Forgetting That People, Not Territories, Are the Prize : LOST VICTORY A Firsthand Account of America’s Sixteen-Year Involvement in Vietnam <i> by William Colby with James McCargar (Contemporary Books: $22.95; 432 pp., illustrated;0-8092-4509-4) </i>

Vietnam still casts a deep shadow on American politics. It is the ghost that stayed President Bush from helping topple Panama strongman Manuel Noriega. Its legacy divides the Democratic Party, leading to the nomination of presidential candidates who seem too weak for the job of Commander-in-Chief. The humiliation of our defeat generated compensatory fantasies that America’s greatness could be restored by invading miserable little countries like Grenada. The waste of blood and treasure produced a self-absorbed “me generation”that helped propel America’s political life to the right.

In recent years, a plethora of books have been published on the lessons of Vietnam. A “revisionist” school has grown which argues that the United States could have won the war. Former CIA Director William Colby’s new book, “Lost Victory,” goes even further. He claims that we won the war in Vietnam, only to lose it in America. His book makes a vital contribution to the debate on this searing national experience.

From the perspective of his 16-year involvement in the Vietnam War, both in Washington and Saigon, Colby marks as major mistakes President Kennedy’s support of the overthrow of President Diem, the dispatch of half a million U.S. troops to fight a people’s war, and our failure to support the South Vietnamese army (ARVN) when North Vietnam invaded in 1975. While there is nothing new in this, Colby also argues that by then, the pacification program finally had won the war in the villages, creating a new foundation for prosperity, democracy, and stability.

Colby remembers an unguarded trip across the Delta by motorcycle in 1971, where he passed through areas that a few years earlier were totally dominated by the Viet Cong. Other colorful stories dramatize his central point: While the VC controlled much of the countryside in the late ‘60s, by the early ‘70s pacification had driven the Communists into Cambodia and cut them off from the bulk of the population.

Credit for this turnaround is given to CORDS, an integrated program to provide development and self-defense at the village level, and to the Phoenix program. Anti-war activists claimed that Phoenix was a CIA assassination program. Colby is unapologetic about it, except to say it was not very effective. He makes a persuasive case that Phoenix was aimed at capturing VC leaders (who clearly were pursuing a program of deliberate assassination). That many would resist and be killed, now seems obvious.

“Lost Victory” is less persuasive in arguing that success in pacification equaled winning the war. During that same period, I worked on arms control at the National Security Council. My colleagues in the next office, who ran the war, did not exactly exude success. And while the South Vietnamese turned back a large northern assault in 1972 with massive U.S. air and advisory support, three years later, without such help, they collapsed. It is difficult to escape the impression that there was a vital lack of cohesion and determination among the South Vietnamese.

Colby makes clear that the U.S. military and their civilian leaders (particularly in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations) have a lot to answer for. Fighting the wrong war, the military wasted crucial years and 50,000 American lives chasing guerrillas in the jungle--then left behind a hollow South Vietnamese army.

In Washington, our leaders squandered time and political capital calibrating the next useless escalation of bombing in the North when they should have been figuring out how to control villages in the South. Colby describes top officials happy as schoolboys when they finally get evidence that the bombing worked--a picture of a single burnt-out truck on the Ho Chi Minh trail. The ineffective deployment of half a million men turned off the American people--not only on Vietnam but on the responsible use of American power elsewhere in the world.

Colby explains how it took more than 10 years for the United States to understand the kind of war we confronted and find the right strategy to fight it. The overthrow of Diem was a key political blunder that led to chaos and the desperate introduction of U.S. ground forces. All current and aspiring policy-makers should read Colby’s compelling account of the classic stupidities that brought it about.

But the primary malefactors were the mindless bureaucracies that “did their thing” regardless of its relevance to the war effort. The U.S. Army trained the ARVN to fight the kind of war we found in Korea, not the war the Viet Minh fought against the French, because that was what our Army knew how to do.

Both military and civilian programs ignored the principle that in a guerrilla war, the people are the prize, not territory--this despite the fact that Gen. Giap’s and Che Guevara’s books on guerrilla warfare were published in English in 1961 and Mao Zedong’s treatise on people’s wars had been in print for years.

Colby claims to have understood the problem during this first tour in Saigon in 1961. Unlike the authors of most such memoirs, he candidly blames himself for not pushing his views harder in those early days when they might have made a difference. Time and again, he talks about “staying out of the line of fire” when crucial issues were being debated in the U.S. Embassy.

He seems bewildered at the virulence of the anti-war movement, which he portrays as a “know-nothing” phenomenon fixated on images of Tet 1968--the summary execution of a guerrilla in a Saigon street, Viet Cong invading the U.S. Embassy. In fact, polls show that several months earlier, a majority of Americans already disapproved of the war. Tet merely hardened this opposition.

Serving in Saigon for the crucial years, 1968-71, Colby can be forgiven for not appreciating how U.S. public opinion turned off on the war. But by slighting the U.S. combat role in favor of the less-well-known pacification story, his book inevitably and unfairly makes those who opposed the pointless slaughter of American boys seem foolish and flaky.

Colby believes that the United States has been morally correct to fight to contain Communism. The brutality and incompetence of the North Vietnamese conquest of Indochina and the current rejection of Communism throughout the Communist world proves Colby morally right.

His main conclusion is that we can avoid anti-war reaction and still battle Communist insurgencies against our friends and allies if we pursue a strategy that combines local defense and economic reform. While I am sympathetic with this approach, it is hard to escape the impression, even from Colby’s book, that the American people are fundamentally too isolationist to sustain it.

America has no imperial vocation. Unlike the British in earlier centuries, we have no elite class whose third son goes off to colonial service. Nor have we a lower class happy to earn a living by waging war abroad.

Equally important, we do not have a national philosophy powerful enough to convince us that sustained sacrifice is justifiable. The “white man’s burden” is not for us. We will fight for freedom and against palpable threats to our security. But in the Vietnam War, our sense of threat shifted from the Communists to the local draft board. And the corruption and authoritarianism of the Saigon regime made it hard for many Americans to feel we were fighting for democracy.

In a sense, both sides in the American debate over the lessons of Vietnam are right: We could have won, but our heart was not in it.