Vietnam: Embers of War
How it all began
Neil Sheehan, author of Bright Shining Lie, one of the best known contemporary books about the Vietnam War, gives great importance to the January 1963 Battle of Ap Bac where the Viet Cong defeated the Army of the Republic of Vietnam in a decisive conflict. Some say it is where the Viet Cong first “won their spurs.”
Fredrik Logevall’s Pulitzer prize-winning new book, Embers of War, is the reminder we needed that Ap Bac, and all that came after it, was chapter two of the Vietnam saga.
The insanity of America’s war in Vietnam is best seen through the prism of the French experience and in light of Cold War rhetoric.
Vietnam, part of Indochina, was a French colonial possession from the 1870's.
As early as 1919, there was a Vietnamese drive for independence that was rebuffed by western powers in the aftermath of WWI.
Logevall traces the burgeoning Vietnamese nationalist sentiment in the interwar years led, in part, by the maturing and charismatic Ho Chi Minh.
The Japanese invaded southeast Asia during WWII but Logevall reminds us that they allowed France to remain in administrative control of Vietnam, only throwing them out when the end was near.
Many of us picture Ho Chi Minh as the graying communist but he was unabashedly pro-American during WWII, helping to rescue downed U.S. pilots and deliver them to freedom. Russia’s Stalin never fully trusted Ho, deeming him weak on communism and, indeed, Ho’s primary goal was independence for Vietnam.
In the wake of WWII, Viet Minh forces, the army of the insurgent Vietnamese, went to war against the French in a bloody conflict which lasted until 1954 when the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu and the Geneva accords were signed.
The story of America in Vietnam begins with WWII and Logevall traces how U.S. presidential and foreign policy, beginning with FDR, shaped the French involvement and our intervention.
One event and one person loom large in the narrative: the Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War and the rise to power of Ngo Ding Diem as the South Vietnamese leader.
A Communist China became the transcendent U.S. political issue of the 1950’s and 60’s and Diem became the albatross around the American neck.
Eisenhower so cemented the US/Diem relationship that John Kennedy, often depicted as the president who could have made the critical choice, would have done very well to have just held the line where our commitment was concerned.
U.S. leaders had plenty of intelligence information about the failure of Diem to create a viable government in the South as well as a fresh memory of the French defeat, yet on our merry way we went.
Logevall, in Embers of War, does a superb job explaining how our willful ignorance was a fatal error.
