Understanding the fall of South Vietnam

I ran across this from the great Jerry Pournelle:

The anniversary of the fall of Saigon and the consequent death of about a million people who thought the United States would protect them. The end of American credibility: not only did Kennedy allow the assassination of the man who invited his help, but when Viet Nam was invaded by three army corps with armor and other weapons from Russia, the Democratic majority Congress abandoned our allies, and we had the shameful scene of pushing helicopters off the deck of a carrier to make room for more.

Viet Nam was not a civil war. The insurgent movement was defeated. Then in 1972 the North sent down 150,000 men with as much armor as the Wehrmacht sent into France, The Army of the Republic of Viet Nam – ARVN – with US air and materiel support destroyed the enemy. Fewer than 50,000 returned north. US casualties were under a thousand, in a battle larger than most in World War II. It was no civil war; it was an invasion from the North; and it was defeated by ARVN, with little US ground support and few American casualties. It was victory.

Of course we do not celebrate victory in Viet Nam.

When the North built a new army and sent it south, the Democrats of the Congress denied all air support, and voted materiel support of twenty (20) cartridges and two (2) hand grenades per ARVN soldier. Accordingly and predictably Saigon fell and the War ended with a North Viet Nam victory. Executions, reeducation camps, boat people and other refugees accordingly followed; and the dominoes fell in the killing fields of Cambodia.

The Democratic Party does not celebrate this victory, but it is all theirs; and the myth that the USA was defeated by Viet Cong guerrillas grows and grows.

And the one certain lesson of the fall of Saigon is that you cannot trust the United States to defend you no matter how much blood and treasure has been spent, or how little will be needed: US politics trump any national commitment. It was not always so.

Let's hope this new book helps dispel the myth of the victorious VC guerrilla.

A much needed book

From the publisher description:

The defeat of South Vietnam was arguably America’s worst foreign policy disaster of the 20th Century. Yet a complete understanding of the endgame—from the 27 January 1973 signing of the Paris Peace Accords to South Vietnam’s surrender on 30 April 1975—has eluded us.
...

Ultimately, whatever errors occurred on the American and South Vietnamese side, the simple fact remains that the country was conquered by a North Vietnamese military invasion despite written pledges by Hanoi’s leadership against such action. Hanoi’s momentous choice to destroy the Paris Peace Accords and militarily end the war sent a generation of South Vietnamese into exile, and exacerbated a societal trauma in America over our long Vietnam involvement that reverberates to this day. How that transpired deserves deeper scrutiny.

Related:

Feet of clay and heads of stone

America’s reporters in Vietnam became unwitting tools of Hanoi’s intelligence apparatus

Even worse, most of them were cool with that

This is a fascinating and important read:

PHAM XUAN AN: VIETNAM’S TOP SPY

Why Did U.S. Journalists Love Him?

The life and career of Pham Xuan An requires honest scholars to revisit the established narratives of the Vietnam War, the reporters who got famous there, and the internal CIA wars of the 1970s.

When An was revealed as a murderous communist spy, most of the reporters who had worked with him were ready to extol him as a fair and honest journalist.

I thought An deserved to be lauded by the communists as a hero of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. He had done his job well. But I didn’t see him as an American hero. So when an excerpt from Bass’s book appeared in The New Yorker in 2005 quoting journalists I knew as singing his praises, I wrote a letter to the editor, saying:

“It was one thing to have been against the Vietnam Warmany of us werebut quite another to express unconditional admiration for a man who spent a large part of his life pretending to be a journalist while helping to kill Americans.”

Related:

The irony of David Halberstam

Vietnam

The MSM is shrinking because it keeps celebrating people like Halberstam and Mike Wallace: idols revealed to be neither astute nor patriotic.

Grant provides a concise, brilliant illustration of how An played 3-D chess with his American friends at the Battle of Ap Bac (January 1963).

The short version: the esteemed “journalist” used his American connections to discover the timing and location of an ARVN offensive. He alerts his superiors in the Viet Cong. VC uses that foreknowledge to ambush and defeat ARVN offensive. “Journalist” explains to his American friends that battle proves that SVN forces are unable to match VC in morale and training, hence they are doomed to lose. American reporters use the battle to undermine American officials in Saigon who are optimistic about prospects for ARVN in future.

Fifty years later, J-schools and reporters still think those naïve American reporters should be role models.

Before William Colby became head of CIA, he clashed with the chief of counterintelligence, James Angleton, because the latter believed that Colby’s operations in Vietnam were insecure, riddled with spies, and susceptible to Communist disinformation. Turns out, he was right.

After Colby became DCIA he fired Angleton and downplayed the importance of counterintelligence.

CIA proceeded to get conned by a long-series of double-agents and disinformation campaigns.

Related:

Spy Wars

This really is a big freaking deal

Are you really a ‘paranoid’ mole hunter if there really are moles?

Why we still hate Jane Fonda

Jane Fonda and Her Friendly North Vietnamese Intelligence Officer



The point here is not that Jane Fonda was a witting agent of the North Vietnamese communists, because there is absolutely no evidence for such a charge. It is that she knowingly placed herself in a position in which a hostile intelligence service could exploit her fame and her contacts for both covert intelligence collection and covert propaganda operations, and that, according to the North Vietnamese themselves, one of her close contacts was a covert intelligence officer whose entire purpose in 1972 was to exploit people just like her. To imagine that he would not at least try to manipulate and exploit her is naive in the extreme.

Vietnam

Neo-neocon:

Vietnam: they lost the war, but won the battle

Who are “they?” The Left.

What war? Vietnam.

What battle? The one that determines who gets to write history.

It’s said that history is written by the winners, and that’s true. But Vietnam just may have been the first war in which those who opposed the conflict “won” in the forum of public opinion by convincing their fellow citizens and government to abandon the war itself, and then got to write most of its chronicles.

I think this is a classic example of journalism and the battle for "explanation space". "Everybody knows" means "what journalists agree on."

I've also argued that professional ambition played a role in the writing of the first draft of the history:

What is not often discussed is how professional ambitions make journalists defeatists. When wars go well, the uniformed military receives the praise. It is they who enter into history. We remember Nimitz and Patton, not the correspondents who wrote dispatches about the victories at Midway and Bastogne.

In contrast, Vietnam made the careers of David Halberstam, Seymour Hersh, and Neil Sheehan. Exposing military failure and atrocities makes the journalist the hero not the chronicler. It is a powerful temptation, one which could cause a reporter to lose proportion and distort the meaning of events. Yet this is not something that seems to get discussed much.

and that guild loyalty helps explain why journalists are unwilling to revise that draft. Vietnam and Watergate are the "heroic myths" that reporters use to justify their high opinion of themselves and their work.

Vietnam

On 30 April 1975, Saigon fell to the invading army of North Vietnam. Americans watched the last helicopters fly out of the city and then immediately got on with the task of forgetting their longest war.

Three books to combat the great forgetting.

Maj. Ed (Too Tall to Fly) Freeman, RIP

Farewell to an American hero

For the better part of 60 years, two old Army pilots who loved each other argued over many a meal and drink as to which of them was the second best pilot in the world.

The two shared the cockpits of old Beaver prop planes and Huey helicopters; they shared rooms in military hooches all over the world; they shared a love of practical and impractical jokes and they shared an undying love of flying and soldiers and the Army.

They also shared membership in a very small and revered fraternity of fewer than 105 men who are entitled to wear around their necks the light blue ribbon and gold pointed star that is the Medal of Honor, America’s highest decoration for heroism above and beyond the call of duty.

Vietnam: What we know now that we didn't know then

Who Owns the Vietnam War?

Above all, antiwar activists and critics of American policy in the media denied their own moral responsibility for what happened in Vietnam and Indochina once the policy they themselves had vociferously advocated—namely, withdrawal and disengagement—was carried out. When, four years after the fall of Saigon, Joan Baez, Richard John Neuhaus, and other former antiwar activists tried to draw attention to the plight of Vietnam’s boat people and the brutal tyranny that had been established in that country, their former comrades, led by celebrities like Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda, denounced them as “stooges” and CIA agents. “Even if the [North] Vietnamese had chosen the course of mass executions and plunder,” one of these former comrades stated in a letter, “it would have been our own strategies of terror and brutality that drove them to it.”

This collapse of ethical and intellectual integrity would have consequences far beyond Vietnam. In the decades to come, the Vietnam myth would justify the Left’s instinctual opposition to America’s efforts to contain Communist aggression in Latin America in the 1980’s, its characterization of the 1991 Gulf war as a campaign of “blood for oil,” and its denunciations of our interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11. The need to prop up the same myth in the face of a contradictory reality would fuel the “paranoid style” of leftist conspiracy-mongering in films like Oliver Stone’s JFK, Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911, and most recently and blatantly Loose Change, which argues that the Twin Towers were brought down by agents of the Bush administration. And, as President Bush discovered last August, it remains potent enough to trigger the most irrational and rhetorically violent responses when anyone dares challenge its proprietary construction of what the Vietnam war was in fact all about, and what are its lessons.

Historical analogies are never entirely accurate. They may not even be useful. But it remains true that our present and future actions are always based, to some extent, on our evaluation of past experience. Generals are often accused of fighting the last war. This is something that, when it comes to Vietnam, liberals and leftists have been doing for more than three decades, by refusing to confront (in words Peter Marin once flung in the face of American authorities) “their own culpability” and “their own capacity for error and excess.” Whatever the differences or similarities between Vietnam and Iraq, or between Vietnam and our global war with Islamic radicalism, the real analogy between then and now may lie in this tenacious refusal of self-examination by the liberal Left—especially when the facts utterly contravene its reflexive indictment of the motives, purposes, and actions of the American government.

Highly recommended

The irony of David Halberstam

Roger Kimball casts a cold eye (very cold) on the “sentimental rubbish” that the press gave us after Halberstam’s death.

A dissent on David Halberstam

I discussed Halberstam’s Vietnam reporting a few months ago:

Vietnam: a different sort of revisionism


A fragment of history, lost, never to be recovered

Vietnam reporting

Long before that, I noted that his career trajectory helped make defeatism part of the mental bias of ambitious military reporters:

What is not often discussed is how professional ambitions make journalists defeatists. When wars go well, the uniformed military receives the praise. It is they who enter into history. We remember Nimitz and Patton, not the correspondents who wrote dispatches about the victories at Midway and Bastogne.

In contrast, Vietnam made the careers of David Halberstam, Seymour Hersh, and Neil Sheehan. Exposing military failure and atrocities makes the journalist the hero not the chronicler. It is a powerful temptation, one which could cause a reporter to lose proportion and distort the meaning of events. Yet this is not something that seems to get discussed much.

Kimball points to this article by Hilton Kramer who also is not a Halberstam fan. One passage was interesting because of its insight into the journalism racket and for its perverse historical echoes.

What I was expecting that day over lunch were some sage observations about the way the policy of détente, following upon the debacle in Vietnam, was affecting the situation in Europe. But as the wine flowed and our conversation became more animated and confidential, the subject that was uppermost on the mind of my luncheon companion, who had spent many years in both Eastern and Western Europe, turned out to be something else. Rather to my surprise, I was suddenly treated to a long and acute analysis of what was happening to the Times’s foreign news coverage as a result of the Vietnam War. This was a subject that had clearly become a cause of considerable worry and professional chagrin for this writer, whose journalistic experience went back to the Second World War and who harbored few illusions about the kind of suffering and social wreckage that Communism had brought to the millions whose lives it had come to dominate.

The vehement, free-wheeling tirade to which I was treated that day touched on many particular people, editors as well as reporters, and many specific episodes, but its essential points were the following: The Vietnam War was proving to be a disaster for the Times’s foreign coverage. The paper had to send in all those reporters in relays to cover the war. Many of them were young men who had little or no experience of the world. They knew nothing about politics and even less about war. There were exceptions, of course, but very few. Some had never before had a serious foreign assignment or seen any military combat. At one point the Times had even sent in a fashion reporter from its Paris bureau. Communism was an abstraction to them. They thought the real enemy in Vietnam was the USA. They weren’t Communists themselves, but they proved to be complete suckers for the anti-anti-Communist line that was now ascendant in the Western press. History for a lot of these guys began with the election of John F. Kennedy, and most of them thought Bobby Kennedy was a saint. In Vietnam, they had three ambitions: to get out alive, to win a Pulitzer, and to see America defeated. Their whole view of the world was shaped by Vietnam. They saw the world divided into good guys and bad guys, and we were the bad guys. Then, when they had finished their stint in Vietnam, they had to be rewarded with assignments to more glamorous foreign capitals, where they were likely to understand even less than they had in Saigon, and where they seldom knew the language, the history, or the culture of the countries they were writing about. This was the kind of comic-strip coverage of foreign affairs the Times was now getting. All in all, it was probably a good thing that newspaper readers were now less interested in foreign affairs than they used to be. It was keeping the circulation of misinformation at a lower level than it would otherwise be.

I can’t say that this conversation changed my view of the world, but it certainly changed the way I read the foreign news columns of the Times, and not only the Times. It wasn’t until a little later, as I watched some of these Vietnam-era correspondents ascend to positions of power on the paper, that I realized they were bringing the same good guy-bad guy scenario, with America as the bad guy, to their coverage of the domestic scene as well.

If Kramer’s lunch companion was right, then the Times was repeating the mistakes of the US Army which helped set the stage for the Vietnam quagmire. After World War Two, the Army’s system of Professional Military Education went into decline. By 1962, this had produced a generation of officers ill-equipped to confront the strategic and operational challenges of counter-insurgencies and limited wars. It was these under-educated generals that Halberstam railed against in Vietnam and in his later books.

In the Spring 1998 issue of Joint Forces Quarterly, Lieutenant General Leonard D. Holder, Jr., and historian Williamson Murray explained why the service schools suffered this fate:

Despite the tributes U.S. military leaders lavished on the role of PME in preparing them for World War II, education fell into decline after the war. The Cold War with its monolithic dependence on nuclear weapons, which required little adaptation, was one reason. With a constant threat, there was less cause to study the complexities of strategy and war, particularly given the fact that America emphasized deterrence rather than combat. More-over, a generational shift in the l950s brought the junior officers of World War II to command positions. They had joined the military in the 1930s and gone to war as lieutenants and captains with-out receiving PME and returned home as colonels and generals. As a result, many discounted the role of PME in military professionalism. By the late l950s, the services had allowed professional military education to drift.

So it turns out that Halberstam and Co. were not that different from the hubristic, ignorant generals that populate their books and news stories about Vietnam.

There is one key institutional difference. The Army and other services went to great lengths to discover, learn, and teach the lessons of Vietnam. The journalist guild, however, still pretends that their heroes such as Halberstam got it right the first time in 1965.

Fighting the revisionists: The Swift Boaters

On Reliable Sources this weekend, Jeff Jarvis referred to the Swift Boaters as "obnoxious." It was just an aside and so he did not have to explain what he meant or offer any evidence.

This attitude is becoming the conventional wisdom within the MSM. The Swifties were bad. End of story.

In light of that, this post is a useful refresher.

Swift Boating the Swift Boaters

A true hero is finally recognized

A Hero of a Helo Driver

In a few days - 41 years after the events of a long-ago November - a white-haired retired guy named Bruce Crandall will receive the nation's highest award for valor, the Medal of Honor, from President George W. Bush.

He's always been a hero to the men of the 1st Battalion 7th U.S. Cavalry who counted on Crandall and his wingman, Ed (Too Tall to Fly) Freeman, when the chips were down in a fire-swept clearing called Landing Zone X-Ray in the remote Ia Drang Valley in Vietnam's Central Highlands.

Vietnam reporting

A couple of follow-up points about Halberstam and his band of knowing brothers. CSPAN did an interview with William Prochnau author of Once Upon a Distant War: David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan, Peter Arnett--Young War Correspondents and Their Early Vietnam Battles.

Here the author describes Neil Sheehan's background that earned him s spot in Saigon and gave him such deep insight into the war:

Neil Sheehan was 25 years old. A sometimes brooding, sometimes absolutely wildly humorous and wonderful Irishman who had worked exactly two weeks for UPI in Tokyo before the Saigon correspondent for this, second-rate, second-best news agency. The Saigon chief quit. They rustled around in Tokyo to see who could speak French; he spoke French. And suddenly, after two week's experience, he was the Saigon bureau chief for UPI, and it was 30 years before he really rid himself of Vietnam after that.

Here is Halberstam in his element with the media mob:

Well, Halberstam I describe as a brilliant brat. I mean, he clearly was the driving force. He worked for The New York Times. The Times, at that time was clearly the dominant and most prestigious newspaper in the world at that time. And television was not what it is today. That television came in occasionally with stringers and part-time correspondents and you'd see a little blip here and a little blip there about Vietnam, but Halberstam represented the most powerful media institution of all. He was 28 years old. He was a man of great passions, great angers. The lying and more deception of another kind, the self-delusion and the self-deception -- he felt was deluding itself as much as deluding the American people -- drove him to fits. At one point, in one very famous episode, he slammed his fist down on a table in a little cafe in Saigon and said that the commanding general, the American General Harkins, Paul Harkins, should be court-martialed and shot. And everybody in the room turned around and looked at this 28-year old making this kind of announcement. He was clearly the drivingforce.

Here is Sheehan's own explanation for his political evolution from hawk to dove:

I have sometimes thought, when a street urchin with sores covering his legs stopped me and begged for a few cents' worth of Vietnamese piastres, that he might be better off growing up as a political commissar. He would then, at least, have some self-respect.

Ideology as an unthinking tantrum. That is all it takes to become a journalistic hero.

A fragment of history, lost, never to be recovered

At a Harvard conference in 1983 David Halberstam told a touching story of the terrible trials he faced as a war correspondent in Vietnam:

During the fall of 1963, i was twenty-eight, and I went to the Mekong Delta with a man named Richard Tregaskis; he had been a hero of mine, who had written a book, Guadalcanal Diary, that i had greatly admired as a boy. We had spent what I thought were an entirely pleasant two days in the Mekong Delta, I had introduced him to treasured sources of mine. On the way back to Saigon, he turned to me and in a very soft voice said to me, "If I were doing what you were doing, I would be ashamed of myself." We traveled the rest of the way in Stony silence; my face, I am sure, was ashen."

Halberstam goes on to write off Tregaskis's remark to that old devil the Generation Gap. Those old reporters just did not understand the complexity and nuances faced by young reporters in Vietnam.

Still, i wish i knew what Richard Tregaskis saw in the Delta that made him think that Halberstam's conduct was shameful.

Vietnam: a different sort of revisionism

Very good review of a new book on Vietnam:

A Winnable War
The argument against the orthodox history of Vietnam.

I especially liked this part:

The primary weakness of the orthodox school, Moyar demonstrates, is its constricted historical horizon. For the most part, orthodox historians have covered the war as if the only important decisions were made in Washington and Saigon. This is an example of what has been called "national narcissism," the idea that history is just about us. Of course, important decisions were also made in Hanoi, Beijing, Moscow, and many other places. Moyar has exhaustively consulted the relevant archives and uses them to demonstrate the very real limitations of the orthodox view. He not only places Vietnam in its proper geopolitical context, but demonstrates the Clausewitzian principle that war is a struggle between two active wills. An action by one side elicits a response from the other that may be unexpected.

Orthodox historians often act as if Hanoi pursued a course of action with little regard for what the United States did. But Moyar demonstrates that the North Vietnamese strategy was greatly affected by U.S. actions.

This point was driven home to me in 1983 when the late Douglas Pike, the foremost American expert on Vietnamese communism and an early proponent of Vietnam revisionism, delivered a paper at a Wilson Center symposium on the war. Pike observed that "the initial reaction of Hanoi's leaders to the strategic bombings and air strikes that began in February 1965--documented later by defectors and other witnesses--was enormous dismay and apprehension. They feared the North was to be visited by intolerable destruction which it simply could not endure." But the air campaign was severely constrained, a fact that became increasingly apparent to Hanoi. As a result, North Vietnamese leaders concluded that the United States lacked the will to bear the cost of the war.

There is a big, important book to be written by a scholar from the new generation on the war reporters who made their bones in South East Asia. The review touches on them but I want more:

So why has Diem been depicted the way he has? First, he was a victim of press bias: No one did more to undermine Diem's reputation in the United States than David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan. Far from providing a balanced picture of the war, they pushed a decidedly anti-Diem view, and their prejudice was so transparent that a 1963 congressional mission described the American journalists as "arrogant, emotional, un-objective, and ill-informed."

But then, these same reporters were themselves influenced by others with axes to grind. Much of the criticism of the Diem regime's military policy was fed to them by the maverick U.S. Army adviser, Lt. Col. John Paul Vann. In addition, many American reporters relied on a Vietnamese journalist named Pham Xuan An, a Reuters stringer later revealed to be a Communist agent whose very mission was to influence the American press. As journalists such as Stanley Karnow later admitted, Pham was very good at his job.

I think Halberstam illustrates Moyar’s point about the Western insularity of the orthodox view. This problem was present even in the “first draft of history” written by those brave young reporters in 1962-65. (This article by Robert Elegant is very good on the subject).

Correspondents, briefly set down in the brutally alienating milieu called Viet Nam, turned to each other for professional sustenance and emotional comfort. After all, there was nowhere else to turn, certainly not to stark reality, which was both elusive and repellent.

Most correspondents were isolated from the Vietnamese by ignorance of their language and culture, as well as by a measure of race estrangement. Most were isolated from the quixotic American Army establishment, itself often as confused as they themselves were, by their moralistic attitudes and their political prejudices. It was inevitable, in the circumstances, that they came to write, in the first instance, for each other.

To be sure, the approbation of his own crowd gave a certain fullness to the correspondent's life in exile that reached beyond the irksome routine of reporting and writing. The disapprobation of his peers could transform him into a bitterly defensive misanthrope (I think here of one industrious radio and newspaper stringer who was reputed to be the richest correspondent in Viet Nam, except, of course, for the television stars). Even the experienced correspondents, to whom Asia was "home" rather than a hostile temporary environment, formed their own little self-defensive world within the larger world of the newcomers.

It was no wonder that correspondents writing to win the approbation of other correspondents in that insidiously collegial atmosphere produced reporting that was remarkably homogeneous. After each other, correspondents wrote to win the approbation of their editors, who controlled their professional lives and who were closely linked with the intellectual community at home. The consensus of that third circle, the domestic intelligentsia, derived largely from correspondents' reports and in turn served to determine the nature of those reports. If dispatches did not accord with that consensus, approbation was withheld. Only in the last instance did correspondents address themselves to the general public, the mass of lay readers and viewers.

I discussed another example here:

Mission to Niger and a Cautionary Tale from Vietnam

In his book the Best and the Brightest Halberstam goes to great lengths to appear knowledgeable about "the real forces" driving the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese. It’s nationalism and anti-colonialism; communism is just a canard. But thirty years later, with colonialism dead everywhere, Hanoi is still run by a Stalinist regime.
A glimpse into Halberstam’s thinking is provided by his obsession with McCarthyism. Anti-communism, that was the real cause of the Vietnam debacle:

All of this was part of one of the great illusions of the country and the Administration in 1961, the belief that the McCarthy period had come and gone without the country paying any real price, that the Administration and the nation could continue without challenging or coming to terms with the political and policy aberrations of that period.

Halberstam the Harvard man wielded Vietnam as a club against those awful men--those rubes-- who were mean to the China hands and Robert Oppenheimer. So which came first: his disenchantment in Vietnam, or his snobbish anti-anti-communism?

I think the snob factor is real. Halberstam goes on and on about the anti-communists ignorance of "nuance" their failure to appreciate "subtleties", etc. etc. Since Halberstam, like most US reporters in Vietnam had neither the language nor education to really grasp the nuances or subtleties themselves, what was he talking about? Was it just thatthose Marine officers in the Delta were not like him? Not as clever, not as well-read, not hip to the new world without absolutes? Not willing to suck-up to the super-credentialed reporter from the New York Times?

I’ve suspected for a long time that much of the "slant" to the reporting came from ignorant young reporters reading Graham Greene’s The Quiet American on the plane ride over to Vietnam.

Here is just one example of Halberstam’s ill-informed arrogance. In The Best and the Brightest he draws a savage portrait of Gen. Paul Harkins the top US military man in Vietnam during the Kennedy years. Harkins, he declared, was a "compelling mediocrity", a military nonentity, a careerist, a staff officer who knew nothing of infantry war.

Missing from Halberstam’s description is the fact that Harkin served as the deputy Chief of Staff in Patton’s Third Armythe finest Army level staff the US had in World War Two. This was the group that pulled off one of the great feats of modern war: the redeployment of Third Army to relieve Bastogne and cut off the Germans in the Battle of the Bulge. Patton’s staff was not a bunch of rear echelon paper shufflers. In the Third Army staff officers operated as extra eyes for Patton. They went to the front seeing, evaluating, reporting back to their commander.

None of this means that Harkin did a good job in Vietnam. But it does show just how shallow Halberstam’s understanding was. Harkins knew war. He had seen it from the bottom to the top. He had seen sieges, armored thrusts, grinding infantry advances and desperate defensive stands. If a reporter could be so knowing and yet so wrong on such a basic point, how can you trust him on anything?

Seymour Hersh

This article on America's most famous investigative journalist makes interesting reading in light of the MSM triumphalism over the Schiavo "Talking Points Memo."

Sy Hersh Says It’s Okay to Lie (Just Not in Print)

There are two Hershes, really. Seymour M. is the byline. He navigates readers through the byzantine world of America’s overlapping national-security bureaucracies, and his stories form what Hersh has taken to calling an “alternative history” of the Bush administration since September 11, 2001.

Then there’s Sy. He’s the public speaker, the pundit. On the podium, Sy is willing to tell a story that’s not quite right, in order to convey a Larger Truth. “Sometimes I change events, dates, and places in a certain way to protect people,” Hersh told me. “I can’t fudge what I write. But I can certainly fudge what I say.”

Previous posts on Hersh here, here, and here.

The New York article also notes the interesting arc of Hersh's career: he is praised and honored when he attacks Nixon or Kissinger or Bush or Rumsfeld. The MSM suddenly becomes concerned with his methods when he goes after JFK or Bill Clinton's appointees.

Hersh, of course, came to fame for "revealing" the My Lai massacre. But he was not always so energetic is digging for Vietnam fact nor was he always on the side of the victims. In America in Vietnam, G. Lewy quotes Hersh's response to the testimony of POWs on the conditions in NVN prisons:

There is evidence in the public record that Frishman [a former POW] seriously distorted the prison conditions inside North Vietnam.

Which is a really weasely way to call a POW a liar.

"John Kerry's real record as an antiwar activist"

Never Apologize, Never Explain

JOHN KERRY SAYS HE IS "PROUD" of his activities in opposition to the Vietnam War. Why, then, have he and his spokesmen consistently misrepresented them? Indeed the Kerry camp has been so effective in obscuring this history that both the New York Times and the Washington Post were forced to run corrections on the subject recently because their reporters relied on misinformation that the Kerry camp had succeeded in putting into wide circulation.

Roger L. Simon reviews Stolen Honor

The movie consists of interviews with now gray or graying men who were incarcerated and tortured in the Hanoi Hilton during the Vietnam War. Their stories are juxtaposed with the testimony of John Kerry at the Winter Soldier hearings. Despite the quality of the filmmaking, and my poor viewing conditions, I was deeply disturbed while watching this. It is not a "filmic" experience in the traditional sense. While viewing this movie, I imagine most of my generation find themselves reviewing themselves and their actions at the time rather than the film. I am far from resolving my view of Vietnam, although I still tend to think it was the wrong war. But the behavior of some factions of the antiwar side, factions which I fully supported then, were clearly out of line and as reprehensible as the war they wished to protest

RTWT here.

An important footnote to the history of the Vietnam war

Eddie Adams and the famous Tet photograph

Photographs Do Lie

Vietnam as product attribute and all-purpose response

The Kerry/Edwards campaign has a bad case of Vietnamitis -- no matter what the issue or the debate, they find a way to throw in Vietnam as their rebuttal, usually in a hysterical shriek that could serve as a parody in and of itself

From Captain's Quarters.

They really don't have much of a choice. As Kerry's fawning biographer admitted:

"Kerry decided to make Vietnam the centerpiece of his campaign for one clear reason: Imagine him without his military record -- he would just be another liberal from Taxachusetts," Brinkley said. "With Vietnam, he could challenge Republicans on their strongest position -- standing with the military and with the American flag. Now you're seeing the negative effects of that"