Light at the End of the Tunnel: A Vietnam War Anthology

567 Pages·2010·3.4 MB·English

by  Andrew J. Rotter

LIGHT AT THE END
OF THE TUNNEL
A Vietnam War Anthology
Third Edition
Edited by
Andrew J. Rotter
To my students (again)
Published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
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http://www.rowmanlittlefield.com
Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom
Copyright © 2010 by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including
information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote
passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Light at the end of the tunnel: a Vietnam War anthology / edited by Andrew J. Rotter.—3rd ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-7425-6133-5 (cloth: alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-7425-6134-2 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Vietnam War, 1961–1975—United States. 2. Vietnam—Politics and government—1945–1975. I. Rotter, Andrew Jon.
DS558.L54 2010
959.704’3373—dc22
2009052939
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information
Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I: A Chronology of U.S. Intervention
Chapter 1: Getting In, 1945–1952
1. Ho Chi Minh: The Untried Gamble
Robert Shaplen
2. The United States, Its Allies, and the Bao Dai Experiment
Mark Atwood Lawrence
Chapter 2: Fighting Shy, 1953–1961
3. Dwight D. Eisenhower and Wholehearted Support of Ngo Dinh Diem
David L. Anderson
4. Geneva, 1954: The Precarious Peace
Ellen J. Hammer
5. The CIA Comes to Vietnam
Edward Geary Lansdale
Chapter 3: Digging In, 1961–1968
6. No “Non-Essential Areas”: Kennedy and Vietnam
Herbert S. Parmet
7. The Tonkin Gulf Resolution
Robert S. McNamara
8. Lyndon Johnson Chooses War
Fredrik Logevall
9. The Tet Offensive, 1968
George C. Herring
10. A Dissenter in the Administration
George W. Ball
Chapter 4: Getting Out, 1968–1975
11. Nixon, Kissinger, and a Pax Americana
Jeffrey Kimball
12. Bombing Hanoi, Mining Haiphong, and the Moscow Summit
Stephen E. Ambrose
13. Stabbed in the Back
William Colby
Part II: In Country
Chapter 5: Allies and Enemies
14. Ngo Dinh Diem, the Impossible Ally
Seth Jacobs
15. Ngo Dinh Diem, Modernizer
Philip E. Catton
16. The Foreign Policy of North Vietnam
William J. Duiker
17. The National Liberation Front and the Land
Tom Mangold and John Penycate
Chapter 6: The Battlefield
18. Getting Hit
Philip Caputo
19. Feeling Cold
Wallace Terry
20. Nursing and Disillusionment
Lynda Van Devanter
21. “They Did Not Know Good from Evil”
Tim O’Brien
22. My Lai: The Killing Begins
Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim
Part III: Controversies and Consequences of American Involvement
Chapter 7: International Dimensions of the War
23. The Soviet Union and American Escalation
Ilya V. Gaiduk
24. China and the American Escalation
Qiang Zhai
25. The Vietnamese and Global Revolutions
Odd Arne Westad
Chapter 8: Laos and Cambodia
26. The War in Laos
Timothy N. Castle
27. Bombing Cambodia: A Critique
William Shawcross
28. Bombing Cambodia: A Defense
Henry A. Kissinger
Chapter 9: Interpreting the War
29. A Clash of Cultures
Frances FitzGerald
30. An Opportunity for Power
Gareth Porter
31. A Defense of Freedom
Norman Podhoretz
32. An Act of Imperialism
Noam Chomsky
33. An Assertion of Manhood
Robert D. Dean
Chapter 10: The War in America
34. Working-Class War
Christian G. Appy
35. Seeds of a Movement
Tom Wells
36. Women at the Barricades, Then and Now
Myra MacPherson
Chapter 11: The Legacy of War
37. Saigon: The End and the Beginning
Duong Van Mai Elliott
38. Homecoming USA
Arnold Isaacs
39. Amerasians: A People in Between
Thomas A. Bass
Chapter 12: Afterword
40. Letting Go
Le Ly Hayslip
Notes
Sources
Preface
THIS IS THE THIRD EDITION OF A BOOK OF READINGS on a conflict that ended over a generation
ago. After the first edition came out in 1991, I never imagined doing another one, much less a
second other one, but it has come to this, and I must say I am delighted. That there remains a
good deal of interest in the Vietnam War is due, I think, to several factors. First, students want
to know how or why the United States lost the war. Losing a war is something the United States
had not done until it was forced to leave Southeast Asia by treaty in 1973, its objectives
unachieved and within two years defeated. Some students find this upsetting. Others simply
want to understand how it happened, with the hope that it never happens again. Second, and
connected to this, are the comparisons many commentators make between the United States’
war in Vietnam and U.S. conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan that continue at this writing. Many
students think that the lessons of Vietnam, insofar as they understand them (and in truth my own
charges are modest on the first day of the semester, having rarely had much exposure to the
Vietnam War in high school history courses), should have prevented the United States from
going to war in Iraq, at least. Others, more skeptical of the comparison between the two wars,
still wonder whether U.S. policymakers and military officers were sufficiently attentive to the
consequences of Vietnam before embarking on the efforts to remove Saddam Hussein from
power and to create a stable and democratic Iraq.
Most of all, though it takes some gentle prodding to get the stories, this generation of
American college students has older relatives—parents, aunts and uncles, now sometimes even
grandparents—who were part of the Vietnam War generation. Some of their relatives, the
students report, never talk about the war, either because they managed to stay aloof from it or
because the memories are too painful to discuss. Others opposed the war, to greater or lesser
degree; some of these remain proud of their antiwar activities, while others, the students note
with surprise, hint at what they say were shameful deeds done in the interest of bringing the
war to a close. Nearly every American man born during the early 1950s still remembers his
draft lottery number. And each spring in which I teach History 217: The United States in
Vietnam, 1945–1975, I have students whose fathers, aunts, or high school social studies
teachers served in Vietnam. “My father was an artillery officer.” “My aunt was a nurse at a
field hospital.” “My teacher was there, but I don’t know what he did because he refuses to talk
about it.” It is more and more the need to find out about their parents’ generation’s war, that
awful, divisive war, that brings today’s college students to a class on the subject, and that
makes necessary yet another revision of this volume.
The scholarship and writing on the Vietnam War has become considerably richer and often
more sophisticated since I put together the second edition of Light at the End of the Tunnel in
the late 1990s. I have thus made a number of changes in the readings offered here, and I have
tweaked the organization of the book to reflect in particular the growing interest in
understanding the war as an international event, not just a bilateral or trilateral conflict. The
book is divided into twelve chapters, the first four of which provide a chronological survey of
the U.S. war in Vietnam. Each of these chapters contains two or three scholarly accounts of the
war and, with the exception of chapter one, a passage or two from the personal accounts of
participants. Chapters 5 and 6 concern the war itself, examining, in turn, the Vietnamese who
fought with and against the Americans and the Vietnam battlefield. The remaining chapters treat
the consequences of the war for Southeast Asia, the United States, and the world. They cover,
respectively, the global Cold War context of the conflict, the overflow of the Vietnam War into
neighboring Laos and Cambodia, the scholarly controversy that has emerged over the sources
and results of the war, the antiwar movement and some of its impact on American society, and
the legacy of the war for the two countries and peoples most directly involved in it.
Chapter 12, an afterword, is an excerpt from a book by Le Ly Hayslip, a Vietnamese
woman. I include it not only because it is a moving piece of writing but also in order to leave
the reader with the testimony of someone who lived in Vietnam while the war was going on.
Most American students who take courses on the Vietnam War are by their own admission
chiefly interested in the American side of the conflict; if, for example, you ask how many died
in the Vietnam War, most will unthinkingly give their estimate of the number of Americans who
died there. But it is important to remind students, and all readers, that the war engulfed Vietnam
to a far greater degree than it involved the United States—indeed, Vietnamese today see the
American War as just one more in a long and bloody sequence of conflicts undertaken, in their
view, to dominate them. Le Ly Hayslip’s tale conveys some of the pain and pathos of the
Vietnamese experience of the war, and it thus seems to me an appropriate place to end the
anthology.
I have tried to choose readings that are diverse in their coverage and orientation,
interesting, provocative, and, as ever, intellectually responsible. Teachers may, of course, edit
the collection by assigning only certain of its sections or reorganizing the book to suit their
needs. While I have previously suggested that the book be used with a published collection of
primary source documents on the war, such volumes are hard to find today; some enterprising
scholar should produce such a book. In the meantime, the presence of documents available
online, including those at the presidential libraries, the State Department series Foreign
Relations of the United States, and the Texas Tech University Virtual Vietnam Archive, makes
it possible to assign selected ones that support the readings here. I hope above all that this
book will be of use to students, mine and others, who, a generation removed from the Vietnam
War, nevertheless continue to look for answers to their questions about the conflict.
Acknowledgments
MY THANKS TO NIELS AABOE AT ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD, who encouraged me to do a third
edition of Light. Michelle Cassidy at the press kept the balls in the air; I hope it was not this
project that drove her to graduate school. Jehanne Schweitzer saw the project through. Many
scholars made valuable suggestions for improving this edition; Seth Jacobs was particularly
helpful and supportive. Julia Meyerson drew the map that appears on page xxii, and Noam
Chomsky, Tom Wells, and William Shawcross generously allowed me to reprint their words
without charge. Judith Oliver, chair of the Colgate Faculty Research Council, and Lyle
Roelofs, Colgate’s Provost and Dean of Faculty, provided a significant publication subvention
and thus made this book happen. Padma Kaimal once more bailed me out again and again.
Over the years, Vietnam veterans Pappy Patchin and Nellie and Tom Coakley have enriched
my thinking about the war. I am most grateful to my students at Colgate University, who amaze
me, year after year, with their dedication to History 217: The United States and Vietnam. This
one, like the last one, is for them.