Review of Whitewash/Blackwash: Myths of the Vietnam War

 by Nathan Alexander  

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Most scholarship on Vietnam has focused on American hubris and defeat, ignoring the role of the South Vietnamese armed services while overemphasizing the role of the North Vietnamese desire to unify their country. Recently, Vietnam Veterans are beginning to challenge this narrow view with their own written accounts of the Vietnam war.

The academic canon on the Vietnam war was essentially complete by 1972. David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest would become the most well known of “Tet Scholarship,” those books written in the wake of alleged US defeat during the Tet Offensive of 1968. Contemporary works such as Michael Herr’s Dispatches and Francis Fitzgerald’s Fire in the Lake would translate the complexity of the war into one of the more accommodating images conveyed to Americans on network television: the Vietnam war is the story of America’s imperial hubris, its belief in the omnipotence of its military power and its gross ignorance of foreign culture. The argument was so quickly accepted by America’s elites that it hardly occurred to anyone that the final word should not be said on a war that was still far from over.

The 1980's witnessed a renewal of interest in the Vietnam war, and the “Tet scholarship” of Halberstam and his colleagues began to be questioned. Large areas of the war had been neglected by the Tet Scholars who seem to have assumed it not relevant to establishing their conclusions. The entire history of the war from 1968 until 1975, for instance, had been ignored.What was the point in writing about the details of a defeat whose fate was determined by American failure at Tet? Even today there is little work that has been done on the ARVN, the South Vietnamese armed services, who were assumed to be incompetent and an unworthy object of research. The war, the Tet School had argued, was about American hubris and defeat. Insofar as it was about the Vietnamese, it was about Vietnamese nationalism—as defined by the North Vietnamese desire to unify “their” country. The story of the ARVN was linked to the story of American hubris and failure. In fact, their stories are the same. The same is true of the South Vietnamese themselves. If their story is merely the duplication of American pride, to write of America’s defeat is to account for their failure as well. Unsurprisingly, the Tet School neglected telling the story of the ARVN and the South Vietnamese, dismissing them as corrupt and concealing the remains of both under the catastrophe of US defeat.

Today these lacuna are being addressed by several revisionist schools of thought on the war. Increasingly, Vietnam veterans are rewriting the accounts of the war which, until recently, have been dictated to them (and the American public) by the journalists who originally reported it.

It is in this context that Vietnam Veterans Bill Laurie and R.J. del Vecchio have written their short monograph Whitewash/Blackwash: Myths of the Vietnam War. Whitewash/Blackwash is a concise summary and refutation of the assumptions that underlie the “Tet” school of thought on the war. The book is intended to be an introduction to a much larger text on the war, to be published later in 2006 by Bill Laurie.

Whitewash/Blackwash lays out the claims of the revision school of thought on the war and challenges those of the Tet school. First, Laurie and del Vecchio believe the war had more to do with global and Vietnamese political considerations than ethnic nationalism. The authors correctly see American involvement in Vietnam as part of the larger containment strategy directed against communism. They criticize recent attempts to portray Ho Chi Minh as a simple nationalist, referencing his allegiance to dogmatic Marxism. They are sharply critical of attempts to portray the Viet Cong guerillas in the south as simple freedom fighters. The authors remind the reader that the stakes in the Vietnam war were not national solidarity but democracy or totalitarianism. The Tet school gloss that the war was a struggle for “ethnic independence” conceals the political realities for which the South Vietnamese and Americans fought.

In the second part of their book the authors address myths coming from the representation of the US war and the military in the American media. Here the significance of the Tet school’s insistence that the war was “nationalist” becomes clear: Viet Cong and North Vietnamese atrocities are committed for the sake of resisting “historical domination,” not imposing totalitarianism on the south. The New Left in particular was assiduous in translating the most embarrassing aspects of Ho Chi Minh’s Marxism into something more savory to the liberal palate. By 1968 the war had been recast in the eyes of the media from the political “defense of democracy” to one of “national liberation.” The focus of the American media on US atrocities reflected the media’s (and America’s) own ambivalence over the meaning of the war.

Part three of del Vecchio’s and Laurie’s book addresses myths surrounding the ARVN’s integrity, the effectiveness of US military strategy, US POW treatment and the war’s winnability, and the cultural stereotyping of the Vietnam veteran. The authors bring attention to the heroic ARVN stand at Xuan Loc in 1975. They point out recent North Vietnamese sources testifying to the success, among many, of the US military’s Linebacker bombing of North Vietnam in 1972.

The book concludes appropriately with a discussion of what happened to the South Vietnamese who remained behind after the Saigon fell in 1975. The vicious retribution enacted by the Northern Communists against southerners(Bulldozing ARVN cemeteries for instance), the employment of concentration camps to “reeducate” (and execute) former supporters of the South Vietnamese Regime, and the tragedy of the “boat people” all expose the lie of the “ethnic jamboree” assumed by many of the war’s opponents to take place upon American withdrawal. The myth today that Vietnam is now somehow “unified,” may be the most perverse myth of all.

Whitewash/Blackwash is a long overdue gauntlet, thrown down at the feet of an academic establishment intent upon justifying the outcome of the Vietnam War. The authors have summarized recent revisionist scholarship on the war and it is to be presumed that their lengthier book will articulate in greater detail their conclusions. It is only now, over thirty five years after the ARVN and their American allies threw back the Communist offensive in Hue, along the DMZ, in Saigon and the Delta during Tet 1968, that scholarship is beginning to follow suit.

Order techconsultserv">Whitewash/Blackwash: Myths of the Vietnam WarFor more information on the authors, see the Vietnam Veterans Legacy Foundation review.

Book Reviews, The Meaning of the Vietnam Veteran, Vietnam War

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