter to a general who was a friend of his back home that's when he was working when he'd come back and he'd begun to realize the social and political and cultural dimensions of the thing he could do that because John was a he turned out to be a lot more complicated than than I had ever imagined and that's one of the reasons he more I learned of him the more he fascinated me and the more he was a metaphor for this war because I discovered when I got in when I when I began to research the book that I thought the John van I knew I didn't really know at all but he was a much he had he had a terrible childhood his mother was a part-time prostitute in Norfolk Virginia and he was illegitimate and worse than that she'd rejected him and this was during the Depression with terrible poverty and he had raised himself up out of this childhood by sheer force of will and had become an officer in the Air Corps first during World War two and then transferred to the infantry and that that that having his background his origins gave him the capacity the poverty of his own childhood to identify with these Vietnamese in the countryside who were struggling against against a system that denied them any social advancement or any social justice and that's why he could write that way he could say if I were 18 years old I joined the Vietcong because he could he could feel that most Americans couldn't and we follow the Chronicle to the end by the end of the book his great tragedy is that he seems to know less than he knew in the beginning yes he lost his sense of he lost this sense of reality because what happened was he couldn't give up on the war and after Tet sixty-eight this is the surprise communist offensive at Tet 68 when the will of the American population to continue the war was broken John couldn't give up on it at that point he had invested too much in it first of all he was a marvelous soldier a natural leader of men at war he was fearless he had and he had an indomitable will to win he was not only intellectually convinced that he could win it was part of his character he found it impossible to admit defeat and secondly he becomes somebody by 1968 he was he was somebody important in Vietnam and and third and thirdly he had this dark personal sight he was a compulsive womanizer this had come out of the childhood and he could exercise at that side of himself in Vietnam so he couldn't give up on the war and so he began to rationalize what was happening of Vietnam he began to say we don't need to stop the corruption anymore because you see a Tet 68 the Vietcong guerillas were mostly destroyed and he said well they're the major threat the we can handle the North Vietnamese army because they won't have the political capacity of the guerrillas we don't have to have such a competent government we can handle it with American power and then it began to rationalize and he came up with a number of those ideas that Nixon incorporated in the vietnamisation program and he gradually he didn't lose his sense of reality in terms of fighting and this man of course who talked about using a rifle because you mentioned that quote earlier the last thing he said was of course we can't use a knife so we'll have to use a writer because it's the most discriminating weapon he ends up in the end in 1972 when he stopped the big North Vietnamese offensive at Kahn tomb he was calling in the b-52s and and he and he he says to a Washington Post correspondent at that time anytime the wind is blowing from the north where the b-52 strikes are turning the terrain into a moonscape you can tell from the battlefield stench that the strikes are effective so he completely reversed his position gong for his professionalism was gone and in the end he's he's killed in a in a you know tragedy that was not conflict related he is his helicopter with a young pilot got caught in in some wind currents I guess and he was killed over will tell us what was the site that was a very ordinary thing what happened of course in the end was he was fighting for himself in the end he was he was fighting to preserve himself he wasn't plastering peasant Hamlet's with those b-52s he was using them against the north vietnamese army but but he was he was he was killing out of rage and and and to preserve himself in vietnam and what he had become I mean he becomes some of the appointee was a general by that time and and he was keeping himself in the United States in Vietnam with that weapon of mass destruction there was this great irony in that and then right after winning this major battle in 1972 at Kahn tomb in the mountains when South Vietnam was about to collapse then in the sense that it would have collapsed in the center the Vietnamese were panicking the South Vietnamese were panicking and the whole center of the country would have gone the Communists who have gained at all and of course there would have been a different negotiation at Paris and he stopped them at a place called Kahn tomb for a major battle destroyed two North Vietnamese divisions that attempted to take this town and then right after that one night about a week later he was flying up a road when his helicopter in the darkness and rain hit the trees now this was a man who had survived he cheated death in numerous times and he did shot down on several occasions he'd also driven through several ambushes he and it was to mate Arana that he would die in an accident and when I and I wanted to see what had happened because by the time I went there in 72 to do my first research trip for the book I realized that by that time that there was always more to this man than was in an official report and so I found the accident site it was a contested area there there was fighting going on there I found it a South Vietnamese lieutenant who said he knew that there was a helicopter crash like the one I was looking for and as we walked toward the site it was a grove of high trees off the road about 500 yards and it was the only grow of high trees in the whole area all the others were these low second-growth trees and i wondered how did john's helicopter manage to find those trees in the night and that one grove of trees whose his bright sunny day when I went there and then when I got into under the trees I was at first looking at the wreckage which was scattered around under the trees because the helicopter had flown into them at full speed in that exploded killing him and the other two men aboard instantly and then I noticed these strange wooden stockade like things under the trees and I asked this lieutenant what are these and he was a tribesman from that area and he swept his hand around and he said dead men here dead men here and then I looked deeper into the trees and I saw these carved statues around the larger stockade like thing and I I felt very cold because I knew immediately where I was I was in the hamlet graveyard I had been at a tribal Hamlet like that 15 miles away 10 years earlier and had seen statues like that in the graveyard and it was absolutely uncanny It was as if those the land had somehow reached up for him in the night and taken him because he had come up that road he was jubilant he thought he was winning his he'd won his war he was he was skylarking along it was the most dangerous route to take he shouldn't have been taking it and he didn't realize that these figures were waiting for him I don't believe in a supernatural if I did I would have said that this was was supernatural I think that what it is is that he van was one of these figures of destiny if you will and their lives there are people like this and their lives are governed by a different drummer and he was one of them but it was an extraordinary experience so that in a way the spirits had brought down the the technological machine that was trying to defeat them was so it was cool yeah you say your horse constantly your last statement on him is he died believing he had won his war I presume that you mean not only the Vietnam War but his personal war yes he'd become somebody he wasn't this illegitimate kid in Norfolk Virginia anymore he briefed President Nixon and Nixon had listened to him with great attention Nixon had thought he was going to prevail in Vietnam too and and he every time he went back to Washington on these trips but at this point he would brief the Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird who came his funeral he had he had by this time he his former army patron had become the vice chief of staff he was an important man and he had won his war to make himself somebody and he also thought I think at the end that he had won though he gave the same credible briefing too at the end which he talked about through the social revolution having even been brought about through the war itself this social revolution he had earlier wanted to create having this haven't even brought about an end was course it was it was delusions nothing like that had occurred the country was going to was going to collapse the next time when John van and people like John van were not there but Heath and and he he didn't he was lucky in that he didn't live to see that I also used the sentence saying he hadn't missed his exit because it was it was true he would have been very unhappy had he lived and some people missed their exits and he had gone out at for him just the right moment now this this extraordinary book that you've written is really well it's seven books in a way and it's also an analysis of u.s. foreign policy and and why it failed there and so on but one is struck by someone like you who who's taken sixteen years of his life to complete this work that that an education was going on for you also tell us a little about the process after leaving Vietnam as a war correspondent I mean what what was it about this man's life that led you to unravel all of these complexities not only the complexity of his life but also the complexities of u.s. foreign policy well you had to explain well let me let me start at the beginning I had been after all these years myself as a reporter ten years involved with Vietnam by the time I went to his funeral I wanted to write I was looking for I wanted to leave behind something that would bloom more than another magazine article or another newspaper story and I had first thought of writing reporters memoir and I was no more and I was very dissatisfied with that because I don't I think reporters are useful for what they witness and what they report and then I realized standing in that Chapel but and later on when I thought about it that this man had over the years befriended or he had argued with or he had somehow made contact with almost all the major figures of the war and he had intersected with all the issues of the war I mentioned at Lansdale the famous CIA agent putting the go-to nzm in power in 54 he was at that funeral I met him on the steps and so I I thought that if I wrote a book about John I could tell the story of the war now when I got into the thing I began to discover that he had crossed with even more than I had ever imagined he had crossed with it with with I ran into figures involved with him who had one man in particular who'd been in Haiphong in 1945 when we had backed the French attempt to reconquer Indochina I ran into and then you followed it all the way up through always went found a thread to van and therefore you had to explain the policy issues as well I was I wanted of course to weave the history together with the biography of the man and in order to do that and I discovered he had reached out much more than I had ever imagined even when I started and of course I to do that I had to explain these policy issues as it went along why had we gone to Vietnam in the first place what were the viet what kind of people were the vietnamese because we didn't understand them why had we done what we'd done because it wasn't a question of these generals like Westmoreland or Maxwell Taylor or these presidents like Kennedy and Johnson being stupid obviously they weren't stupid there's a question to be explaining how intelligent men had behaved stupidly and had brought upon this country and upon the people of Indochina this enormous tragedy I was struck and I wrote jotted down as I would come to different parts of the book not only would new vistas about the war open up but I was impressed with your skills in in laboring and and and it struck me that sometimes you were historian there's a whole chapter on the history of the Vietnam War you were the muckraking journalist in the correspondence says you were obviously the war correspondent and also the courthouse reporter basically digging up vans lab but then all finally I was struck by your skills your potential as a as a novelist basically in the way you would portray landscapes and so on at any point in this did you think about moving to a different form writing a novel for example or were you too much a reporter to do that well I was much too much reported yeah and I thought that a novel wouldn't have validity yeah because it wouldn't be real this man's life was was to me more interesting than I'm I have never written fiction so I am NOT denigrating fiction that's another but to me this man journalism has always been for me more interesting than fiction and and to me this man's life was more interesting than fiction because it was real it had happened and the story of what we had done in Vietnam was more interesting than fiction because it had happened so that but I wanted to write it with it with a narrative that would would carry with would carry the reader along that's another reason it took me so many years I mean I was as arrogant as Robert McNamara I thought it would take me three or four years to write this book but one of the reasons I had of course the very complicated man this history of a very complicated war and trying to explain it gone on for 30 years from 45 on and then I also had the I wanted to write it in a form which which would have a fast a simple driving narrative I had read one when I had written an earlier book I had had trouble with the manuscript and it was a small book and a nun in a below fair called II it was a sort of can you and he come alive it's a book called the ironhide affair and at first I'd written it in journalist form and handed the editor I had then had said to me this is terrible it's a boring you've taken an interesting event and you've made it terribly dull and I then read Truman Capote's book in cold blood and he convinced me you could write about real events with the same narrative drive we'd associated with fiction but it was of course much harder to do and I reworked that first using that form and then and so I was determined to write this book in the same way but I didn't realize that I would be writing about a complicated whole series of events a complicated biography of a man and a whole series of events in a hit in a history of of now of a nation the history of a man the history of a nation but I was determined to do it that way and it took a lot longer because you have to have you have to retain the truth you have to retain complexity you have to retain subtlety and yet at the same time you've got to keep that narrative simple and yet you can't let it be distorted so it was very difficult to do I was struck in reading the book by by great works that it reminded me of and III want to ask you about that the the similarity of the structure to heart of darkness with you as the narrator and John Paul Van essentially as Kurtz was there any connection there had you recently you hadn't read that book we read that book in the course of this Odyssey it wasn't that's a good point it wasn't Odyssey for me yeah because it was an education for myself and it was it was a journey but the the no I had I'd read heart of darkness in college and I had never thought of a van a lot of people have commented on that since the books been published and have have seen similarities I had never I didn't think of it myself I I simply let the information I followed the information and I let the story take me where it were it where it led and and and it led in obviously in a direction that some people have compared with heart of darkness in the sense of a man who gives the best of himself to something and it's finally destroyed by it because that's what happened to John van I mean he was he was a man with with with he was like a Greek hero in the sense that he had great virtues and great flaws and the flaws finally did him in and he was destroyed by this war in the end he was devoured by it and and and by the end it's destroyed him he's not the same man I knew earlier but I had thought of mice if one could use a figure and I don't want to compare myself to him but I had thought I would be able to bring to the writing of this book insights but somebody else wouldn't because I had been a witness to these events and the figure I thought of was lucid ''tis because he had he had been an officer in the Athenian army other than you seen the enforces excuse me and he had I felt been able to write about that war his war because he had been there and one of the things I thought I could bring to it as a journalist who'd been there was that I would be able to see things others wouldn't see and I felt people would share things with me that his other participants would share things with him because I'd share the experience with them and that turned out to be true people talk to me I think in a way they would not have talked to somebody who hadn't shared the experience with them and they gave me their papers they gave me their Diaries they found people constantly opening up to me and there and I think they did because I had shared that experience with and and the the Pentagon Papers must have been important in the search for truth I mean because here was really the hidden history of the war prepared by the government itself yeah it was an intellectual step for me yeah oh very definitely because you see let me give you just one example of it when I was a young when we were we were young reporters in Vietnam when that first period 6263 and these generals would would tell us how they were winning the war we thought they were lying to us we thought that they were we considered these these statements of virtue as optimism to be insults to our intelligence we thought that they they regarded us with contempt because we were reporters and they were just saying we thought they had a grip on reality when I got the Pentagon Papers I began to realize that just the moment maybe these people believed these delusions and then when I began to research the book I discovered that it was absolutely true I got the secret records of those strategy conferences in Honolulu and here were these men sitting in a guarded room under top-secret circumstances and they were what they were more optimistic than they had been with us in a press conference in Saigon and it was like it was it was I don't want to use that phrase that's lying phrase but it was mind boggling in a way I mean it was like an explosion going off in your mind because you realized my god they believed in these delusions we had a military and political leadership the leadership of that period which was genuinely deluded I'm also curious about another step in your education which was the fact that you came home by home back to the United States because there's a your life intersects with Vann at a point where he knows more than you know when when you're in Vietnam and then he goes downhill from there as we've just discussed whereas your trajectory one could say I guess is up and and did that the did that make a difference your being here you're seeing the opposition to the war in addition to all that you were uncovering in the course of this it was it you know doubtedly did make a difference yes because first what happened was when I went back to Vietnam in 65 66 for my third year there I had gotten to love that country and in the and that first war is destructive as it was it was nothing like what happened when the American army and the Marine Corps and the Air Force and the Navy came in and started blowing this little country apart and if you had if you loved the country it really upsets you and the destruction of civilian Hamlet's the the killing and the wounding of civilians became vastly greater than it had been before and it was very upsetting but I still couldn't bring myself to understand that we that the policy itself was wrong but then when I did get back to Washington yes I undoubtedly acquired the perspective to think about it and I began first to realize we were going to lose that came home clearly to me that we were gonna lose and then I began to realize also that this war was very damaging for this country not only were we going to lose it but we were damaging ourselves and we were damaging terribly Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos and so I began to rethink my own positions and the Pentagon papers experienced help that too I was I was struck by your criticism of of American foreign policy and I have some quotes here that I want to read you and it's a it's a way I think to get into another element of the complexity of this book of the military leadership US military leadership you you write the dominant characteristics of the senior leadership of the American armed forces had become professionally arrogant there was an a lack of imagination and moral and intellectual insensitivity and of the American foreign policy elite you write the elite had become stupefied by too much money too many material resources too much power and too much success this was these were conclusions that came at the end of the Odyssey the middle of the Odyssey when you were there when you were here or what they they came about the middle of the Odyssey in terms of researching the book not while I was in Vietnam because you see when I was in Vietnam I thought the system I thought our system was rational I think all Americans did remember Lyndon Johnson would say if you only had access to that top-secret information I have you know we were winning this war and as I said before it was a question I discovered as I was researching the book of thinking my way through these issues it was not a question of stupidity it was a question of intelligent men behaving stupidity and what stupidly and why had they behaved stupidly well then I began to look at the American military and political leadership of that period and I realized it had it had it had undergone a sea change and the host poll percival post-world War two period World War two had been such a tremendous success story for this country that the political and military leadership of the country began to assume they would prevail simply because of who they were we were like the British at the turn of the 19th century we were going to win simply because we were British and I think that was two of the intellectual leadership of the country at the time and uh and uh Natalie we now see of the business leadership as well the these people had had they couldn't they they'd lost their imagine that sense of imagination they couldn't think creatively arrogance had replaced reality those generals thought they were gonna win simply because they were American generals they lost the the sense that they were gonna lose it when you looked at the world war two leadership and I've all my life been a student of military and political history when you looked at the world war two leadership you saw a man like Patton and Eisenhower and and Marshall who had a very keen sense that they could lose and so they were on the lookout all the time whereas these generals of Vietnam like Westmoreland Minh Hawkins Taylor they couldn't conceive of losing and you you also saw it in what happened to people in the book John van in 62 63 tried to alert first General Harkins and then the leadership in Washington that we were losing that advisory war Kennedy had started he tried to do it through the reporters and he tried to do it first directly in his reports Harkins wouldn't listen to him so he turned to the reporters then when he got back to Washington he was scheduled to brief to Joint Chiefs and Maxwell Taylor read his briefing and had it canceled he didn't want to hear that information then later on you see a Marine general in the course of the book a brilliant marine general named Victor Krulak who had been responsible in a major way for the landing craft in World War two were very a sinking soldier who had been Vance nemesis in that earlier period and that he had gone along with Taylor and Harkins when the big American war starts in 65 Kulak began to rethink it he realizes that this war of attrition strategy the American generals are the army generals want to follow is crazy that we're not going to be able to kill these people off so fast that they'll lose their will and it won't work will just will end up to use their term will have trigger cells will kill a whole lot of American soldiers and undercut the political capacity to wage the war at home he tries to change the system he goes to McNamara with a paper saying look we fight the war this way we'll lose McNamara won't listen to him he ends up a frustrated man then McNamara finally frightened in 1967 he realizes we're gonna lose he tries to convince Johnson of this Johnson won't listen to him thinks he's lost his nerve Johnson thinks west war --lens winning the war and he fires mcnamara then johnson's destroyed in comes Nixon Nixon comes up with another strategy he's going to win and Vietnam destroyed Nixon too so he realized that this system was ill I called it the disease of victory that they come out of World War two the American system the major the our leadership system had that's why it Vic tamai is the soldier and the American soldier in Vietnam it did ceased it lost its grip on reality you don't make much in your analysis of this this failure of the the anti-communism of the leadership I mean it's really the arrogance of power is the thrust of the analysis is that a fair comment or it was the arrogance of party anti-communism shows only in this sense I mean it contributed to it obviously in the sense that because of their mindset they wanted to see the world in black and white they didn't want to see any shades of gray and so you get us you got a simple-minded anti-communism I mean you begin with Atchison and Truman backing the French attempt to reconquer Indochina in 45 and you go on through those those years and you find a Kison totally incapable of realizing that ho is yes ho Chi Minh is a communist he's not on that he's done a Democrat he's not an agrarian reform he kills his enemies but he's a nationalist they couldn't relate the t-tell phenomenon to the - to the communist world as a whole in other words communist countries were destined to behave as differently from each other as right-wing dictatorships had now our statesmen ignored that they didn't really ever consider that possibility and then when the sino-soviet split occurs you find them again ignoring it so that it's it's it's it's it's I think they were looking if you will their instincts led them to look for simple-minded solution and they then follow those simple-minded solutions to our to our grief and and and the cost for the people's in in Vietnam were that they were really out of the calculation that our leaders were making you you refer to a study done by top a to McNamara McNaughton in which he laid out the percentages of why we had to remain there somewhere in the middle of this conflict and he said seventy percent to prevent our defeat there I mean the appearance of defeat 20% to keep this area from China and only 10 percent to permit the people of South Vietnam to enjoy a freer better way of life so that the bottom line here was that that we sort of completely lost sight and in fact destroyed many of the people there who were living there really yes and the people we were allegedly going to save I think you have to remember that that what Americans saw their purposes as so innately good that they could excuse the in in in that is they saw those purposes as so innately good that they could excuse the pain they would inflict on others to carry out those purposes because the purposes were so good that they would justify this pain we were inflicting on other people and McNaughton was quantifying it there those were the priorities it if the at the hill and on the anti-communism it wasn't that there wasn't a threat from the Soviet Union obviously there were real threats in the world I don't mean to say there were no threats mm-hmm but the what happened was they were unable to distinguish between Stalin and Hall and Mao etc there was an inability to see these countries as historical entities so there is this amazing quote that you are leaving your assignment in Vietnam and and you go out for a day with general Westmoreland on a tour and you raise the question of the cost to the Vietnamese people of the bombing and the quote I think goes something like this Westmoreland tells you well sure we're killing a lot but at least we're denying the enemy the population and killing them he said yes Neela I asked him about the civilian casualties from the bombing and shelling me and if he was troubled by and he said yes Neela there's a problem but it does deprive the enemy of the population doesn't it I realized then that he knew the effect of this and in other words that they were deliberately emptying the countryside with bombing and shelling that he didn't mind the fact that he was generating millions of refugees and it was called generating refugees in fact the Harvard scholar named Huntington later on called this forced urbanization and described it as a way to win Wars of national liberation he didn't come up with the idea but he was describing what was happening again I think you see the American thought that his his purposes were so innately good they justified this pain he was inflicting on other people he didn't he didn't think of it and also there was obviously as I discussed in the book there was racism involved in this racism towards Asians you remember all those phrases about now these people didn't value human life and and Asians don't don't value human life like we do well if you spend any time around them you discover that they they love their children just as much as we love ours that is certainly true of the Vietnamese but I think that the it was American racism but more than that it was also this this this belief that our purposes are always good and therefore whatever we want to do is right good as just justified one of the the great achievements of your book is the the the vignettes and profiles of individuals who are trapped in the war and we've talked about several of them mentioned that Marine general crew lack there is a young aide to to Vann who one recalls Ramsey who knew Vietnamese and then is captured by the Vietnamese tell us a little about that that that learning experience had in seven years of captivity that was an extraordinary thing because Doug Ramsey was vans assistant in this province west of Saigon this very insecure province that was dominated by the Communists in 65 66 and then van left and he carried on in this van tradition of driving the roads and he was captured and on his way to the prison camp Ramsey was one of the few Americans in Vietnam who spoke Vietnamese fluently he was a brilliant young man a foreign service officer who volunteered to work out in the countryside and on the way to the prison camp they stopped when they get to the rainforest for a meal and one of the three guerillas are squirting there's a 16 year old farm boy and he asked Ramsey why are you Americans making war in this country and Ramsey gave him this one of the standard explanations of the time we're we realized this is rice he said I realized it's very painful for you but but we're stopping the Chinese from expanding and taking over the rest of Southeast Asia because you people are pawns of the Chinese and the kid looked at him and he said you're crazy we're not gonna let the Chinese into this country just because we share the same form of government with them doesn't mean we're gonna let them run us there are traditional enemy and Ramsey started arguing with the boy and the two older girls who were off one of whom was an officer broke in and they said you're wrong and the boys right and they proceeded to give Ramsey a history lesson in Vietnamese history about how the Chinese were their traditional enemies and how they had beaten off invasions from China and Ramsey realized them on his way to the prison camp later on that afternoon and the poor man underwent seven years in jungle prison camps here he a most incredible ordeal which I relate in the book he he he realized on his way to the prison camp that this whole concept that we were stopping the Chinese in Southeast Asia was if he called it in his mind he was ashes that these people were the the best barrier you could ask for it the Chinese expansionism at the Southeast Asia and of course as soon as we were defeated in Vietnam and left in 75 the historic and Amasa tea reasserted itself and Vietnam the Communist dynasty of China invaded Vietnam just as every other dynasty that came to power in China invaded Vietnam the two won the unthinkable occurred two communist countries went to war with each other we talked about the the education of John Paul van of Neil Sheehan of some of the characters in your book what what what education of the American people would you like to emerge from the reading of this book well I was willing to spend those years at it because I thought that I could write a book that would tell what really happened in Vietnam and why it happened because I felt that because of my own past and because of this man where he led me I would be able to really get at the truth and that I and I also wanted to catch the whole of the war that's why you mentioned earlier battle scenes I wanted to take the reader from the rice I thought you could only understand this if you understood the details and so I wanted to take the reader from the battles and the rice paddies in the rain forests up to the White House and up to the Politburo in Hanoi I just catch the whole thing what I hope people will draw out of is first of all an understanding what happened in Vietnam because we've had a whole lot of excuses the media did us in the protesters did us in Lyndon Johnson chickened out in 1968 if only we bombed harder and none of those explanations stand up to historic examination so I I hope we'll first of all it would help us to face up to the truth of what happened there that's that's the first thing I would and then we would I hope begin to draw some lessons from it because Vietnam will have been a war in vain only if we fail to draw wisdom from it we if we if we draw wisdom from it then perhaps we can redeem the lives of some of those men who remembered on the wall and we can redeem you can never really redeem it but you can redeem to some extent the destruction inflicted on the nations of Indochina so so what what specifically are some of those lessons there are a whole lot of them first of all that your your leadership can be deluded that your your your presidents and your generals can really not know what they're doing now Americans never believed that before war particularly in the American experience has always was always a good experience you went off to war morally unifying thing you came home you done your duty you defended your country and your your leaders basically knew what they were doing that's one thing the second thing was that you can fight the raw a long war in the wrong place for the wrong reasons it's another thing I don't think we understood also the nature of war itself how cruel war can be the cost of it to yourself and the cost of it to other people that I think was something Americans particularly after World War two we tend to draw Manta sighs war because World War two and war to our cause was the cause of humanity and our soldiers brought home glory and victory and thank God they did but I think it led us to romanticize it to some extent and also our previous experience with war and I hope will draw a lot of these things out of it is it your sense that our foreign policy elite has learned some of this even before your book emerged on the scene I mean is there is can we understand the reluctance of the military to get involved in places around the world it's partly due to that it's some of it has sunk in yes some of it's sunk in by the sheer forces of what happened because of course Vietnam has changed this country utterly we will never be the same again that is within the foreseeable future I think because of Vietnam and you do see some of that yes first of all the president's limited now no president can can commit American soldiers and Marines and the Air Force etc the American armed forces with the freedom Johnson and Kennedy could because the credibility of the President to do that has been has been damaged it's been changed people don't believe that he's he's got that ultimate wisdom anymore secondly I think the military leadership has a sense of its limitations excuse me they have some of them have a sense of the limits of military force that force is not always a solution to a foreign policy problem in the when you see the papers of the military leaders of 1960s they're always telling the president forces a solution send the army send the Marines send the airforce that'll solve your problem now you've got militarily just saying look wait look before you intervene all of these things yes again some of the hum of it has sunk it I don't think it's fully sunk in yet no the other the other issue here is we no longer have the resources that we had to waste in Vietnam I was struck by your passages describing how American culture intruded on the Vietnamese and in the massive way which we intervene there not just in the military sense but culturally with the big bases we built a whole sort of destruction of whatever native culture existed but now we don't really have the resources and that that may be more important in all of this who knows it could be I mean this is still a powerful country but it would be it would be much more painful now to spend resources like that because Vietnam set off that whole if first of all we fought a succession of wars and that has damaged our economy and Vietnam did damage our economy seriously and there's a there's a sense now of limitation there economically as well and and there as you say there are not the resources I mean we we've now run up a huge debt over over rebuilding or trying to rebuild a military establishment and I don't know if we've gotten ourselves a better one or not but you're right there is a limitation of resources now one of the important things in this book and now in our foreign policy is the role of the press the press obviously in Vietnam was the messenger of the bad news and in some factions in the public debates on these issue want to blame the press what what what has the press learned from all of us and what what is its proper role now and in the making of u.s. foreign policy well I think at least in the 70s we'll have to see whether this sticks or not but by the 70s editors had become more skeptical than they had previously been because of Vietnam and the events that followed it like Watergate and one would hope that they would return we would the press as a as a whole would retain that sense of skepticism I don't think the press would ever the news media this country will ever journey far from the conventional view because despite all this business you hear about the media the news media in this country are very conventional and they're out long they don't stray very far from the mainstream and they don't think we will but but I would hope that some of the skepticism would be retained that they don't always have the answers and let's ask the questions let's look because we do have a responsibility to tell the truth and to find out the truth and to end and to give an account of it I don't think that would have happened prior to Vietnam without Vietnam week because Vietnam made people conscious of that the publishing of your book undoubtedly is and will become an important cultural event I'm curious as to your sense of how our culture up to this point has dealt with this experience I have in mind the movies that we see now increasingly on Vietnam obviously this was a concern and a lot of the pop music what what are your thoughts on on that catharsis that we are attempting to go through well I I think it's good that we're going through it you know I think it's going to be a slow process there's the this coming to grips with Vietnam we're going to we're going to have to it's going to take us a long time but but those those things you mentioned you were often in music you hear it occasionally in rock music but but that's the general but that generation that went to Vietnam listened to rock Billy Joel had a very good a very authentic song about Vietnam I remember one of my daughters playing for me years ago and and that I think is all basically that some of a lot of that is to the good because it's a way of coming to grips now some of it's been more excuses like Rambo escapism but but but some of it is is a genuine attempt to come to grips you will also have the escapism I think that's inevitable because there will there will be a lot of people who will never want to face Vietnam do you think we will ever be able to sort of look at this war from from the consciousness of the Vietnamese people themselves I think that's probably asking too much of us as a people because it's it's it's it's it first of all we didn't understand the Vietnamese when we went there we didn't understand the Vietnamese who we were allegedly helping we didn't understand the Vietnamese we were fighting and I think that the experience has been so painful and so traumatic for Americans that I think it would be it's asking too much of a nation to to really see it from the opponent's point of view and you've got to remember that one of the reasons why Americans are angry at the Vietnamese who remain is because they beat us mm-hmm that's something that's that's that rankles a writer named Broyles who was a marine lieutenant went back to Vietnam in 1985 and wrote an article for The Atlantic Monthly in which he said that he had he went back to the anomaly toured the country and he went down to a place where he had led a Marine platoon and he talked to the local Vietcong and one of these former guerrillas was drunk sketches in the sand of how they would attack of how they had attacked this this Marine unit that Broyles had led and he said I would he said he wrote that I would rather have his that is the Vietnamese his memories than mine and I can understand that because it was so painful attitude to go to war and and to come back and be rejected these men were wrongly rejected the veterans the fighting man should never have been blamed for it should never have the blame for what happened to be it Nam but also it was a war which was a terribly unhappy experience and I think it's it's asking too much to ask people to really see it from the other fellows point of view one final question what what are your feelings after completing a project like this that took 16 years of your life well if if people read it and if it helps us to come to grips with the war then the 16 years will been worth it I'm at least I'm at peace with myself I have done my best to to to write a book about what really happened there and why it happened and it's done and it's published I won't write another book on Vietnam why I mean I might write a mag I might write a magazine article and you want to go there do you would you want to go the I'd like I'd like to go back and see what's happened to the country and write a magazine piece about it but I do not want alright now the book about Vietnam because this was the book that I felt I could make it through which I could make a contribution through which I could help my own country and I again I want to be careful I don't want to sound like a boasting but I I felt that this was an American saga this is more than a story of of John van and Vietnam and of the war in Vietnam more than a biography and a history there it was also the story of a man and his youth and his early years that led him to this war that he was destined to fight and that was that would destroy him and it was the story of the country whose historic or his historical path also led into this tragedy that was to inflict on itself and on the peoples of Indochina and I felt that if I if I could tell that story I'd have made a country and I've done my best to tell it so I'm like peace with myself well mr. Sheehan thank you very much for the book for writing it and thank you very much for spending this time with us to help us understand your intellectual Odyssey in writing it the name of the book again is a bright shining light john paul van and america in vietnam some might say I will say right now that it may be a literary equivalent of the Vietnam Monument in Washington well congratulations mark thank you and thank you very much for joining us for this conversation on remembering Vietnam Oh

Channel: University of California Television (UCTV)

Views: 19,672

Rating: 4.7755103 out of 5

Keywords: UC, Berkeley, Neil, Sheehan, Vietnam, War, John, Paul, Vann

Id: tp8DM_j4xRw

Length: 60min 27sec (3627 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 12 2008