A belated review of historian Mark Moyar's remarkable book, "Forsaken Triumph," retelling how a flawed war strategy coupled with anti-war news media sunk the sovereign Republic of Vietnam. 

"The war in Vietnam . . . was not to be a foolish war, fought under wise constraints, but a wise war fought under foolish constraints."
– Mark Moyar in Triumph Forsaken (2006)

Sipping the local Singha brew at a flightline "hootch" bar along a jungle airstrip in Southeast Asia, young off-duty airmen are kibitzing above the din of F-105 fighter-bombers taking off at full throttles with racks of 500-pounders under their wings.

It is 1965. The Vietnam War is beginning to heat up.

One young man in the tropical flightline bar (yours truly) says to no one in particular:

"Bomb Hanoi? Nah. Not on our lives."

We laugh, yet again, at joke #10 in our repertoire of what passes for barracks humor. In a few precious hours we will count the Republic F-105 Thunderchiefs (a.k.a. "thuds" to us), as one by one they return to base, touching down with empty bomb racks, another sortie over North Vietnam, unreported by news media anywhere.

Today their return is 100%, but it is not always so. When the unthinkable happens, a pall settles over our jungle air base. Long faces everywhere, mess hall to chapel. Friends of the downed crews are glum, quiet over the tragic loss(es). Survivors, yet to be informed.

My smart-alecky remark about not bombing Hanoi, ironically, reflects the typical, cynical, young GIs' exasperation with LBJ's "limited" warfare. The reaction of most of us then twenty-somethings, young Turks all, is summed up by one seething sentence: "We're asked to win this f—— war with one arm strapped behind our backs."

"Limited war" puzzles us. So, too, are its fuzzy, dippy cousins, "appropriate response," "measured" and "graduated pressure." What the hell is THAT all about? Who does the measuring? What's appropriate? Do we really want to win this g– d— awful bloody war, or not? Defecate or get off the pot, dammit.

Fundamentally, "limited war" violates longtime U.S. military precepts. That is, when faced by an intractable foe, apply overwhelming power at the point of attack, to overwhelm the enemy, drive it to ground.

LBJ inherited JFK's batch of "the brightest," also called "Whiz Kids," led by a know-it-all former car-maker, the later regretful Secretary of Defense, Robert S. McNamara. Opting for "limited war," not all-out, they squirrelly contradicted advice of wiser, seasoned heads, mainly military, often called "warmongers." Fighting a limited war became a politically correct, politically expedient Rx on how to lose slowly, painfully, with devastating loses, in a protracted conflict in a faraway place.

What WAS Washington thinking? Such decisions, far above our junior pay grades, were incomprehensible to us jungle lackeys. Pull our punches? Not give the struggle our all? But then, what did we young, dumb "boots on the ground" know? We had not studied von Clausewitz's treatises on war, or War & Politics 101. Our lives were merely on the line. Ours was not, in the old soldiers' phrase, to question why.

News media in general, not yet labeled "mainstream," selectively slanted field reports of this internecine war, most written from relatively safe Saigon hotel balconies. Most but not all civilian correspondents were anti-war, we reckoned, some downright anti-military. Few had served, themselves, in the military, nor were they embedded as in a future war. Their outlook toward us in the green jungle fatigues could be described, generally, as uppity condescension mixed with revulsion. One newsman was surprised to find college degrees among us upcountry jungle rats.

We came to recognize a disparity between what news media told folks back home, and the reality of "our" war. News media, presumably on our side, were calling play-by-play in a different ballgame. That came as a shock to us, frankly, believers in basic fairness, and some measure of objectivity in news fare.

In widely circulated AP wire stories back home, and in UPI dispatches by acerbic war critic Neil Sheehan, slanted reports came down every week, a sort of on-going anti-war propaganda campaign. Chief war correspondent for the ever-dovish New York Times, David Halberstam, was particularly venomous toward the American presence in South Vietnam, rallying the people back home to his point of view. Summed up, it was "Get Out."

Reading the domestic press, a different war emerged that our realities in the field. (This would be the experience also of GIs in another war 40 years later in Iraq.)

Disparity between war reports and reality is finely detailed in one exceptional book, Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965, by Mark Moyar (Cambridge University Press, New York, 2006). Historian Moyar of the USMC University delivers in 512 pages, including 80 pages of copious notes and footnotes, a shocking indictment both of news media in 'Nam, and bonehead decision-makers in Washington, D.C. It is a disheartening read, but a must if you want full transparency on what truly happened there.

About the Times' hit man Halbersham, Moyar writes: "Before he left [Vietnam] he would do more harm to the interests of the United States than any other journalist in American history." at [p. 170]. Not well known is that JFK on the Q.T. asked Halberstam's publisher at the Times to remove him covering this war, so offensively biased were his reports. (Request denied.) As early as 1963, with the South beating up on the VC, Time magazine lamented "the war is lost." (Shades of pre-surge Iraq among some Congressional Democrats?)

Defeatism — no, fatalism toward this ugly war — precipitated a decline of always tenuous popular support for "our" war that eventually, with botched war strategy and God-awful decisions, put South Vietnam on the chopping block. It was "unwinnable," said CBS-TV's avuncular Walter Cronkite. His word became the mantle for and model of coverage by his fellow, mostly liberal – yes, defeatist journalists.

(To us, a thin tabloid military newspaper that later I wrote for, Stars & Stripes, was the absolute best source of untarnished war news. I kid you not. "Troops" swore by it, not escaping the cheesy pin-ups published by my Tokyo editors.)

One hesitates, momentarily, to label war-covering civilian journalists as crackpot "liberals," or as isolationist-crazy "conservatives." Moyar does not make this mistake in Triumph Forsaken. Only the facts, please, and let the chips fall. Probably the journalists were both liberal and conservative, in varying degrees, in sharing the pessimistic vision. No doubt, though, the "liberal" mind-set predominated. Not unlike today.

Losing this war became a viable option to most journalists covering it, maybe wish it to be a self-fulfilling prophesy. Their reports became a balm to pacifists back home, including the chickenhearted, "hell-no, we won't go" mob" of self-centered, mostly students out of deferments, some fleeing to Canada.

Besides being out to preserve their own skins, letting others serve, these creeps were moved by seemingly credible reports from South Vietnam that forged the bizarre notion that we, the USA, were up to no damn good. (Later, John Kerry brought home the same argument, and actually ran for president, in part, on it.) Pardons wold come later, blanket-like, with no consequences, courtesy of wimpish Jimmy Carter.

(Reality was, ours mission was a noble attempt to preserve an independent, allied, in-trouble sovereign nation.)

The unilateral "limited war" espoused by LBJ & Co. was based, it seems, to have any rational basis, on the harebrained, bizarre notion that the Comintern-trained enemy, North Vietnam, and its Moscow-schooled leader, Ho Chi Minh, would somehow reciprocate in kind, or hang it up. Sure. And pigs, finally, would fly.

In his remarkable book, Professor Moyar (BA, summa cum laude, Harvard, and Ph.D. Cambridge University), denotes and deconstructs flawed reportage of this war, and decisions which sunk South Vietnam on the home front. Moyar zeros in on the cabal of anti-military reporters such as Halberstam and Sheehy and, to a lesser extent, AP's Malcomb Brown, to make his necessary points. His is a history book well worth reading if one feeds on truth, not smoldering falsehoods, about this unfortunate war.

Nay-sayers to this war were somehow regarded back home as awful truth-tellers. Who knew what they were up to? Many would write well-selling books about their experiences, cashing in, and hit the lecture circuit.

If you snap up his book, be prepared to paw through its convincing, set-the-record-straight points. Pay attention also to his notes and footnotes, where gems reside, such as this quote from a fed-up president:

Several years later, [LBJ] told Time-Life journalist Robert Sherrod, "David Halberstam killed Diem. He made us assassinate him. That man is a traitor, so they give him a Pulitzer Prize. They give Political Prizes to traitors nowadays."
– at p. 468, cited from Robert Dallek's Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Time (1999).

Truth be told, and Moyar documents it unstintingly, South Vietnam actually was winning the war early on, during the period covered in his book, up to 1965. Without direct United States military involvement, and only 370 advisers (at first). Then Ho upped the ante, while LBJ crowed about "limited war." That made the North's bold military advances practically immune from full counterattack. The way had been paved for the enemy, not us, to ratchet up this war, and eventually to claim victory, despite its losses on the battlefield.

In a contemporaneous postmortem of how American media covered Vietnam, Congressman Zablolcki (D-WI) lambasted news media in these scorching words, prescient of today, in many scary respects:

The conduct of the U.S. press is a grave reflection upon their entire profession. They are arrogant, emotional, unobjective and ill-informed. The case against them is best expressed by their having been repudiated by much of the responsible press. [p. 262]

Halberstam of the Times, Moyar points out, "failed to report on [RVN] government successes, and wrongly maintaining the South Vietnam military 'was in shambles.'" [p. 264]. Contrary to Halberstam's inaccurate – read, biased — reports, it was "a virtual stand-off" with the ARVN (Army of Republic of Vietnam) actually winning. Even Ambassador Lodge, complicit in the coup that killed President Diem, was forced to admit Diem's "strategic hamlet" program was "in good shape" [p. 268].

General Giap, the North's chief strategist, wrote after the war, that the North feared, even planned on, full-scale invasion by the United States and South Vietnamese in 1964 and 1965. If that had happened, he asserted, "the war would not have evolved in our favor at it did." Promises of "limited war" had its consequences in blood. Moyar writes:

[President] Johnson worried that forceful action [would] embolden the enemy, when in reality, the lack of forceful action emboldened the enemy." [p. 412]

On August 2, 1964, three North Vietnamese PT boats fired torpedoes at long range, 10 miles or so, at the USS Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin. Two PT boats were "sacrificed" to Maddox's long-range, radar-assisted gunnery, say the North's historical accounts. Yet today, even this indisputable fact of history is labeled, by some war critics, as untrue, or at least suspicious. Such is the never-ending undermining of America in Vietnam.

Bombing Hanoi, as we redneck jungle jims sardonically joked about, came only late in the war, on a limited scale, to release our Hanoi-kept and tortured POWs that Jane Fonda dismissed as war criminals. Mining of Haiphong harbor was off the table, so as not to disturb USSR ships offloading cargoes of war supplies that would later on kill our soldiers and our South Vietnamese allies.

Cigar-chomping General Curtis LeMay, whose bombers led to the final capitulation of Japan in 1945, suggested in his view in his typical blustering way, ". . . bombing them back to the Stone Age." (He was a a gift for editorial cartoonists!) But even ever-constant war critic and academic scold, Daniel Ellsberg, one of McNamara's "Whiz Kids," favored air strikes into Laos to halt infiltration on an only slightly interdicted trail, and into the heart of the North, to include mining of harbors. "Bomb Hanoi? Mine the harbors?" Not so wild a dream after all, and a recurrent nightmare to our intransigent enemy, Ho's North Vietnam?