If you have any interest in Vietnam, or war stories in general, you should read A Bright Shining Lie by Neil Sheehan. While thick and packed with facts, it was surprisingly readable thanks to the bizarre and unlikely life of John Paul Vann, who is the focus of the book. Sheehan was a war correspondent stationed in Vietnam, and represents himself as someone who wanted to crush Commies and was horrified by how badly the US was botching the job. That's a good position to tell a story like this from - otherwise I would have been more paranoid that the author had an ulterior agenda that colored his criticisms.
I admit it did take me 4 or 5 renewals from the library to finish it though.
The incompetence of everyone with the rank of General and higher during that conflict is mindblowing. I came into this book with a pretty low opinion of Kennedy, and this cemented it. Lyndon Johnson looks similarly bad. Nixon not so much, but he and Kissinger were already on my shit list after reading Mao: The Unknown Story. Sheehan suggests that success in WWII made it impossible for these Presidents and Generals to adapt to any other kind of warfare.
To demonstrate how the military resorted to meaningless statistics to imply progress, Sheehan presents a portion of a report General Harkins made to Secretary of Defense McNamara and the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the relatively early stages of the war.
During April 434 ground operations were mounted. This was increased to 441 in May.Sheehan doesn't however do the math. There are more days in May than April, and those numbers mean that average operations per day actually dropped from 14.47 to 14.23! Even ignoring the fundamental meaningless of those numbers I would have been firing people immediately for that level of stupidity.
In fact, if GWB hadn't been willing to keep firing Generals until he found one that could do the job, I think there is a real possibility Iraq could have gone the way of Vietnam. Generals Franks and Abizaid in particular were making me very concerned that Iraq was screwed.
What was most striking for me though, was how much the experience of Vietnam shaped the Iraq war. (The book was written back in 1988, so this is entirely my conjecture.)
Firstly, it explains why the media is so hostile to the military now. The war reporters back then were massively hoodwinked by the powers that be, and ended up making the situation far worse by continuing to encourage public support long after the venture was floundering. I can understand why they might be bitter and suspicious this time around. And frankly, while I find it obnoxious, petulant whining about the military is definitely better than the ass kissing that apparently used to go on.
Secondly, why the US military allowed the Iraqi army to collapse rather than just subvert it. As I recall, there was a lot of second guessing going on about that decision for a long time. But the Vietnam lesson was that you don't win wars with lousy corrupt troops, and if the Iraqi army broke so quickly against the Americans they wouldn't have been any better after switching sides. Sheehan describes the South Vietnamese armies as irredeemably corrupt (largely from their leadership), cowardly, and far crueler to the peasantry than the already nasty Viet Cong. By the time significant US boots hit the ground the US advised ARVN had done a fantastic job of rallying the peasants to the side of the Viet Cong and supplying the VC with US weapons.
It would also appear that the US military has gotten a lot better at what was known as "pacification" in Vietnam; namely the conversion of hostile or ambivalent civilians into willing collaborators. I suspect that made all the difference in Iraq.
Anyway, Sheehan does not paint a pretty picture of the way the US conducted itself in Vietnam, but it is still an amazing story with some inspiring moments.
