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Vietnam: A War Lost and Won | 
 enlarge | Author: Nigel Cawthorne
Publisher: Chartwell Books
Category: Book
List Price: $9.99
Buy New: $7.94
You Save: $2.05 (21%)
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Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 964231
Media: Hardcover
Edition: Reissue
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 9.4 x 8.9 x 1.2
ISBN: 0785824456
Dewey Decimal Number: 959
EAN: 9780785824459
ASIN: 0785824456
Publication Date: August 30, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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 WHEN FIRST WE PRACTISE TO DECEIVE February 8, 2005
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
We become enmeshed in our own deceptions and lose all sense and recollection of what we were trying to do in the first place. Simplifications that were once convenient become quagmires that we can't escape from when they are no longer so. Pretences that we thought we could get away with become embarrassments and millstones round our necks when the truth starts to get out. Objectives that seemed clear at early stages turn out to have unforeseen difficulties to them that we would rather people did not understand, so we start by blurring them in the minds of others and end up in fog and confusion ourselves.
The Vietnam war really needs a Thucydides, but it has not lacked for chroniclers and commentators, much of the story has got out into the public record, and at least Nigel Cawthorne's account is level-headed and free from histrionics or preaching. It doesn't come over to me as a political work in the sense of taking a particularly judgmental stance regarding the combatants, and while Cawthorne obviously knows an atrocity when he sees one, where there are wider lessons to be drawn he leaves it by and large to his readers to draw them. I have not attempted to verify the detail, but a good deal of this ghastly narrative rings a bell, and I would guess that he is unlikely to be far wide of the facts in general. The miasma of deception that pervades the book is not of the author's creating, it comes from the actors. The Gulf of Tonkin incident that led to the first ratcheting-up of the stakes in the war seems to have been fabrication. Victories were regularly claimed that were no victories at all. Bombing of neighbouring countries was happening and being denied with barefaced mendacity. However it is one thing to lie to other people if one's own mind is at least clear. What in my own view is a lot worse is a pig-headed refusal to see that some basic strategic assumptions were at best questionable. Underlying this conflict was a perceived need to combat some ill-defined spread of international communism, often conveniently summed up as the domino theory. Any reasonable person could see that the Soviet Union was a squalid nuisance and that firmness was needed in dealing with it. In addition it had aspirations as a world power seeking parity, or more, of status with America, in consequence of which America invented the concept of something called `the West', a number of nations given rather more of a role than they might have wished in furthering American objectives and threatened with domino status if they stepped out of line. However it had been obvious from an early stage to President Eisenhower for one that red China was no domino nor any lackey, to say the least, of the Soviet Union, but the domino concept had caught hold, and that was what the war in Vietnam was originally supposed to have been about. Neither the Soviet Union nor China, it became increasingly clear, had much influence over Ho Chi Minh or General Giap, but we were in there now and we thought we had to stay there. Strategy after military strategy failed but the pretence of success had to be kept up, and the worse we were faring the more the same failing approach was seen as the remedy, in a familiar way -- Milton's `Serbonian bog...where armies whole have sunk'. There were even people whose credulity ran to believing that some sort of democracy was on offer from some quarter, although their number can't have included many Vietnamese.
Let me take you to the New York Times of 9/4/67. There you will read `US encouraged by Vietnam vote: officials cite 83% turnout despite Vietcong terror', and more along the same lines. Does this remind you of something in the early weeks of 2005? Cawthorne's conclusion is interesting. We lost the wretched war anyway, and now here is Vietnam providing sweatshop labour for American commerce. The Soviet Union and any supposed threat from it have gone, and I would add that it would have collapsed anyway through its monstrous war economy with or without either Mr Reagan or the war in Afghanistan. The Vietnam war achieved precisely nothing that I can see, but we went into it as self-righteous know-alls. We are now back with that mentality, still seemingly unable to understand what motivates people and how it differs from what motivates us, under similar mendacious pretexts. It's not so much the deception that bothers me as the self-deception in it all.
 Vietnam a War lost and won July 6, 2003
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Vietnam, there are so many perspectives that have come out of this war that it has become increasingly difficult to determine exactly where ones own stance lies. Nigel Cawthorne in his book takes a revisionists approach and although he is generally scathing of American involvement in Vietnam he also highlights the short comings of the North Vietnamese leaders.Diem is critised for his repeated human wave tactics (as he should be) as he sent many of his fellow country men to their certain death. Many other authours steer away from such criticism of the North Vietnamese leadership and tend to build up the great victories attained by Diem and Ho Chi Minh's cabinet. Why this is done is anybodies guess. Diem thought nothing of losing 1500 men to American forces 45. Cawthorne points out that the North Vietnamese as a concious effort kept their troops mortality rate marginally below their birth rate. According to Cawthorne this enabled the Vietnamese to always be assured of a fighting force. The book carefully outlines the inportance of the winning of the hearts of the Vietnamese people and how heavy handed tactics on civilians by Americans was probably one of the best Weapons the NVA and Viet Cong had. Cawthorne does not let the North Vietnamese get away that easily though he reminds the reader that the Communists also were responisble of much atrocities and even their conscription at the point of a gun does not go unpunished. Cawthorne provides a good insight into one of Americas biggest problems in the war, the civil unrest back home. He also provides a good perspective on the My Lai Massacre and Calleys argument as to why he did not consider himself a murderer. All in all it is a good book but at times can turn into a mind numbing reiteration of dates names and places that can make for uncomfortable reading. Also who ever editted the book needs to lose their job as the countless number of typo's becomes rather irritating and leaves you wondering as to whether or not the book was proof read at all.
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