Huế 1968, Mark Bowden
I picked this book because I was in the mood to circle back to the Vietnam War, a conflict that has really stuck in my craw over the past couple of years. You can probably pick any arbitrary conflict in US history and point to it as primogenitor of The Way We Are Now, but many of the characteristics of the war–guerrilla warfare, atrocities committed against civilians, political malfeasance, the interface of warfighting and novel technology–seem particularly important. For whatever reason, the war haunts me.
Reading about the Battle of Huế reminded me of another book I read in the past few months, Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides. Both do a very good job of establishing the chaotic, surreal, dehumanizing aspects of the war. In the Vietnam War in general, and the Battle of Huế in particular, you see what happens when human beings, or their deaths, are viewed merely as means to an end.
In the epilogue to Huế 1968, author Mark Bowden points out that the greatest toll was paid, not by US or NLF or ARVN troops, but the civilians in Huế. It’s shocking how blithe American soldiers became to the suffering of innocent people, and it puts paid to the lie that we cared at all about the lives of the Vietnamese. By the end of the battle, commanders had effectively initiated a gloves-off policy whereby anyone who looked Vietnamese was a valid target. Old men, children, pregnant women, students: all were subject to naval shells or M-16 bullets, or worse torments, not to mention the desecration of their bodies and the shattering of their surviving families. The NLF too comes off very poorly; they too committed atrocities against their own people, crimes which to this day are not properly acknowledged in unified Vietnam.
US leadership also comes in for a well-deserved pummeling from Bowden. The commanders on the scene often wasted their men’s lives or enacted policies which led to innocent deaths. Their leaders in the Pentagon and the White House come off way worse. General Westmoreland, leader of the MACV until shortly after Huế and the Tet Offensive, seems willfully ignorant, even decades later. His quotes from the time of the battle and from his autobiography show the thinking of a man who knows there will never be accountability for his terrible decisions. Willful blindness from LBJ, McNamara, Rostow, and other civilian leaders is also on display here. If there was any justice in the world, all of these men and many more would have been tried for war crimes a la Nuremberg. We see in their impunity an example that continues today with the architects of the Iraq War and our remaining involvement in the Middle East and Africa–an example that no doubt inspires the leaders of other conflicts in the world to this day.
What I found most alarming about the Battle of Huế was that, in reading about it, I found myself getting a thrill out of the whole thing. It’s like the alleged quote from Truffaut about how there’s no such thing as an anti-war movie. Reading about the battle, knowing how much suffering resulted from it, understanding its pointlessness; I nonetheless found myself imagining myself as one of the Marines, thinking about what it would be like to roam through the city under fire, smoking cigarettes and launching attacks and shooting at whoever I saw. It feels like some kind of primal instinct for conflict that I cannot remove from myself. There’s this raw animal nerve that is activated by reading about death and destruction, almost a yearning to be its agent. It feels sick, like I’m the kid from Apt Pupil who finds himself unduly fascinated with the crimes of the Nazis. Because of my age and lack of fitness, it’s far more likely that if I were ever to find myself in a conflict like this, it would be as one of the innocent civilians, either dying myself or mourning the loss of loved ones. But being an American insulates one from having to really grapple with these issues. When you live in a society for the past several decades has only fought wars of choice, it’s difficult not to see yourself as a “protagonist,” in some sense of the word.
One thing reading about modern conflicts has done for me is cemented the notion that there is no such thing as a good or noble war. Inevitably, military leaders are going to start authorizing civilian death, and if they’re American leaders, they will NEVER be held accountable for it. Instead they’ll just make money from their sinecures in American industry. I hope there’s some accountability for them when they die. Will there be accountability for their fellow citizens, people like me who, questioning or otherwise, benefit from or are blind to the effects of these murderers’ actions? It feels like I would go insane if I stare into this abyss too long.