“If a free election were run in South Vietnam, President Eisenhower observed, Ho Chi Minh would have won by a landslide.”

By Sergio Miller

NOBODY HAS EVER won a war by spinning, nor will they.

This truism has not stopped a procession of Western national leaders and their appointed military chiefs in the last two decades from throwing sand in the face of sceptical electorates when they probably should have been drawing lines in the sand on their own misadventures. Seldom has the phrase ‘we are making progress’ been so drained of meaning, or repeated so insistently as if magically it might come true. Today, Iraq is a mess and Afghanistan is sliding into a fresh civil war.

Becoming embroiled in ‘stupid, endless wars’ is not a modern singularity or even an American malady. But in the last half century or so Washington D.C. has been the exemplar of these military quagmires. The progenitor of them all was the Vietnam War, which until recently stood as America’s longest conflict and still, undisputedly, the most divisive of military interventions. Even with the passage of time and dwindling ranks of veterans, the bitterness and controversy remain raw.

Too commonly, the cliché is invoked that Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) – much like its pale modern reflection of NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) – was never able to join the dots of tactical victories to fashion strategic triumph. ‘We never lost a battle’ so the myth went. ‘So what?’ Hanoi riposted. ‘You lost the war.’ This is untrue and also misses the point.

The South Vietnamese lost their short-lived republic to their harder, more determined northern brethren. America did not ‘lose the Vietnam War.’ And talk of tactics and strategies (so beloved of armchair generals past and present) bypasses the more salient point.

The whole misbegotten affair was folly from the start, like Iraqi weapons of mass destruction more recently, or the Quixotic mission of ‘defeating terrorism’ in places nobody has ever heard of, or particularly cares about. If a free election were run in South Vietnam, President Eisenhower observed, Ho Chi Minh would have won by a landslide. Yet the two nations with most pretensions to representing democracy and liberty, France and then America, became hell-bent on thwarting this outcome.

The justification for it all was the Domino Theory.

“You have a row of dominoes set up,” the same Eisenhower told a press conference. “You knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is that it will go over very quickly.”

The notion of dominos falling to the hidden Communist hand was not his. Major General Claire Chennault first suggested the general idea in a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing in the spring of 1948. But it became an Eisenhowerian albatross like the greatly misquoted “military-industrial complex.”

Over time, the Domino Theory grew into the unreflecting Cassandra-cry in a string of National Security Action Memorandums urging more involvement, not less, in Vietnam. To question the orthodoxy was not just to show disloyalty (and imperil your career); it was also un-American. As veteran Southeast Asia CIA analyst George Allen wisely observed:

‘‘Survey missions sent to determine what might be done seemed always to return with a program for positive action – to propose a solution no matter how intractable the problem might appear to those participating in the mission. More often than not, such study groups seemed to listen selectively, to minimize negative factors, and to find reasons for doing something, rather than proposing that nothing can be done.”

He could have been describing Baghdad or Kabul.

But what could be done? In Aeschylus’ Agamemnon the chorus describes the God of War as “money changer of dead bodies.” General William Westmoreland, commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968, might have agreed.

In a speech to a joint session of Congress in April 1967 he advised: “One cannot measure [our] progress by lines on a map.” Instead he proposed to measure progress by the enemy “body count.” There have been few more pernicious measures of progress in a war. A strategy of “stack them up like cordwood” was doomed from the start and morally bankrupt.

Journalist and war-critic David Halberstam later wrote: “We were fighting the birth rate of a nation.”

But it was far worse than that. If all that counted was dead VC then counting itself should be co-opted into the grand delusion and deception.

Commanders were rewarded for the “body count” and duly responded by inflating numbers, or simply sanctioning rules of engagement that could only lead to one outcome: many dead and innocent civilians.

“There may be a limit beyond which many Americans and much of the world will not permit the United States to go. The picture of the world’s greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring 1,000 non-combatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny, backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one.” So wrote Defence Secretary McNamara in a memo to President Johnson in May 1967. His warning fell on deaf ears.

The ‘body count’ underwrote Zippo-wielding soldiers torching villages; Major General Julian Ewell’s campaign in IV Corps Tactical Zone (‘the Butcher of the Delta’); B-52 raids; and the terrible stain of My Lai. Against this bleak panorama it should never be forgotten that hundreds of thousands of young Americans made the year-long rite of passage to Indochina and did not commit atrocities or dishonour their service or country. But the overall picture was unrelentingly dark. ‘Paint it black,’ sang the Rolling Stones.

When politicians and military chiefs can no longer manipulate reality, they resort to manipulating its presentation – or spin.

We have become used to this in our times: the fashionable “warfighting” in fact is just a subset of “media ops,” while the “warriors” (as soldiers must be termed nowadays) seem like extras in a movie produced by anonymous people in offices far from dangerous frontlines.

But it was Vietnam that created “the credibility gap” – a euphemism for lying. And it was Saigon that presented the “Five O’Clock Follies” in the Rex Hotel. “At least we outran Fiddler on the Roof,” joked one of America’s last military spokesmen. But who could laugh after over one million war dead?

Sergio Miller is the author of No Wider War: A History of the Vietnam War Volume 2: 1965–75. A former British Army Intelligence Corps officer who served in Special Forces, he was deployed to Northern Ireland and undertook assignments in South America and East Asia. In the First Gulf War, he served as an intelligence briefer to the U.K. Joint Commander. Since leaving the regular armed forces he has worked in the defence industry. He writes regularly on defence subjects.