BOOK REVIEW Smoking out Vietnam War truths Search and Destroy: The Story of an Armored Cavalry Squadron in Viet Nam
by Keith Nolan
Reviewed by Nick Turse
In January, the United States Department of Defense issued a press release [1]
announcing "its program to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War"
and directed those interested to its rudimentary website. VietnamWar50th.com
offers almost no information, no facts about the war, no real substance, just a
list of objectives that unspecified commemoration activities should meet, such
as serving to "[t]hank and honor veterans of the Vietnam War".
The only notable features on the site, in fact, are photos of US troops and a
prominently placed post-war quote from former president Richard Nixon, with a
citation from the New York Times, which reads: "No event in American history is
more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is
misremembered now." (In actuality, this is a line from
Nixon's No More Vietnams that was reprinted in a New York Times review
which characterized the book this way: "As history, it is second-rate, with
many questionable assertions about the past.")
In response, Don North, the vice president of Military Reporters and Editors -
an association of the folks who report on the Pentagon - fired off a letter.
[2]
"[W]e
feel the choice of this quote is unfortunate as it unfairly disparages the work
of thousands of journalists of many nations who tried to cover the Vietnam War
fairly and truthfully," he told the Vietnam War Commemoration Program Office.
"A discussion to assess the media role in the war would be a valuable part of
your commemoration observances, but would not be served by using this quote by
a president who contributed greatly to the war's misunderstanding and was an
avowed enemy of a free press in Vietnam."
After citing author William Hammond's exceptional study, Reporting Vietnam:
Media and Military at War - an abridged edition of a book originally
published by the US Army Center for Military History - North noted that while
Nixon called the press "our worst enemy" in the war, "Hammond clearly writes
that the real enemies were the contradictions and flawed assumptions that he
and [former president] Lyndon Johnson had created."
While it probably would have been impolitic to do so, North (who himself
covered the war in Vietnam from 1964-1973 for ABC News and NBC News) could have
added the Department of Defense to the list of liars.
During the Vietnam era, the Pentagon took great pains to lie, spin, cover-up
and bury the truth about the war. As someone who has spent the better part of
the past decade investigating and revealing long suppressed information about
US war crimes investigations that were kept secret and buried away, the Vietnam
War 50th anniversary commemoration program's embrace of Nixon's quote didn't
surprise me a bit.
In recent years, a sizeable and powerful segment of the military establishment
- dubbed the "Crusaders" [3] by Vietnam veteran and professor of history and
international relations at Boston University, Andrew Bacevich - has embraced a
counterfeit history of the war.
Following the works of revisionist historians like Lewis Sorley, whose A Better
War (like Nixon's No More Vietnams) claims the US military won
the conflict in Vietnam but gave it away on the home front, the Crusaders and
their fellow travelers have constructed the fictional history that Nixon always
longed for and expunged the most salient feature of the conflict: Vietnamese
civilian suffering.
Which brings me to Vietnam War historian Keith Nolan.
In 2005, Nolan told me about the next book he planned to write. I was skeptical
to say the least. The topic was a winner, but Nolan wasn't the historian I
wanted to see tackle it. I viewed Nolan as a revisionist who, starting in his
teenage years, uncritically and unquestioningly lionized American troops,
dodged troubling questions and wrote gushing tales of valorous combat with
little hint of civilian casualties or Vietnamese suffering.
His books - 10 in all, at that point - didn't ring true to my ear. I worried
about yet another revisionist tract, the kind of history the Crusaders would
eat up.
But this was, he emphasized, a new Nolan. In an e-mail to me, he wrote: "As
you've probably noticed, most who write about Vietnam have a political ax to
grind, tend to gloss over the negatives, exaggerate the positives, and
generally produce works marred by many sins of omission and commission. I
should know. I used to do it, too."
In addition to his future plans, he also told me he was then working on a
history of the 1st Squadron, 1st Cavalry Regiment or "1/1 Cav" in Vietnam. He
led me to believe it would be a different type of book than his previous works.
I was unconvinced and more or less blew him off.
Neither I nor you will ever see Nolan's next project - he lost a long battle
with lung cancer in 2009. What we do have is the book on the 1/1 Cav he
mentioned in that e-mail message. It may not prove to be the book Nolan's
ultimately remembered for. But it should be.
In Search and Destroy: The Story of an Armored Cavalry Squadron in Viet Nam,
Nolan finally got real. Don't get me wrong, there is still classic Nolan
infused throughout the book, but entangled with it is the real war; the war
that 20-something Nolan didn't want to hear about and his interviewees, the men
who carried out America's wars in Southeast Asia, were happy to see excised
from the history books.
No longer filtering the history as he heard it, Nolan let veterans of the 1/1
Cav speak for themselves - without varnish or censor - blending latter-day
interviews with contemporaneous journals, letters home and court-martial and
investigations documents. The honesty speaks volumes. The history rings true.
"I wish you could have seen us today," a sergeant confided to his wife, "we
real[l]y messed up a big village. Burned and ran over every dam[n] house they
had ..." A private wrote home about savage beatings of noncombatants and
continued, "Does it help the poor farmer when we run over his rice paddy with
our tanks...? I don't think so. Anyone wearing black pajamas and running is
considered VC and shot. As a result, many innocent people are killed."
Another veteran recounts an incident in which a helicopter pilot asked ground
troops if they wanted a prisoner - a young, unarmed boy he had spotted.
Negative. The boy was gunned down in a hail of bullets. A middle-aged civilian
is forced to do push-ups with a bayonet to his belly (immortalized in one of
the book's photos). An officer threatens a non-combatant with a pistol to the
head (also captured on film and reproduced in the book).
One veteran speaks of a fellow unit-member beating villagers with an pickaxe
handle, while another recalled soldiers bashing civilians in the head with the
butts of their rifles. And that's just three pages worth of brutality
(186-188). The specter of atrocity lurks from cover to cover and example after
example punctuates the text.
Search and Destroy is filled with ample evidence of American criminality
and cruelty - assaults, rapes, murder, mutilation and mayhem. But there is also
a sensitivity toward US troops that has always been a Nolan staple. The author
sometimes protects identities and other times names names, but even the worst
offenders, according to testimony and documents, are written in three
dimensions and they and their defenders are given ample say.
While we finally get some sense of the suffering that the rural Vietnamese
endured day after day for years on end, Search and Destroy is still
primarily a history of American men in, out of, and en route to combat. From
stories of medals earned in tracer-streaked firefights to the mud and mistakes
that typify real combat to feats of individual daring and admirable
self-sacrifice, Nolan still offers up the type of battle-centric history his
long-time readers expect. Now, however, he also presents a truer vision of the
Vietnam War than we're used to from mainstream, combat-focused historians.
Search and Destroy is, on its face, a micro-history - basically, a
one-year account of a single armored cavalry squadron during the Vietnam War.
But Nolan's book is much more than the sum of its parts. It is a clear-eyed
vision of the war that it has taken decades to get back to - one that existed
in print (mainly due to the anti-war movement) while the conflict was raging,
but thanks in part to the efforts of Johnson, Nixon and the Pentagon, was
partially erased in America's culture wars, has been further excised by
revisionist historians and marginalized in texts that aim for wide readership
or the embrace of the "we-were-winning-when-I-left" segment of the veteran
community.
I've come to realize that I was altogether too hard on Nolan and not nearly
trusting enough when he told me his plans almost six years ago. I dismissed the
efforts of a man who saw the error of his ways and I sincerely regret it.
Search and Destroy proves to me that Nolan would have done a thorough
and honest job with the big, important history he envisioned. It was a story
that, perhaps, only a historian who had written so many flattering works about
veterans could have actually pulled off.
There might be too much reality for some in the book Former Nolan devotees who
believe that American troops, not millions of Vietnamese (who didn't get to
leave the war zone after a year), suffered most as a result of the conflict and
think that telling history with "warts and all" means an honest accounting a
tactical maneuvers gone wrong, not how Vietnamese lives were torn apart, may
eschew this book. One can only hope that they won't and will instead take a
page from the evolution of Nolan.
There's a reason why the Vietnam War has never, even in the face of later
foreign conflicts, gone away for the United States; a reason why it remains a
festering wound on the American psyche. It stems from a failure to honestly
come to grips with the war and what it truly meant for the people of Vietnam.
As a result of this lack of honesty, today we're saddled with revisionist
tracts that continue to distort history and an official 50th anniversary
program at the Pentagon that chose as its keynote quote, the self-serving words
of a disgraced American president who broke the law in an effort to hide the
truth about the war. And yet, while Americans are still mired in a decades-old
battle over how the conflict is remembered, Nolan offers yet another
opportunity to face a painful reality - a chance to begin to grapple with the
real story of the American War in Vietnam. Here's to hoping his last and finest
effort isn't squandered.
Search and Destroy: The Story of an Armored Cavalry Squadron in Viet Nam
by Keith Nolan. Zenith Press; First edition (July 8, 2010). ISBN-10:
0760333122. Price US$30, 448 pages.
Nick Turse is an investigative journalist, the associate editor of
TomDispatch.com, and currently a fellow at Harvard University's Radcliffe
Institute. His latest book is
The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan(Verso Books). You can follow
him on Twitter @NickTurse, on Tumblr, and on Facebook. His website is
NickTurse.com.
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"[W]e
feel the choice of this quote is unfortunate as it unfairly disparages the work
of thousands of journalists of many nations who tried to cover the Vietnam War
fairly and truthfully," he told the Vietnam War Commemoration Program Office.
"A discussion to assess the media role in the war would be a valuable part of
your commemoration observances, but would not be served by using this quote by
a president who contributed greatly to the war's misunderstanding and was an
avowed enemy of a free press in Vietnam."
