The Forever War

Given the significant number of wars that America has been involved in during the last century, I consider it an act of divine providence and supreme good fortune that my immediate family has never been directly touched by war.

Five of my uncles served honorably in the European and Pacific theaters of World War II, but fate was kind to them as they all returned home safely when so many others didn’t. My father saw many of his friends shipped out to fight that war, but he graduated from high school in the Fall of 1946, a year after the 1945 surrender of the German and Japanese armies, when the victorious American soldiers were in the process of coming back home.

The great war of my generation was Vietnam – a near 20 year conflict that began in 1955 in the southeast Asia countries of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia and ended with the fall of Saigon in 1975 and the reunification of North and South Vietnam in 1976.

It was the second of what were called the Indochina Wars. In the first Indochina War, an independence coalition of Vietnamese fighters called the Viet-Minh, with military support from China and the Soviet Union, successfully drove their French Colonial occupiers out of Vietnam in 1954.

The second Indochina war (called the Vietnam War by those in the West) began in 1955 as a conflict between the United States-backed South Vietnamese Democratic government and the Communist North Vietnamese government consisting of the Viet Cong, North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and the National Liberation Front.

The North Vietnamese army was supported by the Soviet Union, China, and other communist allies; the South Vietnamese army was supported by the United States, South Korea, Australia, Thailand and other anti-communist allies. 

The U.S. government viewed its involvement in the war as a way to prevent a communist takeover of South Vietnam. They justified their actions under a containment policy whose intent was to prevent countries in the region from falling like dominoes under the influence and control of China and the Soviet Union – Cold War enemies of the American government who were actively trying to spread their communist forms of government throughout the region.

More than 3 million Americans served in the Vietnam War, some 1.5 million of whom actually saw combat. At the peak of the war in 1968 there were 543,000 American military personnel serving in Vietnam. The war exacted a large cost in terms of fatalities and injuries. By war’s end, 58,220 American soldiers had been killed, more than 150,000 had been wounded, and at least 21,000 had been permanently disabled.

In addition, an estimated 175,000 Americans left for Canada or deserted to avoid serving in Vietnam and approximately 830,000 Vietnam veterans suffered some degree of post-traumatic stress disorder when they returned home.

I remember having to register with the Selective Service when I turned 18 in 1978, but by that time the Vietnam war was over and America was still recovering from the painful memories of the conflict and loath to commit the country to any new conflicts.

My three older brothers did come of fighting age during the Vietnam war, turning 18 in 1968, 1971 and 1972 but they did not get drafted to serve. My oldest brother was sheltered by attending a Maritime college and signing up for the Reserves, the two middle brothers were protected by a Nixon administration policy called Vietnamization that went into effect in 1970. That policy shifted the burden of the war to the native ground forces of the South Vietnam army rather than the U.S. Army. Vietnamization resulted in a gradual eight-fold reduction of U.S. troop levels over three years (from 549,000 in 1969 to 69,000 in 1972).

My decision to select the topic of Vietnam as this month’s blog entry was driven by two recent experiences: watching Ken Burn’s emotional ten part documentary on the Vietnam war, coupled with the reading of a military science fiction novel called The Forever War.

The Forever War tells the story of soldiers from a future Earth who are fighting a war between Earthlings and an alien species called the Taurans. The book was written by Joe Haldeman and was inspired by his own experiences serving as a combat engineer in the Vietnam War. Haldeman was wounded in battle, awarded the Purple Heart for valor and struggled to adjust to civilian life after returning home. He learned to cope by becoming an award winning writer of books and screenplays, even writing two of the early Star Trek episodes.

There are many lessons to be learned from this complex war. Each lesson probably warrants its own separate blog, but I have tried to summarize below the thoughts and observations about the Vietnam War that occurred to me as I immersed myself in the book and television documentary over the last month.

A Flawed Policy Leads to Tragedy

The logic behind the U.S. containment policy that was first used to justify American involvement in Vietnam was flawed from the outset. The North Vietnamese and National Liberation Front were not really fighting for Communism. They viewed the struggle against the Americans, and the French before them, as a fight for their liberation and the right to independently govern Vietnam without interference from other foreign countries.

If America had not been so blinded by the Cold War mentality and fear of Communism that was prevalent at that time, the whole tragedy of the war might have been avoided. Maybe instead we would have had sympathy with the Vietnamese cause to re-unite their country and throw off the bonds of colonialism and imperialism that had ruled their country for over a century – just as America fought their own Revolutionary and Civil wars to give their people a right to rule their own country.

Congressional Abdication

The U.S. Congress abdicated their oversight responsibility in managing the Vietnam war when they passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964, authorizing the president to “take all necessary measures, including the use of armed force” against any aggressor in the conflict.

This resolution essentially gave Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon unfettered power to escalate the war at will, inevitably leading to increasing numbers of U.S. ground troops and bombing campaigns – despite increasing opposition to the war from the country and its elected leaders.

Incompetent Military Leadership

The American military command, led by General William Westmoreland, implemented a strategy of attrition – attempting to drain the enemy of manpower and supplies via relentless strategic bombing and attacks of fortified North Vietnamese positions.

Westmoreland reported to the President that the strategy was winning the war, but it was clear on the ground that the strategy was failing because the large scale casualties being inflicted on non-combatants were turning our South Vietnamese allies against us, undermining support for the war at home and increasing the will of the North Vietnamese to fight harder.

Furthermore, the American soldiers were given what they felt were pointless missions and assignments. They were told to attack heavily fortified enemy positions, suffering great losses while driving the enemy out and securing the target; only to have the enemy melt back away across the border to Cambodia and Laos. As soon as the American’s left, the enemy would just return and take up the same positions again.

Ike was Right

President Dwight Eisenhower, in his 1961 farewell address to the American people, warned about the dangers of the informal alliance between the nation’s military, defense industry and congressional leaders. He worried the vested interest they have with one another would adversely influence public policy – leading to wars from which they could profit.

Eisenhower said; “We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military–industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.“

Despite Ike’s warnings, the Vietnam war indeed gained momentum by being promoted by America’s military-industrial-congressional alliance. The U.S. spent more than $1 Trillion (in 2015 dollars) fighting the Vietnam war, much of that money lining the pockets of the defense industries and Congressional lobbyists. The amount of money spent on the war was three times what the U.S. spent on education and would have been enough to pay off the mortgage of every homeowner in the country at that time.

Bob Dylan’s song Master’s of War, which he wrote about the same time that Eisenhower was giving his farewell speech, plays in the background of the Vietnam documentary during a scene when the narrator discusses how the government conspired to hide bad news about the progress of the war, while at the same time labeling those who supported the war as patriotic and those who did not as traitors.

Masters of War – Bob Dylan

Come you masters of war
You that build all the guns
You that build the death planes
You that build the big bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks

You that never done nothin’
But build to destroy
You play with my world
Like it’s your little toy
You put a gun in my hand
And you hide from my eyes
Then you turn and run farther
When the fast bullets fly

You fasten all the triggers
For the others to fire
Then you set back and watch
When the death count gets higher
You hide in your mansion
While young people’s blood
Flows out of their bodies
And is buried in the mud

Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good
Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul

Be Careful what You Measure

When you can’t measure the things that are important, you make the things you can measure important. The statistic that the American military decided to use as a metric to prove that their war of attrition was being won was “Kill Ratio“. An arbitrary and ambitious kill ratio goal of 10:1 was set by the U.S. high command (10 North Vietnamese soldiers killed for every 1 American).  The goal was to kill the enemy faster than they could be replaced.

When the American company commanders learned that their units were failing to achieve their designated kill ratio metric, some of them encouraged their units to increase the body count by killing any Vietnamese that moved (regardless of whether they were enemies or allies, soldiers or non-combatants).

The very act of measuring something affects human behavior and American leaders should have realized that the number of Vietnamese killed was sure to rise one way or another once this metric was put in place – and that it would likely lead to atrocities and wide-scale killing of the innocent. A better measure in my opinion would have been the number of bodies that were NOT being killed.

Racism 101, Turning the Subject into an Object

Before they went into battle Americans were trained to to see the enemy as less than human. If you don’t see them as people, maybe you won’t hesitate to kill them. After  his first kill, John Musgrave, an American Marine who emerges as one of the most brutally honest voices in the Vietnam film, struggled mightily with his conscience and made what he called his deal with the devil.

He told himself “I will never kill another human being as long as I’m in Vietnam. However, I will waste as many gooks as I can. I’ll wax as many dinks as I can find [slang derogitive terms U.S. soldiers used for the Vietnamese people] … but I ain’t going to kill anybody. I turned the subject into an object. It’s Racism 101. And it turns out to be a very necessary tool when you have children fighting your wars, for them to stay sane doing their work.”

That comment in the film by John Musgrave reminded me of a similar sentiment expressed in a passage of The Forever War, where the author describes the conflicting emotions that were felt by the soldiers who were asked to kill.

In the scene the military force from Earth lands on an alien planet in search of an enemy Tauran species, who they have never actually seen. They encounter a herd of strange looking animals, that are curious but not threatening. Here is an excerpt from the book:

“When I give the word, open fire. Shoot to kill.” “But, Sarge, they’re just animals”. “If you’ve known all this time what a Tauran looks like you should have told us. Shoot to kill.” I felt my gorge rising and knew that all my training hadn’t prepared me for this sudden reality… that I had a magic wand that I could point at a life and make it a smoking piece of half-raw meat. I wasn’t a soldier nor ever wanted to be one.

“Maybe some of you feel the way Potter evidently does, maybe some of your men feel that way… that we ought to go easy, not to make this so much of a bloodbath. Mercy is a luxury, a weakness we can’t afford to indulge in at this stage of the war. All we know about the enemy is that they have killed 708 humans… they are responsible for all the lives of your comrades who have died and who are surely going to die today. I can’t understand anybody who wants to spare them. But that doesn’t make a difference. You have your orders and you might as well know that all of you have a post-hypnotic suggestion that I will trigger by a phrase, just before the battle. It will make your job easier.”

While my conscious mind was rejecting the silliness, somewhere much deeper, down in that sleeping animal where we keep our real motives and morals, something was thirsting for alien blood, secure in the conviction that the noblest thing a man could do would be to die killing one of those horrible monsters…”

…it was murder, unadorned butchery – we hadn’t been in any danger. The Taurans hadn’t seemed to have any conception of person-to-person fighting. We had just herded them up and slaughtered them, the first encounter between mankind and another intelligent species. What might have happened if we had sat down and tried to communicate. I spent a long time after that telling myself over and over that it hadn’t been me who so gleefully carved up those frightened, stampeding creatures. Back in the Twentieth century, they had established to everybody’s satisfaction that “I was just following orders” was an adequate excuse for inhuman contact. I was disgusted with the human race, disgusted with the army and horrified at the prospect of living with myself for another century or so…

Most Soldiers Served Honorably

It’s unfortunate that most of the American soldiers who returned home from Vietnam were not treated with the respect or honor that was bestowed on veterans of other American wars. They were victims of the unpopularity of the war and of the nightly news cycle that focused on a minority of the soldiers and units that committed war crimes.

Soldiers were victims too. Many went over there voluntarily to serve their country and were put in an impossible situation. Failure of government and military leadership at all levels, politicians who continued the war for selfish personal reasons, who did not want to admit they were wrong and were afraid of losing their popularity in the polls.

The reality is that the vast majority of American soldiers who were sent to Vietnam loved their country and did their best to serve their time with distinction and honor. In the documentary, Army veteran Vincent Okamoto remembers the men in the infantry company he led in 1968:

“It’s almost going to make me cry – nineteen-, twenty-year-old high school dropouts that came from the lowest socioeconomic rung of American society . . . they didn’t have the escape routes that the elite and the wealthy and the privileged had . . . but to see these kids, who had the least to gain . . . they weren’t going be rewarded for their service in Vietnam. And yet their infinite patience, their loyalty to each other, their courage under fire, was just phenomenal. And you would ask yourself: how does America produce young men like this?”

What Price Victory?

Officially, the North Vietnamese army were the victors. After 20 years of fighting, the U.S. withdrew their forces and support from South Vietnam and within a matter of months the forces of the North Vietnamese overwhelmed South Vietnam and re-unified the country under the banner of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.

But North Vietnam paid a terrible price for their “victory”. Estimates of the number of Vietnamese soldiers and civilians killed during the conflict vary from 966,000 to 3.8 million. The documentary captures Lo Khac Tam, a General in the North Vietnamese army saying; “The war we fought was so horribly brutal. I don’t have words to describe it. I worry, how can we ever explain to the younger generation the price their parents and grandparents paid?”

For Bao Ninh, a foot soldier in the North Vietnamese Army, who became a celebrated novelist after the war, the official public narrative celebrating their great, noble victory rings hollow: “People sing about victory, about liberation. They’re wrong. Who won and who lost is not a question. In war, no one wins or loses. There is only destruction. Only those who have never fought like to argue about who won and who lost.”

The Vietnam War caused a deep rift in the fabric of American society and the debate regarding what conclusions and lessons should be drawn from the war continues to be discussed even today, 40 years after the conclusion of the war.

I like to believe that it is a healthy thing because as long as the war is remembered, it will be less likely that America will make policy decisions in the future that repeat the same mistakes of the past. Ultimately, the meaning and great purpose of this controversial war may be that it helps to make war in the future less likely.

At the conclusion of The Forever War, Sargent Mandela returns to Earth 100 years after his battle with the Tauran’s only to find when he is awakened from suspended animation that the war is over. He is curious to know how it all ended so he does some research to find the truth.

I think it is fitting to close with the passage from the book where Mandela summarizes the conclusions that were drawn about the factors that conspired to create the forever war.

The 1143-year long war had been begun on false pretenses and only continued because the two races were unable to communicate. Once the races could talk, the first question they asked was “Why did you start this thing?’ and the answer was “Me?”

The Taurans hadn’t known war for millenia, and toward the beginning of the 21st century it looked as though mankind was ready to outgrow the institution as well. But the old soldiers were still around, and many of them were in positions of power.

Many of mankind’s early ships met with accidents and disappeared. The ex-military men were suspicious and started arming the colonizing vessels who ended up blasting the first Tauran vessel they encountered. They dusted off the medals and the rest was going to be history.

Military weren’t the only ones to blame. The government believed the evidence, even though it was laughably thin. People who pointed this out were ignored. Businesses believed that Earth’s economy needed a war, and this was ideal. It gave a nice hole to throw buckets of money into, and would unify humanity against a common enemy rather than dividing it.

Here’s hoping that all our future forever wars are only a creation of science fiction.