Face It -- Our Behavior in the War Was Evil

For all the breast-beating media coverage of the fall of Saigon a quarter-century ago, we still insist on ignoring the salient point of the U.S. war in Vietnam that terrorized their country, scarred ours and took 3 million lives: Our behavior was evil.

Yes, we, a decent, educated and free people, did something enormously vicious and stupid. But we can’t admit to its full dimension because to do so would call into question that assumption of national virtue, our most revered but corrosive characteristic. Even now the war must be viewed as a “mistake,” a “quagmire,” a “bad compromise” or any other term suggesting the lost path of the innocent but never acknowledging the descent into barbarism. For such behavior is reserved only to those who live under a flag different from our own.

Ignoring French entreaties to let go the ghost of their Vietnam colonialism, our government prevented the 1956 elections to unify Vietnam, which the French had agreed to, and flew in Ngo Dinh Diem, a recluse from a New Jersey Catholic seminary, as the “George Washington” who would lead a South Vietnam of our invention. A decade later, when monks in his mostly Buddhist country set themselves afire in opposition to Diem’s oppressive regime, our government judged his continued presence an inconvenience and the Vietnamese George Washington was left to scurry for safety in the sewers of Saigon before our assassins caught up with him.

What followed was the full Americanization of the war, a war in which we went on to drop more deadly explosives on the thin stretch of land called Vietnam than we did in all of World War II, a blitzkrieg treated in the media as more of a logistical failure than the high moral crime it was. And that those whom we bombed dared shoot down our planes is still commonly regarded as an affront to our national integrity.

The excuse for this madness is that we faced a powerful enemy. But our leaders knew at the time that the enemy they described with the oft-repeated propaganda slogan “the international communist conspiracy and its timetable for the takeover of the world,” bore no relation to Vietnam. Communism there was nationalistic, just as Tito’s had been in Yugoslavia, and would inevitably end up at odds with any nation, communist or not, that tried to dominate it. The overtures of Ho Chi Minh -- who had cooperated with the U.S. military during WW II -- for normal relations with the U.S. were spurned. Sadly, the trade, investment and tourism that is now changing the face of Vietnam could have begun back then without all the death and destruction. Instead we dragged Vietnam into the vortex of the Cold War under the guise of stopping the spread of “world” communism, even though China and Russia were fighting pitched skirmishes across their long and vulnerable common border before the U.S. buildup in Vietnam.

The “domino” theory, in which a victorious Hanoi would sweep across Asia and then the world, was always known to our policymakers to be a cruel hoax. Indeed, the domino fell the other way. The victory of the Vietnamese communists led them into a war with communist China, a reminder to their giant neighbor that the defeat of the U.S. would not be turned into a pretext for a repeat of the Chinese suzerainty that had once controlled Vietnam for a thousand years.

The war never had a national security purpose for America. President Lyndon Johnson understood that well before he committed to sending a half-million troops to kill or be killed, as the tapes he recorded when president clearly reveal. “I stayed awake last night thinking about this thing,” he told McGeorge Bundy, his national security advisor, on May 27, 1964, “and the more I think of it . . . I don’t think it’s worth fighting for, and I don’t think we can get out, and it’s just the biggest damn mess.”

But the tapes also reveal that the reasons for not getting out were political: “The Republicans are going to make a political issue out of it,” warned a confidant, and Johnson agreed, “It’s the only issue that they’ve got.” So to appease the demons of U.S. domestic policy, we attempted to carpet bomb Vietnam into the Stone Age.

After Johnson, Richard Nixon intensified the bombing of Vietnam while he journeyed to Beijing to toast the leadership of Mao Tse-tung in a final mockery of the goal of stopping communism as the oft-stated purpose of the war.

Why revisit all this now? Because it is a reminder of what Hannah Arendt, writing about the Holocaust, once referred to as the banality of evil, that dangerous state of hubris that turns good people into monsters, a process destined to be repeated unless honestly confronted.