Personal Effects

This year, on the 20th anniversary of the U.S. pullout from Vietnam, the Tennessee Alumnus's Jenny Nash asked alumni to remember their wartime experiences and put them in perspective. She found lives forever changed, men and women still examining their motives and emotions. For an overview of the war, she turned to Dr. Charles Johnson, UTK associate professor of history and a military historian.

When Dr. Charles Johnson decided to teach a course about the Vietnam war, he was determined to do it right, from the beginning.

"I was going to approach it as a good historian and not just jump in post-World War II. I was going to go back to the 1890s when the French began to colonize Indochina,"says Johnson.

After doing some reading in preparation for the course, he realized he hadn't gone far enough back.

"I thought, 'What kind of a historian are you? The Vietnamese people have a culture that goes back thousands of years.' The Chinese, I find out, occupied Vietnam for a thousand years and when they were gone, the Vietnamese were still there.

"I went all the way back to 1895 because I'm such a historian,"laughs Johnson ruefully, "but it didn't take me long to realize that I was making the same mistake we [the U.S.] made: we were seeing the war entirely through western eyes. It's a different kind of world than we know,"says Johnson.

That different world made for a very different and complex war, and Johnson's difficulty in understanding it mirrors our own difficulties, as a nation, in coming to terms with the Vietnam conflict. It was the longest war in U.S. history, and more than 55,000 Americans lost their lives in it. Many more bear physical scars from wounds, and nearly all who served, as well as their relatives and loved ones, carry some psychic scars.

Perhaps because of their ancient culture, the Vietnamese have a different view of war, says Johnson.

"They see war as a long process, a series of stages. The first stage is the conversion of the population to the rightness of your belief. Then, once you've convinced quite a few people, i.e., the majority of the population, that your war is just, then you arm them in small ways and you begin to pick away at the aggressor, be it French or Chinese. As you do that, you're weakening the enemy's will to occupy your nation," says Johnson.

If a lack of understanding of our enemy's culture hampered us, so, too, did a blindness to our own failings, says Johnson.

"I think that for most people there was a desire to do goodÑto save this small part of the world from a communist takeover. But there was a sort of national arrogance that was involved in the decisions that were made regarding the war. We were king of the hill in 1965. There wasn't much that we were afraid of or that we felt we couldn't do. We thought we could do anything we wanted to. We didn't have any real sense of limits on our power," says Johnson.

Even today, some think we could have won if we'd done things differently. Johnson isn't so sure.

"I believed that for a while,"Johnson says, "and there are a significant number of studies that come at it that way. The Air Force believes that if they'd been able to go in early and do what they did late in the war that they would have driven the Vietnamese either to their knees or to the bargaining table. Some people in the Army believe that if we had gone into Laos and cut the Ho Chi Minh trail, as if it were a super highway -- which it wasn't -- that that would have made the difference.

"But if we had expanded geographically, it simply would have widened the war again and given us more to do. I'm not at all convinced of the Air Force's idea that an early large hit would have worked. It certainly would have damaged the Viet Cong infrastructure a lot more, but I don't think it would have changed their minds. And that's what you'd have to do.

"What really turned me around in my thinking about the Vietnam War was Neil Sheehan's book, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam. It won the Pulitzer and the National Book Award a few years ago. He worked on it for 17 years. He was a reporter for the New York Times in Vietnam. He concludes, and I find his argument really persuasive, that the more we did of what we knew best to do, which was going in with guns and firepower and trying to dominate these people, the more we alienated the people we were supposed to be converting. Beyond that, his conclusion, and he comes to it really reluctantly -- I know because I talked to him about it when he lectured here -- was that South Vietnamese society was so corrupt and incapable that whatever we did to try and help made it worse, because we brought in more money, more troops, more inflation, and, most importantly, more corruption."