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Weep Not, Child by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1964)

‘Hurrah and victory for the black folk!’
(Typically naive political slogan Weep Not, Child, page 73)

Weep Not, Child was Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s first novel, written in English and published in 1964, the same year as Nigerian author Chinua Achebe’s third novel, Arrow of God. But whereas Achebe wrote about the Igbo people in Nigeria in West Africa, Thiong’o is a native of Kenya in East Africa, which is where all his fictions are set.

I write ‘written in English’ because, after writing three novels in English, Thiong’o came to feel strongly that the African novelist ought to write in his or her own native tongue and so, from the 1970s to the present day, his novels, plays and essays have all been written in his native tongue, Gĩkũyũ.

Via a long writing career, along with his committed political involvement, and his numerous essays, Thiong’o long ago established himself as a major presence in African literature, and has been nominated for the Nobel prize.

Weep Not, Child

It’s a short book, just 136 pages in the Heinemann African Writers’ paperback edition and, I’m afraid to say, after the monumental vision of Achebe’s Africa trilogy, or the stylish grace and lucidity of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s prose, Thiong’o suffers by comparison. His prose feels simple, almost school level, and the insights and ideas expressed by both the third-person narrator and the characters also seem childish in their illiterate simple-mindedness (more detail, below). That said, the very simplicity of the style arguably matches the stark (and highly political) outlines of the story.

Part One. The Waning Light

It’s set in Mahua village not far from Kipanga town. Ngotho is a middle-aged African, not well off, living in a village compound with his two wives, Njeri the eldest and Nyokabi. By Njeri he has three children, Boro, Kori and Kamau. By Nyokabi he has two sons, Mwangi, who died in the recently finished Second World War, and the boy Njoroge.

Boro fought in the white man’s war, and is now withdrawn and drinks too much. Kori works in an African tea shop. Kamua is apprenticed to a carpenter, Nangwa, in the village. The narrative kicks off as it is announced that Njoroge is going to school (Kamahou Intermediate School, p.109), a big achievement to be proud of in their community.

We learn about their neighbours who are each emblematic. The immediate neighbour is a man named Jacobo who owns a lot of land and a big house ‘like a European’s house’ (p.18). His wife is Juliana, a fat jolly woman. They have a daughter, Mwihaki, a little girl who Njoroge likes to play with. She’s in the year above Njorogoe at school and looks after him when he is a vulnerable new boy.

Mr Howlands is the local big white man, who owns most of the good land and a fine house and has lots of black employees and servants. His wife, the Memsahib, is bored, and regularly demands that the black servants be beaten and, periodically, sacked. Howlands is a product of the First World War, uncertain and disillusioned by the peace, who sought an opportunity and a purpose in Africa.

The older black characters, Ngotho and his friends, like meeting up in the barber’s shop in Kipanga. Recurring scenes turn the conversations there into a kind of chorus commenting on the main action.

Like Chinua Achebe, Thiong’o is not shy of depicting his people as they actually were, warts and unacceptable attitudes, customs and behaviour, and all. Njoroge is afraid of his father. Ngotho’s attitude to his wives:

When a woman was angry no amount of beating would pacify her. Ngotho did not beat his wives much. (p.11)

Children are routinely beaten and thrashed, at school or by their parents. Njoroge longs to be a bit older in order ‘to have the freedom to sit with the big circumcised girls and touch them as he saw the young men do.’ (p.22)

This community loves listening to old stories. The father, Ngotho, tells old folk stories, legends of the creation of the world by the Creator Murungu, as well as stories from when he was a boy and was press-ganged along with so many others during the white man’s first war. He explains that the Creator gave them all the land but the white man took the best of it away. In their little area the best land now belongs to the white man Mr Howlands.

As the narrative unfolds the Land Issue develops as the central theme. Ngotho obsessively remembers the words of Mugo wa Kibiro, an old medicine man and prophet who foresaw the arrival of the whites, and that they would seize the ancestral land given them by the Creator, but also that they would, eventually, leave. So:

the white man Mr Howlands thinks he owns the land. He thinks that ‘he alone was responsible for taming this unoccupied wildness’ (p.31)
Ngotho and Africans of his generation remember the folk stories about the Creator giving all the land to his ancestors in perpetuity, and passively wonders when the white man will leave and give it back to its rightful owners
Ngotho’s sons, especially Boro and Kamau, are disgusted that his father and father’s father were weak enough to have the land stolen from them by the white man

Njoroge’s father, Ngotho, loyally, faithfully works for Mr Howlands, turning up day after day, on time, and working the land with impressive fidelity, but in fact exemplifies the mutual misunderstanding about the land. Ngotho does all this not because he respects Mr Howlands, but in order to maintain his contact with land which he is convinced is his, and will one day revert to him and his sons.

Some of them have vaguely heard of a man named Jomo who came back from the war and calls for their ancestral land to be given back. One of the brothers refers to Jomo as the black Moses, come to lead his people home. (Presumably this refers to Jomo Kenyatta, the great Kenyan nationalist leader.) This chimes with the ways, as he attends school and learns to read, Njoroge develops a deep and simple Christian faith, that God rewards hard work with justice and fairness (p.49).

The thing is, the entire narrative is told in a kind of fog of ignorance and half understanding. The characters are illiterate peasants or barely urban workers. None of them have the education or articulacy to really analyse their situation. Things such as the land issue or the character of this rumoured leader, Jomo, are the stuff of rumour conveyed with great vagueness or naivety. Here’s a typical dialogue between young Njoroge and his older brother Kamau:

‘Do you think it’s true what father says, that all the land belongs to the black people?’
‘Yes. Black people have their land in the country of black people. White men have their land in their own country. It is simple. I think it was God’s plan.’
‘Are there black people in England?’
‘No. England is for white people only.’
‘And they have left their country to come and rob us of what we have?’
‘Yes. They are robbers?’
‘All of them?’
‘Yes.’ (p.43)

It’s not that it’s untrue, it’s just that it’s a very basic, very primitive account, on a par with the extremely simple creation myth which Ngotho tells his family. This makes reading the book frustrating, because all the characters are at such a very low level of education and awareness. Then again, maybe this is the entire point of the novel, to show the slow growth in awareness and political understanding of the main character, from village ignorance to more informed disillusion. But it’s an irritating read.

The menfolk gear up for a general strike, many coming to visit Ngotho to discuss it. They airily assume that all black men will join it because its aim is so noble, to drive the white men out of the land and reclaim their birth-right – that’s how simple and naive they are. Njorege, through whose eyes we see most of the action, doesn’t know what a ‘strike’ is. See what I mean by low level? How can something succeed when most of the characters don’t even know what it is?

Mr Howlands warns his black workers that if any of them join the strike they’ll be sacked on the spot. The Ngotho household is divided because his two wives tell Ngotho he would be mad to join the strike, achieve nothing, and lose his job. The theme of masculinity and patriarchy is evident and generally attached to Ngotho who genuinely doesn’t know what to do for the best.

Five years later New Year. Njoroge’s class assemble for their marks. He is top of the class (which made me reflect on how the schoolchild protagonists of this kind of novel generally are top of their class cf the natural intelligence driving Ugwu in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Half of a Yellow Sun). Mwihaki passed, too.

But they get home to find both their families in too much of a state to congratulate them. It was the day of the much-vaunted strike. Speakers came from Nairobi to address the locals, including Ngotho’s son, Boro, who has gone into politics. They describe how the white men came, stole their land and forced them to fight in two white men’s wars, from which they returned poorer than ever. Loud cheers.

To everyone’s surprise the police invade the stage and then usher onto it Jacobo, Ngotho’s neighbour, wealthy black man who has thrown in his lot with the whites. Outraged, Ngotho stands and strides toward the stage, and the crowd hesitates enough for the scene to crystallise as Ngotho for the blacks and Jacobo for the whites, before the crowd roars and surges towards the stage. The police reply with tear gas, truncheons and bullets. Two are killed. Ngotho is knocked to the ground and loses consciousness.

In the barber’s shop the old men discuss the riot and say it only goes to show that ‘we black people will never be united. There must always be a traitor in our midst.’ (p.60).

p.61 Ngotho is thrown off his land because it turns out it ‘legally’ belongs to Jacobo, who has now become his arch enemy. The family relocates to land owned by Nganga. It costs a lot to build new huts and Mrs Howlands has, of course, fired Ngotho, so times are very hard. But Kamau’s wages go up and they survive. He and Kori also donate money to continue funding Njoroge’s education.

There ought to be a name for the genre of story which is about the first member of a family to attend school and further education, often thanks to significant funding and sacrifices by his family or community. The same kind of story is told by Chinua Achebe in No Longer At Ease. Later, when he goes on to secondary school, the entire local area raises money for his fees, so proud are they of his achievement (p.105).

Interlude

Two and a half years later Fragments. An angry white administrator looks out over the Kenyan country shortly before returning to Britain, with the self-serving thought: ‘And to think of all we did for them’ (p.62). Some men gossip about the assassination of a black chief who was collaborating with the white administration.

We hear that Jomo has been arrested and a state of emergency is declared (p.63). This latter references dates events to October 1952, when the British authorities declared a State of Emergency after the Mau Mau murdered a loyal Kikuyu chief.

Njoroge continues to hear important things, central issues to the politics of independence, but his child’s point of view makes them frustratingly dim and naive.

Njoroge had heard about the colour-bar from his brothers in Nairobi. He did know what it was really. But he knew that the strike had failed because of the colour-bar. Black people had no land because of colour-bar and they could not eat in hotels because of colour-bar. Colour-bar was everywhere… (p.64)

Part 2. Darkness Falls

Two years later Njoroge has left primary school and been going to secondary school for two years (p.68). For his loyalty to the whites, Jacobo has been made a chief. The whites have banded together to protect themselves against the Freedom Boys of the Forest. Mr Howlands has been appointed District Commissioner.

Njoroge gets home to find the family assembled. Boro has come to tell them that Kori was arrested with a number of other agitators. As he’s describing it Kori comes staggering in, having jumped out of the police lorry carrying him and other prisoners. Boro regularly argues with his father. Ngotho refuses to take the Mau Mau oath from his own son. (This is the first mention of Mau Mau, p.71)

p.72 The men of the family discuss the Mau Mau. They all hope Jomo Kenyatta will win his court case and freedom. But he doesn’t.

Ngotho is upset because he has lost the vital connection with his ancestral land and wonders what kind of man that leaves him. He put all his hopes in Jomo. ‘For him Jomo stood for custom and tradition purified by the grace of learning and much travel’ (p.74).

What the text lacks in psychological depth or sophistication, it makes up for in the straightforward simplicity of its agit-prop rhetoric. As they discuss how Jomo lost his court case to be released from prison, Ngotho’s wife, Nyokabi, speaks out:

‘It seems all clear as daylight. The white man makes a law or a rule. Through that rule or law or what you may call it, he takes away the land and then imposes many laws on the people concerning that land and many other things, all without people agreeing first as in the old days of the tribe. Now a man rises and opposes that law which made right the taking away of land. Now that man is taken by the same people who made the laws against which the man is fighting. He is tried under those alien rules….’ (p.75)

Boro says the white people win because they stick together while the black people are divided.

p.76 Cut to Mr Howlands, now District Officer Howlands, in his office. Showing how embittered he is that his wife has left him to become a missionary. All he has left is the land which he has worked so hard to develop i.e. he’s not going to give it up without a fight.

Describes the malicious pleasure he takes in promoting Jacobo and setting one black man against another. Divide and rule. Jacobo comes in for order. He thinks Howlands likes him, respects his loyalty. But Howlands thinks he is a ‘savage’. I found the characterisation of Howlands thin and naive. He doesn’t sound or think like a British colonial administrator. He has the same simple, naive thoughts as the African characters i.e. I’m afraid, Thiong’o.

Jacobo feeds Howlands false information that Ngotho is a Mau Mau leader. Howlands gives Jacobo carte blanche to arrest Ngotho and his family for anything he can.

p.80 As a result Njeri and Kori are arrested for breaking curfew. Ngotho is abused by Boro for sitting by and doing nothing about the arrest. He becomes a shell. He looks none of his family in the eye. Young people no longer congregate in his compound to hear him tell the old stories.

p.82 Njoroge’s school receives a letter saying that if it doesn’t close down immediately, the headmaster and all the pupils will be beheaded. The kind of message sent out by the Viet Cong, by the FLN in Algeria, by umpteen jihadi groups across the Middle East – all collaborators with the oppressive colonialist authorities will suffer the ultimate penalty. Always the same logic to terrorise the entire population into submission.

p.84 The climate of fear created by the Mau Mau. Njoroge is preparing for the exam for entrance to secondary school. (Hang on, if that happens at age 11, as in the UK, and nine and a half years have been mentioned as passing since the opening scenes…well, no way was Njoroge one and a half when the narrative opened. I admit I don’t understand the timeline.

Njoroge laments that his infant friend Mwihaki’s father (Jacobo) a) became a leading figure in the white man’s homeguard and b) was attacked (no details).

p.87 Njoroge walks into town to see Kamau who tells him half a dozen local men were abducted and found dead in the forest, including the barber who hosted so many convivial evenings, and Nganga who kindly gave Ngotho permission to build a new compound on his land. The whites say it was the Mau Mau but the blacks say it was the whites who then blamed the Mau Mau.

Walking home Njoroge bumps into Mwihaki. He still holds a torch for her. She has grown, is an adolescent with budding breasts. Njoroge himself is tall, appears older than he is. They nervously make a date for the following Sunday.

They meet at the church where the preacher (who was once one of Njoroge’s infant school teachers) laments the tragedy, the bloodshed and fear, which have come over the land of the Gikuyu. He implies that the end of days is at hand.

Njoroge and Mwihaki walk back to her house i.e. the house of Jacobo. He isn’t there. He is always away on business but when he does return everyone is terrified of his power and anger. Unexpectedly Jacobo arrives with three bodyguards but, equally unexpectedly, he doesn’t abuse or threaten Njoroge, instead praises him for continuing school and says he will be one of those who rebuild the country.

Njoroge and Mwihaki go up a hill, look out over the plain, and worry that the end actually is at hand. They are both genuine Christians and wonder how Jesus could countenance the destruction of the world and all the people in it. They both struggle to express their emotions (and so does Thiong’o). In a burst she says she wants to live with him and be friends forever. But Njoroge is starting to see himself as a kind of saviour figure, sent to comfort and liberate the land from its white oppressor.

p.97 Cut back to Howlands who is portrayed as a pantomime villain, chortling at how easy it is to set black against black. What does he care if entire villages in the jungle are wiped out, mwah haha, the Sheriff of Nottingham played by Alan Rickman, he might as well be twirling the ends of his black moustache.

Enter Jacobo, the Sheriff’s dim sidekick. Somehow neither of them have managed to arrest Ngotho yet, despite Howlands allegedly having spent years scheming to defeat his enemy. Bit of a pathetic enemy, and pretty useless schemes.

Jacobo shows Howlands the most recent anonymous letter he’s received threatening death if he doesn’t leave off helping the white man.

Some months later Njoroge is heading a Christian procession to a nearby village, chatting to a fellow devotee, with a group of Christian woman walking behind them singing hymns. All of a sudden they are stopped by a white officer and realised they are surrounded by soldiers. The officer lets the women go then makes the boys and the men squat while he examines their papers. The black soldiers beat some of the black Christians.

Their preacher, Isaka, is separated from them because he has no papers. The others are told to be on their way but haven’t gone far before they hear two screams then machine gun fire.

p.102 Cut to Boro and his lieutenant hiding in the bush and discussing their next steps. It was Boro et al that the white man’s patrol was out hunting. We are given a very simplistic account of Boro’s motives, namely Revenge. Boro doesn’t care about the other’s fine talk about freedom. Killing the white man and his lackeys is his aim.

‘Freedom is meaningless unless it can bring back a brother I lost [in the white man’s war]. Because it can’t do that, the only thing left to me is to fight, to kill and to rejoice at any who falls under my sword. But enough. Chief Jacobo must die.’ (p.103)

In the fairy tale simplicity of this I suddenly heard the note of Victorian melodrama at its cheesiest. ‘Chief Jacobo must die!’

p.104 Njoroge graduates from junior school, the only boy in his area to do so. Many people in the area contribute to his school fees. He now has a full-blown messiah complex.

Njoroge now had a new feeling of pride and power for at last his way seemed clear. The land needed him and God had given him an opening so clear that he might come back and save his family and the whole country. (p.105)

Njoroge meets up with Mwihaki, as he keeps doing. It’s one year after the last time they walked up the hill. Now she criticises him for always talking about tomorrow and going on about the people. Njoroge replies with guff about Jesus and faith and hope and freedom and this completely reassures Mwihaki. I’ve no idea what age they’re meant to be, 11, 12, 13? It’s a childishly simple-minded conversation but without the charm.

p.108 So Njoroge starts attending the famous Siriana secondary school, a boarding school. It’s the first time he’s been taught by white teachers and he is surprised by how warm and supportive they are, surprised how boys from the other tribes of Kenya all get along.

One day a football team from a European school come for a game. To his surprise Njoroge gets talking to one of the boy supporters who is none other than Stephen, son of angry bitter Mr Howlands. Turns out the two boys share the same experience of being stared at and made uneasy by boys of the other race. They are both uneasy in this country covered in black stormclouds.

p.112 Mwihaki writes from back in Kipanga, where her father (Jacobo) lives in fear of attack. Every day bodies are found in the forest. She walked past some black people being beaten by police and begging for mercy. It’s a nightmare.

p.114 It’s the third term at the school. Njoroge really loves it, especially likes English lessons (of course), is awed by the way the white missionary teachers work alongside their black colleagues and black children with no colour consciousness at all. It is a sort of utopia.

With no warning Njoroge is called to the headmaster’s study and handed over to two policemen who drive him to a homeguard post nicknamed the ‘House of Pain’ where he is accused of being Mau Mau, interrogated and beaten unconscious. One night to recover then he’s interrogated again, this time by Mr Howlands who applies pincers to his genitals. Njoroge screams in agony. For the first time Howlands reveals what it’s all about: Jacobo has been murdered. Apparently, they’ve interrogated his father who, under torture, confessed to being Mau Mau and killing Jacobo which is, of course, nonsense. A few days later Njoroge and his two mother are released.

p.119 Ngotho on the other hand is detained. What happened is Jacobo was murdered and the cops arrested Ngotho’s son, Kamau. it was then that Ngotho decided to sacrifice himself for his son by walking into the nearest police station and confessing to Jacobo’s murder. Ngotho has become, for Howlands, the symbol of everything ungrateful and blocking his will in this wretched country. Hence the fury with which he tortures him, day after day.

In some obscure way Njoroge is racked by the thought that it’s his relationship with Mwihaku which somehow brought all this tragedy down on his family.

p.122 Ngotho is allowed home. He has to be carried out of the homeguard post. His nose is split in two, he can’t move his legs, he can’t sit without pain (was he in fact castrated, as Howlands in a frenzy told Njoroge?)

Out of the night appears the prodigal son, the accusatory son, the genuine Mau Mau, Boro. There’s a melodramatic scene where Ngotho struggles to sit up and blesses his son, tells him to fight on, before falling back on the bed and expiring. Victorian melodrama.

p.126 Five months later Njoroge is 20 years old. He is working as a shop assistant in a dress shop owned by an Indian. It is a humiliating come-down after all his fancy talk of saving his family and his country. Turns out that Mr Howlands was murdered the same night Ngotho died. His brothers Boro and Kamau are facing murder charges.

p.127 Thiong’o describes Howlands’ last hours of anger and frustration against Ngotho and his entire family really, really badly. Boro bursts in and accuses him of stealing the land, killing many black people, raping women etc. Howlands says it is my land. Boro shoots him. it is all done very, very badly, with laughably thin psychology or insight.

p.130 Mwihaki’s perspective, how she had heard about her father’s murder from the head of her school, then returned home. Her mother, obviously, hates the Ngotho family and Mwihaki is understandably swayed by this but, despite everything, still wants to see Njoroge again.

Mwihaki and Njoroge meet on the hill where they’ve had so many conversations. Njoroge has been beaten down, all his hopes destroyed, the only reliable thing in his life has been Mwihaki and so now he tells her that he loves her. Good grief, this is bad:

‘Mwihaki, dear, I love you. Save me if you want. Without you I am lost.’ She wanted to sink in his arms and feel a man’s strength around her weak body.

Njoroge tells her that he wants to flee Kenya, go to Uganda maybe, but Mwihaki, like so many young women, says No, she has to stay near her mother who needs her. Njoroge experiences her refusal to leave with him as a massive disappointment and disillusion. He sees his last hope of escape, of starting anew somewhere else, disappear, stricken that ‘his last hope had vanished’ (p.134). Unfortunately, all these overwrought feelings came over as barely comprehensible twaddle, to me.

p.134 It is a very shallow book, an immature young man’s book. It’s overstuffed with themes but Thiong’o treats none of them adequately, with any depth. He makes this character of Njoroge bear all kinds of significances which the story, and its complete lack of psychological depth or acuity, just don’t justify.

Thus now, in the last few pages, the narrator makes a big deal of the fact that Njoroge has, at a stroke lost his faith in God, lost his hope for a better day, lost his naive belief that he could be the redeemer who saved his country. Once he thought he would save his country but now he works in a dress shop whose customers look at him sadly and whisper about his family tragedy behind their hands. He has plummeted from utopian heights to humiliating depths.

Which is why he goes out wandering along the endless road till he comes to a tree which has been familiar to him all his life and prepares a noose. He’s about to hang himself when he hears his mother Nyokabi’s voice calling. Like Mwihaki, filial duty overcomes him, he turns from the noose, greets his poor aged mother and returns home with him.

The last sentences describe how Njoroge’s conscience accuses him of being a coward and how the poor young man, completely broken in spirit, miserably agrees.

Thoughts

I see the political importance and consciousness-raising purpose of Weep Not, Child but I couldn’t warm to either the simple style or the even simpler level of thought.

The blurb says it’s a novel about the impact of the Mau Mau emergency on one family but, as my summary conveys, it’s a very skimpy summary, with few if any descriptions of Mau Mau members – Boro popping up for a page two or three times in the narrative is not an adequate treatment of this massive, long-lasting, nationwide rebellion. I suppose some killings, like the execution of Howlands, are described in some detail but, due to the very poor psychology of the scene, it made little or no impression on me. Instead, the story foregrounds the shallow but shrill family melodrama which I’ve summarised.

I think we’re meant to react to the poignancy and emotion of the story, especially the humiliation piled on humiliation of the once buoyant and optimistic Njoroge, at the end. But I’m afraid what came over to my cynical mind was how abjectly unprepared African nations were to manage themselves, if they were placing their hopes in the hands of simpletons and ignoramuses like Njoroge or Boro.

Maybe the situation obtaining in Kenya and Uganda and Nigeria at independence was entirely the fault of the British government, but this book, far more than an insight into the Mau Mau phenomenon (which it hardly gives at all) struck me as being an indictment of how naive, ignorant and unprepared for any form of self rule that generation of Africans was.

So I read it as a tragic story but for this reason and not at all for the reasons given in the narrative and which Thiong’o intended.

Credit

Weep Not, Child by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o was first published in the Heinemann African Writers’ series in 1964. References are to the 1987 paperback edition.

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by Simon on February 9, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Africa, Novel

Tagged Africa, African literature, Alan Rickman, Algeria, black people, Boro, British Empire, Christianity, colonialism, colour bar, Darkness Falls, divide and rule, domestic abuse, East Africa, education, female circumcision, fiction, First World War, FLN, folk stories, Freedom Boys of the Forest, Gĩkũyũ, Heinemann African Writers, homeguard, House of Pain, Isaka, Jacobo, Jomo, Jomo Kenyatta, Juliana, Kamahou Intermediate School, Kamau, Kenya, Kenya Emergency, Kenyan State of Emergency, Kikuyu, Kipanga, Kori, Mahua, Mau Mau, Mau Mau oath, Mau Mau rebellion, Mr Howlands, Mugo wa Kibiro, Murungu, Mwangi, Mwihaki, Ngotho, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o', Njeri, Njoroge, novel, Nyokabi, patriarchy, Second World War, Siriana secondary school, story, the Creator, the Heinemann African Writers' series, The Waning Light, torture, Uganda, Viet Cong, Weep Not Child, white man, white people

Posted by Simon on February 9, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/02/09/weep-not-child-ngugi-wa-thiongo/

Empire Lite: Nation-Building in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan by Michael Ignatieff (2003)

Nobody likes empires but there are some problems for which there are only imperial solutions.
(Empire Lite, page 11)

Nations sometimes fail, and when they do only outside help – imperial help – can get them back on their feet. (p.106)

A bit of biography

In the 1990s Ignatieff managed to combine being a tenured academic, a journalist making extensive foreign trips, and a TV presenter. Without planning it, Ignatieff fell into a rhythm of publishing every 2 or 3 years short books chronicling the unfolding of the failed states he visited, and the chaos which engulfed some countries after the end of the Cold War.

These short but engaging studies build up into a series of snapshots of the new world disorder unfolding through the 1990s and into the post 9/11 era, mixed with profound meditations on the morality of international affairs and of humanitarian intervention:

Blood and Belonging: Journeys Into the New Nationalism (1994)
Warrior’s Honour: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience (1997)
Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond (2000)
Empire Lite: Nation-Building in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan (2003)
The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror (2004)
The Ordinary Virtues: Moral Order in a Divided World (2017)

Ignatieff’s disappearance from British TV and radio around 2000 is explained by the fact that he moved from London to America to take up a post at Harvard. The gap in the sequence of books listed above is explained by the fact that in 2005 he was persuaded to stand as an MP in the Canadian parliament, that in 2006 was made deputy leader of the Canadian Liberal Party and in 2009 became Liberal Party leader. Under his leadership the Liberals lost badly in the election of 2011 and Ignatieff quit as party leader. He went back to teaching at university, in between-times undertaking extended trips to eight non-Western nations which form the basis of his most recent book, The Ordinary Virtues published in 2017.

Empire Lite: Introduction

Three of the four chapters in this book started out as magazine articles published in 2002, so very soon after the seismic shock of 9/11. The premise of the book as a whole is that America is an empire which refuses to acknowledge the fact.

The Americans have had an empire since Teddy Roosevelt, yet persist in believing they do not. (p.1)

But America is not like any previous empire, it doesn’t have direct control of colonies, it is an ’empire lite’, which Ignatieff defines as:

hegemony without colonies, a global sphere of influence without the burden of direct administration and the risk of daily policing. (p.2)

Nonetheless, America is the only global superpower, spends a fortune on an awesome array of military weapons and resources, and uses these ‘to permanently order the world of states and markets according to its national interests’ (p.2) which is what he considers to be imperial activities.

In this book Ignatieff sets out to look at the power, reach and, in particular, the limits of America’s informal empire by looking at three locations he knows well and has covered in previous books, Bosnia and Kosovo in former Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan. In his previous books he has covered states which were collapsing into anarchy and attempts to bring peace to them. Now he is moving on. This book:

deals with the imperial struggle to impose order once intervention has taken place. (p.vii)

It focuses on the problem that, although many states in the modern world have failed or are failing and although some kind of humanitarian intervention is emphatically called for, yet intervention is dogged with problems. Two of the biggest are:

the practical limitations of what can be achieved
the tension between what the intervening power (almost always America) wants to achieve, and the wishes of the local population

After 9/11

The chapters of this book were written during the 18 months following the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America, after George Bush had declared a ‘War on Terror’ in a speech 2 weeks later (20 September 2001), and just as America was limbering up to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein on the controversial pretext of confiscating his weapons of mass destruction. The book was completed and sent to the publishers in January 2003 and the invasion of Iraq began on 20 March 2003.

In other words it was conceived and written in a very different climate of opinion than his pre-9/11 works and 9/11 dominates its thinking. Ignatieff says ‘the barbarians’ have attacked the imperial capital and now they are being punished.

And yet he warns that the ‘War on Terror’ may turn into a campaign without end. He quotes Edward Gibbon who, in his history of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, attributes the fall of Rome to what is nowadays called ‘imperial overstretch’, to the effort of trying to extend imperial control to regions beyond the empire’s natural borders. The Americans cannot control outcomes everywhere. This book sets out to examine the ragged edges where American hegemony reaches its limits.

Ignatieff says the terrorists who attacked on 9/11 co-opted grievances and the rhetoric of Islam into an unabashed act of violence. Violence first, cause later. What is worrying is the huge wave of support they garnered in parts of the Islamic world which feels it has been oppressed and humiliated for generations. It’s not just the obvious example of the Palestinians, oppressed by America’s client state Israel (Ignatieff mentions the pitiful inadequacy of the 1990 ‘peace treaty’ which set up the Palestinian Authority) but of dissident voices all across the Arab world.

9/11 highlighted the limitations of American influence in Islamic states. America has poured billions of dollars into Saudi Arabia and Pakistan and yet Osama bin Laden was a Saudi citizen and the Pakistanis founded, trained and supervised the Taliban which was giving Al Qaeda hospitality at the time of the attacks. And, as we have seen just a month ago (August 2021), the Taliban were to prove impossible to extirpate and have just retaken Afghanistan after 20 years of supposed ‘nation building’. So:

America may have unrivalled power but it has not been able to build stability wherever it wants on its own terms. (p.10)

Problems of empire

Ignatieff bubbles over with ideas and insights, too many to summarise. I was struck by his notion that the central problem of empires is deciding which of the many demands made on them that the imperial authorities should respond to. This is a fascinating insight to apply to the history of the British Empire, which never had enough resources to properly deal with the endless flare-ups and problems in the numerous countries it claimed to manage. Eventually it became too expensive and too complicated for a country brought to its knees by two world wars, and we just walked away. The mystery is how we managed to hang on for so long.

And now the Americans face the same problem. Ignatieff interprets the crisis in Afghanistan as a result of the way the Americans spent ten years lavishly funding and supporting the anti-Soviet resistance (in reality, a congeries of regional tribal groupings to which we gave the blanket name ‘the mujihadeen’). Then, when the Soviets withdrew in 1989, so did the Americans; walking away and letting the highly-armed tribal groups collapse into prolonged civil war, out of which emerged the extremist Taliban who were to give shelter and succour to al-Qaeda ten years later.

Another way of putting this is that America hoped, with the end of the Cold War, to benefit from a ‘peace dividend’: to reduce its armed forces, to withdraw from various strategic parts of the world, job done. On the contrary, as Ignatieff’s previous books have shown, imperial withdrawal from countries around the world did not lead to an outburst of peace, love and understanding but to the complete or partial collapse of many states and the emergence of new kinds of conflict, of ethnic wars, ‘ragged wars’, chaotic wars, and widespread destabilisation.

In these zones of chaos (Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, Somalia) the enemies of the West, and of America in particular, have flourished and now, in 2002, as Ignatieff was writing these pieces, American rulers had to make some very difficult decisions about where to intervene and how much to intervene, and for how long.

Chapter 1. The Bridge Builder

The bridge in question is the bridge over the River Neretva in the centre of the town of Mostar in southern Bosnia. The town actually takes its name from the bridge, which is called the Stari Most (Old Bridge) in Serbo-Croat, and from the bridge-keepers, known as mostari, who guarded it.

The Stari Most was built by the Ottomans in the 16th century, was one of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s most visited landmarks, and was considered an exemplary piece of Islamic architecture. It was erected in 1566 on the orders of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent and designed by the Ottoman architect Mimar Hayruddin.

During the Yugoslav civil wars Mostar suffered two distinct conflicts: after Bosnia-Herzogovina declared independence in April 1992 the (mostly Serb) Yugoslav Army went in to try and crush its independence. They were opposed by an army quickly assembled from both the Croat and Bosnian Muslim (or Bosniak) population (which both made up about a third of the city’s population). In June 1992 the Croat-Bosniak forces successfully attacked the besieging Yugoslav Army and forced them to withdraw from Mostar. Lots of shelling and shooting resulted in the town’s historic buildings getting badly knocked about, but not the bridge.

The bridge was destroyed as part of the second conflict, for after jointly seeing off the Serbs, tension then grew between the former allies, the Croats and Bosniaks. In October Croats declared the independence of a small enclave which they called ‘the Croatian Republic of Herzeg-Bosnia’, supported by the government of neighbouring Croatia and this triggered the Croat–Bosniak War which lasted from 18 October 1992 to 23 February 1994.

The Old Bridge was destroyed by Croatian forces on November 9, 1993 during a stand-off between opposing forces on each side of the river. It’s said that more than 60 shells hit the bridge before it collapsed. The collapse of the bridge consolidated the complete ethnic division of the city into Croat west bank and Muslim east bank.

What’s amazing is the enmity that lingered on after the ‘end’ of this small war. The town actually had six bridges and some of the others survived but adult men were forbidden from crossing over to the ‘enemy’ side. Ignatieff tells the story of a Muslim lad who drove over one of the surviving bridges to visit a Croatian girl he’d known before the division. On the way back he was shot in the back of the head by the Croat checkpoint guards and his car slowed to a halt half way across the bridge as he died (p.33). To understand the Yugoslav catastrophe you have to get inside the minds of the soldiers who did that.

While UN peacekeepers eventually moved in to supervise the fragile peace, the European Union considered how to repair the devastated infrastructure all across the former Yugoslav states. Ignatieff meets the man charged with rebuilding the famous Mostar bridge, a French architect named Gille Pequeux. Ignatieff spends time with him, learning how the Frenchman is doggedly studying whatever architects’ plans still survive from the original bridge, analysing the ancient techniques the Ottomans used to cut the stone and carve runnels along the inward-facing sides of it, which were then filled with molten lead to tie them together. In every way Pequeux is trying to make the reconstruction as authentic as possible.

Ignatieff drolly points out that the president of Turkey offered to fund the rebuilding the bridge as a symbol of Turkey’s long-term presence/contribution/imperial occupation of this part of Europe. The EU politely turned down the offer and insisted it was done by one of their own. So it is drily ironic that the much-lauded rebirth of this ‘symbol of multiculturalism’ entailed a diplomatic rebuff of an actual gesture of multiculturalism (p.36).

But rebuilding bridges and houses and hospitals and mosques is easy. Reconciling the people who live and work in them is much harder. Ignatieff is blunt. The EU and America have spent over $6 billion ‘reconstructing’ Bosnia but it is still ruled by the crooks who rose to power during the wars and a big part of the aid money, like aid money everywhere, is routinely creamed off by corrupt leaders and gangsters.

Now the leaders of the rival communities never meet and rarely talk. They only get together for the photo opportunities required to make a show of unity for the press and EU officials to ensure the all-important foreign aid cash keeps flowing. As soon as the lights are turned off they turn away from each other.

For our part, the West is disillusioned. Real reconciliation has not taken place. Corruption is endemic. Some of the refugees have returned to their homes but for many, ethnic cleansing achieved its goals. They will never return. And many of the locals still hate each other.

And so Ignatieff points out that rebuilding the bridge is as important for the morale of the interventionist West as for the locals. We need it to prop up our delusions that opposite sides in a civil war can be reconciled. That our costly interventions are worthwhile.

This lovely essay rises to a poetic peroration:

The Western need for noble victims and happy endings suggests that we are more interested in ourselves than we are in the places, like Bosnia, that we take up as causes. This may be the imperial kernel at the heart of the humanitarian enterprise. For what is empire but the desire to imprint our values, civilisation and achievements on the souls, bodies and institutions of another people? Imperialism is a narcissistic enterprise, and narcissism is doomed to disillusion. Whatever other people want to be, they do not want to be forced to be us. It is an imperial mistake to suppose that we can change their hearts and minds. It is their memory, their trauma, not ours, and our intervention is not therapy. We can help them to rebuild the bridge. Whether they actually use it to heal their city is up to them. (p.43)

Beautiful rhythm to it, isn’t there? Lovely cadences. The flow of the prose beautifully embodies the flow of the thought, which is both clear and logical but also emotive and compelling. Ignatieff writes like this everywhere: he is lucid and logical, but also stylish and evocative. He’s the complete package.

Chapter 2. The Humanitarian as Imperialist

This essay opens in 2000 with Ignatieff attending a press photo shoot given by the UN representative in Kosovo, Bernard Kouchner, and a Spanish general, who have persuaded two local Kosovar politicians, one of them a former commander of the Kosovo Liberation Army nicknamed ‘the snake’, to accompany them to the site of an atrocity. In the night someone laid a landmine. This morning a van driving between two Serb villages ran over it, it detonated, killing two outright and blowing the legs off the one survivor. The two Kosovar politicians say the required words about the need to change hearts and minds. Kouchner delivers his patter. The photographers snap, the new crews record, then it is over and everyone jumps into their cars and speeds off.

Ignatieff accompanies Kouchner to a Serbian monastery. Father Sava, the head of the monastery, has been chosen as a ‘moderate’ leader of the minority Serbian community left in Kosovo when the war ended in 1999. Attacks on Serbs are continuing on a daily basis. Kouchner and the Spanish general assure Father Sava that they are doing everything they can to protect his community. It doesn’t much matter since the simmering Serb community doesn’t believe either Sava or the UN. Not when members of their families are getting blown up or shot every day.

The international community is having to rebuild Kosovo from the ground up, rebuilding its entire infrastructure, economy, everything, making it ‘the most ambitious project the UN has ever undertaken’ (p.51).

Once again Ignatieff repeats that the West wants ‘noble victims’ and doesn’t know how to cope when the victims (the Kosovo Albanians) turn on their former oppressors (the Serbs).

Bernard Kouchner

All this is by way of introduction to a long profile of Bernard Kouchner. Being Ignatieff, he sees Kouchner not so much as a person but as a walking embodiment of an idea, in this case the way the entire doctrine of ‘humanitarian intervention’ has changed and evolved over the past thirty years.

Ignatieff says Kouchner came of age during the heady revolutionary days of Paris 1968. In a change-the-world spirit he volunteered to go serve as a doctor with the Red Cross in Biafra. However, he drastically disagreed with the Red Cross ideology of neutrality, non-intervention and non-reporting, removed his Red Cross armband and was among the founder members of the French organisation Médecins Sans Frontières or Doctors Without Borders. These guys are more prepared to call out the aggressors and killers in the war zones where they operate. Ignatieff considers the pros and cons of the two positions, the Red Cross’s studied neutrality, Médecins’ political engagement.

Ignatieff claims Kouchner also pioneered the involvement of the media in humanitarian aid, realising that people need to be shocked out of their complacency by images of horror and starving children on their TVs. He has been involved in various publicity stunts which drew down a world of mockery from liberal commentators but do, in fact, help to publicise his causes.

It is Kouchner, more than anyone else, who created the modern European relationship between civic compassion, humanitarian action and the media. (p.61)

Kouchner parted from Médecins when the latter won the Nobel Prize in 1999. This is because Kouchner had moved on from thinking aid organisations should speak out about evil, murder, massacre, human-engineered famine and so on, and had progressed to a more assertive position – that humanitarian organisations needed to get involved in political attempts to combat evil.

Aid organisations talk about ‘civil society’ and the ‘humanitarian space’ but Ignatieff says Kouchner thought this was an illusion. Aid agencies are supported and enabled by nation states. More than that, some crises aren’t humanitarian crises at all, they are crimes. Thus Saddam Hussein attacking his Kurdish population, trying to exterminate it and driving it up into the mountains to starve to death wasn’t a ‘humanitarian crisis’, it was a crime against humanity. Situations like this don’t call for the discreet, neutral aid providing of the Red Cross; they must be opposed by force.

This led Kouchner to become deeply involved in French and then UN politics. In 1988 he became Secrétaire d’état for Humanitarian Action in 1988 in the Michel Rocard cabinet, then Minister of Health during Mitterrand’s presidency. He served in the European Parliament 1994 to 1997, chairing the Committee on Development and Cooperation. He became French Minister of Health 1997 to 1999 in Lionel Jospin’s government, and then served as Minister of Health for a third time, 2001 to 2002.

Ignatieff says Kouchner’s positions, then, aren’t just interesting conversation pieces, but have directly influenced French government action. Thus his position influenced the French decision to back the UN resolution to send a peace-keeping force into Bosnia, part of which was meant to protect Sarajevo and Srebrenica. This failed miserably, with the Serbs bombing Sarajevo for years, and rounding up and exterminating 8,000 Muslim boys and men in Srebrenica under the noses of the 300-strong UN peacekeeping force.

The logic of this sequence of events is that only force can work against evil aggressors, and it was this thinking which finally led the Americans to intervene, when they ordered air strikes against Serbian positions in defence of a Croat advance; and then onto the sustained bombing of Belgrade from March to June 1999 to persuade the government of Slobodan Milošević to stop the massacring of Albanian Kosovars.

So the appointment of Kouchner as UN Representative to Kosovo in 1999 was full of historical ironies and meanings. This was the man who had led humanitarian intervention away from the studied neutrality of the 1960s, through active calling-out of the bad guys, towards evermore aggressive intervention against the wrongdoers. So it is the evolution of Kouchner’s theoretical positions which interests Ignatieff.

In this chapter he reiterates what are, by now, becoming familiar points. One is that modern-day ‘humanitarian’ intervention is ‘imperial’ in a number of ways. First and foremost, imperialism means powerful states compelling populations in weaker ones to behave how the powerful ones want them to. But all this talk about reconciliation is far from disinterested altruism: the European nations want to sort out the Balkan issue and impose peace and reconciliation so as to remove a source of political instability which could (in an admittedly remote scenario) draw in either Russia or Turkey. More immediately, restoring some kind of peace is designed to cut off the influx of the Balkans’ most successful exports to Europe, which Ignatieff drily lists as organised crime, drugs and sex slaves (p.60).

Secondly, as in his concluding essay about Bosnia and Afghanistan and in The Warrior’s Honour, Ignatieff is very, very sceptical about the chances of anything like genuine reconciliation. The same ethnic groups are now at daggers’ drawn and will do everything they can to harm or kill members of the opposing groups. He claims that Kouchner was taken aback by the ferocity of the tribal hatred he encountered when he first arrived (p.63), and depicts Kouchner, when he’s not performing for the cameras, as an exhausted and disillusioned man.

As in the essay on Mostar, Ignatieff asks why the victims should be obliged to conform to the Western stereotype of the noble-minded victim? In reality, the second they had the chance, the ‘victims’ have turned the tables and are carrying out a campaign of revenge killings and terrorist atrocities against the Serbs still stuck in north Kosovo who haven’t been able to flee to the safety of Serbia, every bit as brutal as the violence which eventually prompted NATO to start bombing Belgrade.

Ignatieff sees Kouchner as an imperial viceroy who has been parachuted in to try and rebuild the country and prepare it for ‘autonomy’. He calls Kouchner’s power a ‘protectorate’ with a pretence of local autonomy but where rule actually stops with the imperial viceroy, as in the Raj, as in the British and French mandates in the Middle East between the wars. If that was ‘imperialism’, surely this is, too.

Once again, Ignatieff makes the point that maybe what Kosovo needs is not a moderately independent-minded Kouchner, but an utterly independent-minded General MacArthur, the American general who was given a free hand to rule Japan as he saw fit for six whole years after the Second World War. Maybe what the Balkans need is not less imperialism, but a more naked, out-and-out, assertive imperialism. Do this, or else.

(In the event Kosovo declared independence from Serbia on 17 February 2008. As of 4 September 2020, 112 UN states recognised its independence, with the notable exceptions of Russia and China.)

Chapter 3. Nation-building Lite

Max Weber said a state is an institution which exerts a monopoly of the legitimate use of violence over a given territory. Generally, this monopoly is channeled via the institutions of a professional police service and an army. In a Western nation the police are subject to elected politicians and their work feeds into an independent judiciary, while the army is trained and led by professionals.

In a failed state, weapons are everywhere and the use of violence is widely dispersed. Usually, after a period of anarchy, warlords emerge who control the application of violence, at least in their territories, but often only up to a point, and sometimes cannot control permanently embedded, low-level street violence.

The essence of nation-building is to get weapons out of circulation – out of the hands of warlords, paramilitaries, criminal gangs and punks on the street – and restore that monopoly of violence which is one definition of a functioning state; and in so doing to create a space in which non-violent politics – negotiation, discussion and compromise – can be encouraged. It may still be a violent and corrupt state but it is, at least, a starting point.

Ignatieff pointed out in The Warrior’s Honour that, in quite a few failed states round the world, this is now harder to do than ever before, because modern weapons are so cheap and easily available. Some societies have become so soaked in guns that it’s hard to see a way back to unarmed civility.

Afghanistan

And so on to the specific country in question, Afghanistan. Ignatieff recapitulates the modern history of Afghanistan, the Soviet invasion of 1979, the West’s backing of the mujahideen who, once the Soviets left and the West walked away in the early 1990s, degenerated into a civil war of regional warlords. But Ignatieff’s interest in the story is, as always, in the principles and theory behind it.

Reconstruction

He repeats one of his central ideas which is that nation-building takes a long, long time, and then gives a striking example. America’s own nation-building, starting with the Reconstruction Period after the civil war, arguably took an entire century, right up until the civil rights legislation of 1964 finally abolished discrimination against Afro-Americans (p.85).

Reconstruction in Germany and Japan took about a decade, but in both countries the nation-builders were starting off with states with well-defined borders, established (albeit corrupted) institutions, and ethnic homogeneity. The populations of both countries wanted to be reconstructed.

Don’t say when you’ll leave

Igantieff makes the point that one of the secrets of success for an empire is the illusion of permanence, of longevity. As soon as you announce that you’re leaving at some fixed moment in the future, all the vested interests rise up and jockey for power. This is vividly demonstrated by the absolute chaos triggered when the Belgian imperial authorities abruptly withdrew from the Congo at independence, as provinces seceded and new parties jockeyed for power using extra-political means i.e. guns and coups. Same thing happened in Angola where the abrupt announcement of the imperial power, Portugal, that it would completely withdraw its forces in a matter of months led to civil war between the various independence paramilitaries, a civil war which dragged on for 27 years and wrecked the country.

Ignatieff says the Americans have a poor track record on this matter, and a bad reputation for walking away from chaotic states as soon as it suits them. This means local warlords realise they just have to mind their manners and bide their time.

The American withdrawal from Afghanistan, 2021

What Ignatieff didn’t know in 2002 was that the Americans would stay for an epic 20 years nor that the same rule of permanence was to apply: that as soon as Joe Biden announced the US were leaving, people all across the country realised the Taliban would swarm back into power and began making arrangements accordingly, i.e. Afghan police, army and local governors defected to the Taliban within days o fthe last Yanks leaving, so that the entire Afghan security apparatus melted away and the Taliban were in Kabul within a week.

Not so easy, running an empire, is it? Maybe the thousands of American academics who loftily criticise Britain’s chaotic withdrawal from Palestine or India will reflect on the cracking job their boys did in Afghanistan. With 70 more years of academic theorising and practical experience than the Brits, the Yanks still made a complete shambles of it.

Europe and America: division of roles

Ignatieff makes another snappy point: how can American Republican administrations, who are fanatically opposed to Big Government, find themselves spending tens of billions of dollars creating huge administrations in foreign countries? Easy. They get the Europeans to do it. The Americans are good at fighting (Ignatieff says that, in a sense, America is the last truly warlike nation in the West) so they handle the bombs and drones and special forces. Then the Europeans then move in with the peacekeeping police forces and the droves of humanitarian aid agencies, building schools, hospitals etc. Yin and yang.

Chapter 4. Conclusion: Empire and its Nemesis

Ignatieff describes modern Western nation-building as ‘imperial’ because:

its main purpose is to create stability in border zones essential to the security of the great powers
the entire project rests on the superior armed might of the West
no matter how much ‘autonomy’ is given to local rulers, real power always remains in Washington

In addition, he repeats the point that all empires have to ration their interventions. You have limited resources: which of the world’s endless trouble spots can you afford to address? Ignatieff points out the basic hypocrisy of ‘humanitarian intervention’ which is that it is only carried out in places which are convenient or important to the West. The West is never going to intervene in Chechnya or Crimea or Xinjiang because they are the preserves of other empires.

And the new imperialism is not only lite it is impatient. The British gave themselves generations to prepare the populations of India for independence. The UN gives places like Kosovo or Afghanistan 3 years before they have to hold their first elections. Hurry up! This is costing us money!

No imperialists have ever been so impatient for quicker results. (p.115)

Why? Partly the short attention span of the modern media, always hurrying on to the next story. (It took, by my calculation, about ten days from the American departure from Afghanistan being the biggest story in the whole world to being completely ignored and forgotten about.)

And then the short election cycles in democracies. Whatever plans you put in place now, at the next election in a few years’ time the leader of the opposition party will be promising to bring our boys home and save everyone a shedload of money. Western democracies, by their very nature, struggle to make long-term commitments to anything.

This concluding essay takes its title from a reflection on the enduring force of nationalism which empires find so difficult to counter. In the end, the European empires were defeated by the indomitable resilience of their colonies’ nationalist movements. This was the lesson the Americans should have learned from Vietnam. It wasn’t their weapons which won the Viet Cong victory, it was their nationalist convictions. Nationalism always trumps empire.

Nationalism will always prove to be the nemesis of any imperial nation-building project. (p.117)

Ignatieff didn’t know this when he wrote these lines, but they were to apply to the American invasion of Iraq which commenced just as his book was being published. The Americans overthrew a dictator and promised to bring peace and plenty but were utterly unprepared for the violence of the forces that then attacked them from all sides.

Thoughts

1. So Ignatieff’s message is that if liberal humanitarians really want to do good, they should really intervene: go in hard, defeat the bad guys, disarm them, force parties to the negotiating table, and run things themselves, setting up strong national institutions and teaching squabbling factions what democracy looks like in practice. And they have to do this for years, decades maybe, until the institutions and mindsets of civic society have been thoroughly inculcated. And only leave when everything is completely in place for the transition. In other words – imperialism. Not the kind of imperialism which exploits the native populations and rips off their raw materials. An altruistic imperialism, a humanitarian imperialism. But imperialism all the same.

2. When Ignatieff devotes a chapter of The Warrior’s Honour to the West’s growing sense of weariness and disillusion with humanitarian intervention, I suspected he was mainly talking about himself. This book shows a further deterioration in his attitude. I simply mean he has become markedly more cynical.

Across-the-board hopes have been crushed, ideals have been compromised, ambitions have been stymied. Much of this may reflect the appalling history of the 1990s, but I also think some of it may be a projection of Ignatieff’s own growing disillusion.

You feel this downward trajectory when he says that Bernard Kouchner arrived in Kosovo in July ‘talking about European values, tolerance and multiculturalism’ but by Christmas this had been revised down to hopes for ‘coexistence’ (p.63). Kouchner simply hadn’t anticipated the hatred and the intransigence which he found in Kosovo. So many aid workers and proponents of humanitarian intervention don’t. In Blood and Belonging Ignatieff refers fairly respectfully to ‘the international community’. Eight years later he refers to it as:

what is laughingly referred to as the ‘international community’. (p.97)

His journey his taught him that the international institutes he used to respect are, in fact, a sham.

He is particularly disillusioned with the international aid industry, which he sees as almost a scam, a locust swarm of very well-paid white Western graduates, who fly in, can’t speak the language, pay over the odds for everything thus pricing the locals out of accommodation and food, stay hunkered down in their armoured enclaves, drive everywhere in arrogant white 4-by-4s, and cook up huge impractical ‘aid’ projects without consulting any of the locals. All the Afghans he talks to complain to Ignatieff about the NGOs’ arrogance and condescension. It is the old colonialist attitude but now with emails and shades. During the course of this book he takes to referring to the aid organisation community dismissively as ‘the internationals’, by contrast with the poor, often ignored ‘locals’, the people who actually live there.

In this book Ignatieff is as clever and incisive and thought-provoking as ever. But sometimes he sounds really tired.

Credit

Empire Lite: Nation-Building in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan by Michael Ignatieff was published by Vintage in 2003. All references are to the 2003 Vintage paperback edition.

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by Simon on October 29, 2021 • Permalink

Posted in America, Islamic terrorism, Politics, War

Tagged 9/11, Afghanistan, aid organisations, Al Qaeda, America, Arab world, Balkans, Bernard Kouchner, Biafra, Bosnia, Bosniak, British Empire, Chechnya, civil society, Cold War, Congo, contemporary history, Crimea, Croat, current affairs, Doctors Without Borders, Edward Gibbon, empire, Empire Lite, Empire Lite: Nation-Building in Bosnia, failed state, Father Sava, Francois Mitterrand, General MacArthur, geopolitics, George Bush, Germany, Gille Pequeux, global superpower, Harvard, humanitarian crisis, humanitarian space, imperialism, India, international community, Iraq, Japan, Kosovo, Kosovo and Afghanistan, Kosovo Liberation Army, Kurds, Liberal Party, Lionel Jospin, Max Weber, Médecins Sans Frontières, Michael Ignatieff, Mimar Hayruddin, Mostar, mostari, mujihadeen, multiculturalism, nationalism, Nato, NGO, Nobel Prize, Osama bin Laden, Ottoman Empire, Pakistan, Palestine, Palestinian Authority, Raj, Reconstruction, Red Cross, River Neretva, Saddam Hussein, Sarajevo, Saudi Arabia, Slobodan Milošević, Srebrenica, Stari Most, Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, Taliban, Teddy Roosevelt, Turkey, Viet Cong, Vietnam, war, war on terror, weapons of mass destruction, Xinjiang, Yugoslavia

Posted by Simon on October 29, 2021

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The Venus Hunters by J.G. Ballard (1980)

The first seven stories were published by Panther as ‘The Overloaded Man’ in 1967. The collection was updated with the three last stories and new title in 1980

1. Now: Zero (1959)

Zero is Ballard’s favourite number, denoting the full stop of time and space and energy and human endeavour. Mind you, he was merely adopting a term already fraught with symbolism from his era’s key event:

The origins of the term “ground zero” began with the Trinity test in Jornada del Muerto desert near Socorro, New Mexico, and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. The United States Strategic Bombing Survey of the atomic attacks, released in June 1946, used the term liberally, defining it as: “For convenience, the term ‘ground zero’ will be used to designate the point on the ground directly beneath the point of detonation.”‘

This is a very early work, told in an arch Gothic style, which could almost be Edgar Allen Poe. The narrator is the overlooked and humiliated middle-manager at an insurance company who describes in prissy mannered prose how he kept a feverish, self-justifying diary recording every petty grievance he bore against his manager, Rankin, till one day in a fit of exasperation he wrote in his diary that the manager died, falling to his death from the seventh floor stairway. And next day he did.

Instead of stepping into his shoes as he hoped, the narrator is overlooked and a younger man, Carter, is promoted who quickly puts him in his place. After a few weeks of humiliation, the narrator writes in his diary that Carter dies, run over in the street the following day. And he is.

He reads about a man who’s been acquitted for a murder he obviously committed and writes in his diary that this man, Frank Taylor, will die next day in prison. And he does.

Getting to grips with his power he describes the deaths of four of the company’s directors, with the aim of being himself promoted to director and then using the same method to gain promotion to the parent company and on to world domination. The four directors die, sure enough, but the company goes into liquidation and, like everyone else, he is laid off. The predictable irony of this feels like a much older type of story, like Poe.

He experiments with the limits of the power, writing in his diary that the entire population of the miserable town where he grew up, Stretchford, will die. They don’t. Aha. The power obviously has limits, the limits of feasibility. Returning home the landlady confronts him with nagging demands for his back-rent and so she very satisfactorily dies the next day.

At this point he begins to notice that people are looking at him in the street. The landlady’s replacement is seen in conversation with the local copper, tapping her head. He thinks they are admiring his confidence and power. The reader is tipped off that people think he’s bonkers. His final plan has a garish, comedy-Gothic feel. He tells us he will publish a story in a magazine, which completely reveals his power, but that the person he has scheduled for death… is the reader!!! That means you!!! and the story counts down to the final sentences and words, at which you, the reader will expire!

Three… two… one… Now! Zero!

Is he mad? Just before the end he refers to ‘the victims of this extraordinary plague’; so is it working, have hundreds of readers of the story already dropped dead? Or is it all a delusion?

2. The Time-Tombs (1963)

Set some time in the future and on another planet, a group of four men are scraping a living as scavengers of the time tombs. These are buried in the dust of the planet but when they come to light, tomb robbers like themselves break in and steal the tapes on which the long-dead occupants have recorded images of themselves which are projected as 3-D holograms.

The story depicts the uneasy dynamic between a young-ish new recruit to the gang, Shepley, supported by the easy-going Old Man, and the leader of the robbers, Traxel, and his thuggish sidekick Bridges.

Shepley and the Old Man find a new set of tombs in a previously unexplored quadrant of the sea of dust, what’s more they’re priceless Tenth Dynasty tapes. But the second one they come to depicts a hauntingly beautiful princess with an extravagant hairdo and wings. Shepley can’t bring himself to take her tapes, and next day Traxel and Bridges find them at this tomb, Bridges thuggishly kicking his way through the door, ripping out the tapes, only to discover they are almost empty. She was dead when she was buried (the precise working of the technology is hinted at and not properly explained).

Traxel and Bridges make their escape as the Tomb Police come trundling up on a massive sand-rider and Shepley is so distraught at their vandalism of the princess’s tomb that he lets himself be arrested.

3. Track 12 (1958)

Ballard’s sixth story and a very short one (5 pages). Sheringham, professor of biochemistry ‘at the university’, has invited round for drinks Maxted ‘a run-down athlete with a bad degree… acting as torpedo man for a company marketing electron microscopes’. Sheringham is ostensibly wanted to play him some of the LPs recording the microsonics experiments he’s been doing. He makes Maxted put on headphones and then listen to the weird sounds generated by recording in super high detail a variety of physical mechanisms. He’s listened to the sound of a plant cell dividing, and then an animal cell dividing and the story opens as he’s listening to the sound of iron filings going down a funnel which turns out to be the sound a pin dropping through a long tube lined with microphones makes.

(It may be worth remembering that experimenting with metal tape recordings was a new technology in the 1950s, prompting an explosion of experimental music recording by the likes of Pierre Boulez and Karl-Heinz Stockhausen.)

All the time Maxted is despising this prissy, fussy academic, lounging back on the chair he’s offered and guzzling down the whiskey and thinking about Sheringham’s wife, who he’s having an affair with.

Until, that is, he starts to feel shivery cold. Really cold. He reaches for his glass but knocks it out of reach. He feels his heart fibrillate. Sheringham is standing in front of him and calmly explains that he spiked his (Maxted’s) drink with chromium cyanate which is making all his cells lose control of their water content. He is going to drown inside.

But not before Sheringham has the time to play him one last recording. As his body collapses, his identity melts, the last thing Maxted hears is the enormously amplified and slowed-down grotesque rhythmic spasms of… a kiss, a kiss between him and Sheringham which the vengeful professor spent months rigging up secret microphones all over the patio to record. And which is now the last sound Maxted hears before he dies.

4. Passport to Eternity (1961)

Straightaway I notice that the bickering married couple, Margot and Clifford Gorrell, own some kind of sound device, a sound-sweeper, which projects the mood of their conversations as coloured tones across their walls, splashes of colours which leave residues which takes days to drain, and/or can drown out sound. This immediately reminded me of The Sound Sweep a story from a few years earlier. Obviously a very resonant idea.

Oh and they live on Mars. Not the real Mars but the Mars which is depicted as a kind of 1950s American suburb in The Martian Chronicles of Ray Bradbury, or the American cartoon The Jetsons, a Mars which is full of bored wives who refuse to go on another love cruise of Venus or a a stag weekend to the moons of Saturn. A cartoon Mars.

The story is a comedy played for broad laughs as the overworked husband is henpecked into booking a real holiday for his wife, and they dispatch their personal assistant, Tony Harcourt, to make the rounds of inter-galactic travel agencies, which all come off as spoofs and parodies from a Douglas Adams novel.

Two days later Tony returns with a pile of outlandish brochures, but he has been followed by numerous of the travel agencies who begin to stage samples of their vacations in and around the Gorrells’ house, most notably the one which offers ringside seats at a galactic war

In the middle of it all reality shimmers and slides, and they wake up attached to tubes on beds in a room which looks like theirs but is revealed, with a swish of the curtains, to be some kind of spaceship setting off on a non-stop journey into deep space. A ten-page prime exhibit of why science fiction was not, in Ballard’s day, considered serious literature. This story is barely even serious science fiction.

5. Escapement (1956)

Ballard’s second published story and, tellingly, it’s about distortions in time. A boring suburban couple are having an evening in with the telly on, him doing a crossword, her darning a nightie when he realises the play on TV has slipped a reel and gone back to a scene fifteen minutes earlier. It happens again. He points it out to his wife. She doesn’t know what he’s talking about. It happens again. He phones a friend, who doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Beginning to panic, the narrator realises he is caught in a loop of time fifteen minutes long which keeps jumping back fifteen minutes, trucking through the same period, then jumping back to 9pm. Then he realises the period of time between the leaps is diminishing – he is caught in a time trap! Steadily it decreases till the loops is only a few seconds long and then… he wakes up with a bad headache. His wife tells him he had some kind of convulsion. The time loop has stopped.

It’s very much like an episode of The Outer Limits (which was broadcast, incidentally, from 1963 to 1965). As he panics and switches channels, the narrator comes across a news programme where a scientist is explaining that these gas clouds released by the sun might not only distort light but time. Aha.

The notion of astronomical phenomenon affecting time here on earth will be recycled as the explanation for the crystallising process in The Crystal World.

6. Time of Passage (1961)

The story of a man, James Falkman, told in reverse, as the mourners leave the cemetery, the gravediggers dig up his coffin, put it into the hearse which drives back to his grand house, where he breathes his first breath and slowly improves in health, under the tender care of his sister.

His entire life experiences are lived in reverse, all the way through to his return to his mother’s womb and then, nine months earlier, his parents going to a hotel on their honeymoon.

It mirrors or prefigures the really haunting tale, Mr F is Mr F, where a married man shrinks back to a teenager, then a boy, then a baby, then returns through her vagina into his mother’s womb.

Again, it is well done but feels a bit cheap like a cheesy episode of The Outer Limits. The bit I liked was where, at the beginning, both he and his sister euphemistically refer to the place they came from, but how they’re ‘in the world now’ and how they’ll forget, how everyone forgets. Presumably they mean, forget heaven, where they came from.

7. The Venus Hunters (1963)

At 30 pages, by far the longest story in the collection and the most enjoyable. Dr Ward has just arrived at Mount Vernon Observatory. His new boss Cameron takes him for coffee at a cafe in the town at the bottom of the hill, and introduces him to the tall, bearded, muttering man, Charles Kandinski, a former psychology professor, who claims to have been at a picnic with friends in the desert, gone for a pee and bumped into a creature from Venus by its spaceship, who gave him a tablet and a warning that man must not intrude into outer space.

Kandinski was staggered, tried to contact everyone in authority to pass on the warning, writes a book about it and delivers hesitant lectures… but no-one cares, everyone thinks he’s mad. Cameron jokes that, of course, he believes him. Ward starts off by being utterly sceptical, but over repeated meetings now and then at the cafe, and at a lecture Kandinski delivers to the members of a local astronomy club, he slowly becomes impressed by Kandinski’s sincerity.

At the climax of the story we follow Kandinski cycling off into the desert at dusk, seeing a strange light, clambering up the side of a dune and seeing another circular space ship hovering in the desert. He stumbles back to the nearest farmhouse, begs to use the phone, rings Ward who is at a big conference being hosted by his employer, the 23rd Congress of the International Geophysical Association at Mount Vernon Observatory. Ward is just about to be called to make an opening speech when the call comes through and, despite his boss Cameron clinging on to his arm, he insists on driving off to help Kandinski.

He drives out to the desert, finds the farmhouse as Kandinski instructed him, goes on a bit, sees Kandinski’s bicycle, parks and clambers up the sand dune to the top of the low ridge, finds Kandinski feverishly over-excited, looks down into the shallow bowl between dunes and sees… nothing.

The story jumps to a few days later and we learn that Ward, nonetheless, took part in publishing a statement about the aliens to the New York Times, and has, as a result, been so thoroughly ridiculed that he has been asked to leave the Observatory and is leaving town to go back to university and teach freshman physics.

I didn’t understand. Was Kandinski just deluded? Like tens of thousands of other Americans who, in the decades since have come forward to claim they were abducted and experimented on by aliens? Is it that simple?

You could see the story as a fictional equivalent of the famous statement Ballard made in a 1962 interview that henceforward science fiction (by which he meant, his science fiction) would be concerned with inner space not with outer space. So this is a story in which the entire paraphernalia of outer space (flying saucers, aliens) turns out to be a product of the much-more interesting and fruitful area of inner space i.e. obsessions and delusions.

More tangibly, in structural or thematic terms, the image of driving out into the desert is interesting because it recurs in The Voices of Time; and when Ward sees the strange mandala-like shape Kandinski has marked out at the site of what he claims was the original landing, I was of course reminded of the mandala the dead biologist Whitby has carved into the bottom of the drained swimming pool in Voices and which Powers goes on to build in concrete on a much larger scale out in the desert.

And, of course, drifting sand-dunes haunt no end of Ballard short stories.

*********************************

So the first seven stories in this collection are right from the start of Ballard’s writing career. The remaining three were not published in The Overloaded Man collection and two are from nearly 20 years later.

8. The Killing Ground (1969)

A brutal satire on the Vietnam set thirty years in the future and which foresees the whole world invaded by America and rebel or nationalist forces, just like the Viet Cong, struggling with old weapons and living in holes, against the vastly superior technology of the Yanks whose attacks are computer-guides.

‘The globe was now a huge insurrectionary torch, a world Viet Nam’ and the story concerns a ragtag bunch of insurgents literally holed up in tunnels dug into a hillside overlooking a river over which fly American helicopters strafing the countryside in what, we are told, with a shock, and with blunt satirical irony, is the Kennedy Memorial at Runnymede on the banks of the River Thames, near where I went to school, and which I’ve photographed and mapped on my walking blog.

We get to know Major Pearson, leader of the little troop of guerrillas just long enough to be fed all the lines about America’s war against the world, before they saddle up to make an attack across the flat meadow towards the river (I know it well), coldly killing the three American prisoners they’ve taken, before they in turn are mown down by American machinegun fire.

9. One Afternoon at Utah Beach (1978)

Nearly but not quite successful story about a married couple who are flown to a holiday cottage on Utah beach by a friendly private pilot. During the week they stay there the husband, Ogden, realises the pilot, Foster, and his wife Angela are having an affair.

One afternoon he visits the derelict concrete blockhouse built by the Germans on the beach and is astonished to discover a 19-year-old wounded Wehrmacht soldier nursing a machine gun on a tripod. Taking this in his stride, over the next few days Ogden brings the soldier food and medicine. His wife and boyfriend have taken to going to a wooden shack on the beach to make love in the afternoons. Ogden conceives the idea of getting the German to point his machine gun in that direction and shoot them as they emerge.

On the day in question Ogden takes his own shotgun and, as the adulterous couple emerge, inexplicably fires a warning flare, allowing the pilot to run forward into the long grass as the Wehrmacht soldier finally fires off his machine gun. Ogden stands up in clear sight at his moment of triumph and Foster rises from the dune grass and shoots him dead.

Exploring the blockhouse, Foster and Angela are puzzled why her husband had dressed in a Second World War Wehrmacht uniform.

10. The 60-Minute Zoom (1976)

The deranged soliloquy of a voyeuristic psychopath who knows his wife is serially unfaithful with strangers at all the resorts they visit, and has now set up a camera with an amazing Nikon long-distance zoom lens in a rented apartment across from the posh hotel he and she are staying in somewhere on the Spanish coast.

The idea is that the zoom of the camera starts off capturing the entire facade of the hotel and them moves in, very very slowly, allowing the narrator to describe the overall scene, comment on particular guests visible in the rooms above and below his, and then as the lens zooms in on their room, recording the entrance of her lover, they strip off and make love as the lens moves in closer, capturing their slow orgasms, ten minutes later he has gone and the camera doesn’t even cover her whole body but a portion of her chest, and, in the creepy final paragraph, who enters the frame, but the narrator and cameraman himself, only seen as a shadow and fragments of clothing above her body in tight close up and then… the shot goes vivid spurting red!

These last two stories have stopped being science fiction and are something else – tales of the macabre and the gruesome, heavily laced with pornography and perversion, which remind me of the grown-up stories of Roald Dahl which I read not so long ago – and somehow dated in the same nice-middle-class-man-goes-mad sort of way.

Credit

The first seven stories were published by Panther as ‘The Overloaded Man’ in 1967. The collection was updated with the three last stories and new title in 1980. Page references are to the 1988 Panther Books paperback edition. All quotations are used for the purpose of criticism and review.

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by Simon on January 27, 2020 • Permalink

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Posted by Simon on January 27, 2020

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Dispatches by Michael Herr (1977)

‘… the madness, the bitterness, the horror and doom of it…’ (p.87)

Types of history

There’s a vast and ever-growing factual historiography of the Vietnam War, which for the past twenty years has been able to take advantage of the post-communist opening up of archives in Moscow, Beijing and Hanoi to present a fully-rounded history of the Indochina conflict, setting it in the long perspective stretching back to the Great War and forwards past the collapse of Russian communism in 1990.

These accounts are now able to analyse the course of events from the perspective of the Viet Cong, North Vietnamese and Chinese, and can bring the same comprehensive and detached approach historians have been used to applying to the Great War or the Crimean War.

But then, and quite separately, there is the mythology of the American War in Vietnam – a whole cultural complex, a mood, a movement, like a fashion, whose most enduring features at this distance in time are the classic movies it produced – Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter and so on – and the powerful pop music of the late 1960s – from the Beach Boys to Jimi Hendrix – which provided a soundtrack to the conflict.

All of this has been mixed and mashed with contemporary TV news footage and documentary clips of jungle mayhem, urban bombings, the last helicopters leaving the U.S. embassy in Saigon, cut and edited into sequences readily available on the History Channel or YouTube. A ‘myth’ as instantly recognisable as montages of flappers and jazz recall the Roaring Twenties or bomb blasts illuminating the night-time sky over Baghdad recall the Iraq War.

Jimi Hendrix – Purple Haze (March 1967)

New Journalism

Michael Herr’s Dispatches is one of the classic accounts of the Vietnam war but from a very particular, unconventional, mythopoeic perspective. The late 1960s saw the birth of ‘the New Journalism’, epitomised by the wacky reportage of Tom Wolfe and later taken to the limit in the ‘Gonzo Journalism’ of Hunter S. Thompson.

In this new approach the ‘reporter’ identified powerfully with the counterculture of the day, especially its openness to drugs and pop music. Their ‘pieces’ abandoned traditional journalistic attempts at objectivity in order to present personal, subjective accounts and to freely deploy literary devices like stream-of-consciousness, different points of view, florid imagery and so on. And the ‘reporter’ more often than not became the hero, the dazed centre of the report, struggling to make sense of the crazy world around him.

Herr was in at the start of this movement and a 1965 piece by him about Vietnam is included in the 1973 book-length anthology, The New Journalism, edited by Tom Wolfe, which gave the ‘movement’ its name.

The Animals – We Gotta Get Out Of This Place (July 1965)

Dispatches’ prose and attitude is very much of its time, it’s the kind of knackered paperback you found lying around your elder brother’s room along with Zen and the Art the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974) and Jonathan Livingstone Seagull (1970) among the butts of old joints and Leonard Cohen LPs. It is the high-tide of the new journalism approach to reporting Vietnam, it is a landmark, it is undoubtedly a masterpiece.

Dispatches

So Dispatches isn’t a work of history but neither is it conventional journalism. It consists of six titled sections (themselves made up of shorter numbered section), some of which appeared in magazines like Esquire and Rolling Stone, which are copyrighted 1968, 1969, 1970, and which report on events the author witnessed from 1967 through 1968.

1. Breathing In (pages 11 to 61)

The first section opens in late 1967. The tone is hip, knowing, cool. Herr’s prose is always wearing shades and three days of stubble. His gift for phrase-making and capturing the mixed-up street slang-cum-war jargon of the Army in Vietnam to try to convey the mind-bending experiences offered in so many ways by the war, is frequently breath-taking.

In the months after I got back the hundreds of helicopters I’d flown in began to draw together until they’d formed a collective meta-chopper, and in my mind it was the sexiest thing going; saver-destroyer, provider-waster, right hand-left hand, nimble, fluent, canny and human; hot steel, grease, jungle-saturated canvas webbing, sweat cooling and warming up again, cassette rock and roll in one ear and door-gun fire in the other, fuel, heat, vitality and death, death itself, hardly an intruder. (p.16)

Long looping sentences clotted with nouns, he also turns and twists the language to give familiar phrases new meanings in new contexts. He has a fantastic gift for vivid phrase making.

It was the same with your ongoing attempts at getting used to the jungle or the blow-you-out climate or the saturated strangeness of the place which didn’t lessen with exposure so often as it fattened and darkened in accumulating alienation. (p.19)

1960s slang and Nam slang, street slang, American slang, drug slang, black slang, war slang all meet on top of a sustained attempt to define indefinable sensations, pin down evanescent ideas, track down fleeting emotions:

At least actual contact when it was happening would draw long raggedy strands of energy out of you, it was juicy, fast and refining, and travelling towards it was hollow, dry, cold and steady, it never let you alone. (p.20)

This first section is the most trippy and poetic, pushing you in the deep end of deranged military activities and manic thoughts, offering up a smorgasbord of anecdotes, insights and reflections punctuated by manic moments under gunfire, contributing to the overwrought, druggy vibe.

The Doors – Strange Days (September 1967)

2. Hell Sucks (pages 62 to 73)

Just one of the blasphemous mottoes all the Marines were allowed to paint on their helmets – Born to Kill, Far from Fearless, Mickey’s Monkey, Avenger V, Born to Raise Hell (p.65).

Once Herr has established his recklessly anecdotal, prose poetic, wigged-out style in the first section, this second one is a relatively short burst describing the intense days Herr spent in the city of Hue during the Battle which raged around the Viet Cong-held Citadel in January 1968 – many mangled bodies, death-eyed G.I.s (uniformly referred to as ‘grunts’) telling him their Zen stories, hiding behind the huge Citadel wall from NVA snipers and everywhere terrified and injured civilians.

(Compare and contrast Don McCullins’ account of his eleven days in the same place and time, in his gripping autobiography Unreasonable Behaviour.)

Battle of Huế Wikipedia article

3. Khe Sanh (pages 74 to 133)

The longest section, this gives an impressionistic account of the time Herr spent inside the American camp at Khe Sanh up near the Demilitarised Zone, during part of the epic siege which took place between 21 January and 9 July 1968. There’s more factual information here than in any of the other sections, explaining where Khe Sanh was, the layout of the camp and surrounding hills, information about the U.S. military units and the suspected North Vietnamese Army units which were surrounding and bombarding it, reporting on the progress of the ‘battle’ i.e. the enormous tonnage of bombs the U.S. Air Force dropped on the Viet Cong, as well as sections giving the ‘official’ version of U.S. strategy and events, including an interview with a half-deaf and totally out-of-touch colonel back at HQ.

But much more than that, this section gives a sense of how it felt to be there, numb with terror or awed by the beauty of incoming rounds or outgoing tracer fire, laced with insights about the bitter rivalry between the Marine corps and the Air Cavalry, the anxiety every correspondent felt about the next chopper that can take you out of harm’s way.

It also has the most extended portrait of specific U.S. soldiers – an odd couple comprising skinny blonde Mayhew and huge black ‘Day Tripper’, describing their arguments and confusion and unspoken solidarity.

This section contains a great one-page account of a VC sniper secure in a bunker a few hundred yards from the camp, who survives so much shooting and bombing and even napalming of his position that the Marines end up cheering him and nicknaming him ‘Luke the Gook’.

It has the one-page story of mean Southern redneck Orrin who gets a letter from his girl back in Tennessee telling him she’s pregnant with another man’s baby and describing Orrin’s hard-core vow to survive the war and get home in order to kill her. And, so ubiquitous is superstition among combat troops, that from that moment on, Orrin’s vow made him ‘lucky’, so that other soldiers sought out his presence, as if his vendetta would preserve him.

There’s the story of the voodoo black grunt who uses an M-79 grenade-launcher to ‘take out’ a wounded VC who’s lying out in the perimeter barbed wire screaming, without even looking, from the sound alone, to everyone’s awe. A scene lifted entire and used in Apocalypse Now, presumably by Herr himself who worked on the script for that epic film. (He also co-wrote the screenplay of Stanley Kubrick’s Nam movie, Full Metal Jacket.)

Eventually, after the six month siege ended with the VC melting away from Khe Sanh, the U.S. Army secured its perimeters, cleared up and after a few months completely abandoned the entire camp, removing all assets then blowing up the bunkers. Herr doesn’t invent the air of crazed futility about the whole enterprise, it is there in the actual facts, in the historical record, in the universal sense of pointlessness and absurdity.

The Battle of Khe Sanh Wikipedia article

Postscript: China Beach (pages 134 to 136)

Short description of China Beach facing the Bay of Danang where lucky troops get to go for a few days rest and recuperation (R&R). Its main point is that a few weeks later Herr bumps into some soldiers from the division he was with at Khe Sanh, and asks after the skinny joker, Mayhew, who we’d got to know in the previous section – only to learn he’d been killed, a direct hit from a VC rocket-propelled grenade.

Buffalo Springfield – For What Its Worth (January 1967)

4. Illumination Rounds

These are short snippets, satoris, epiphanies.

The time he was riding in a Chinook which was under VC fire and the trooper next to him was hit and bled to death.
The bad reputation of the overpaid civilian construction engineers drinking and whoring in Saigon.
After a massacre of VC the U.S. captain had twenty or so VC corpses loaded into helicopters and then dropped on the centre of nearby villages to make a not-so-subtle point.
A pen portrait of Davis, a grunt shacked up down a back alley in Saigon with a local hooker, getting stoned with the boys and his unhappiness at the trap he’s caught himself in.
Meetings with the officer who claimed to have invented the phrase ‘Dink’ for VC, shortened from Rinky-Dink, because he didn’t like the common nickname ‘Charlie’.
How he first heard Jimi Hendrix on a tape deck switched on by a black grunt while they were all pinned down by VC fire in a paddy field. Jimi Hendrix – Fire (May 1967)
The Army surgeon in the provincial hospital at Can Tho a few days into the January 1968 Tet Offensive, who had been operating on wounded men for twenty hours without a break and ‘could not have looked worse if he’d lain all night in a trough of blood’ (p.150).

And so on…

San Francisco – Scott McKenzie (May 1967)

5. Colleagues (pages 152 to 199)

This, the most thought-provoking section, begins as an account of the community of photographers and correspondents in Vietnam, which he estimates topped 700. His closest buddies were the photographers Tim Page, Sean Flynn, Rick Merron and Dana Stone (the ‘lapsed logger from Vermont’). They each get pen portraits, descriptions of their looks and attitudes and abilities, but the star of the show is Flynn, son of Hollywood actor Errol Flynn, who worked hard to live down his parentage but earned his chops as a fearless photographer.

This could have got a bit pally about his heroic mates, but Herr takes it deeper, with a number of anecdotes examining the odd relationship between the correspondents and the grunts. For example, the soldiers can’t believe the journos are there by choice.

And Herr moves on to ponder just what it was that drove him and the others to volunteer, to be there at all, to chopper out to wherever the ‘action’ was. To test themselves? To see if they measure up as men? And for the rush, the unparalleled adrenaline rush which comes from being under fire, running, shit-scared – which at the same time is the most exciting thing in the world and the most gut-churningly, pant-wettingly terrifying thing in the world – but which they become addicted to.

Thus they come to understand not only the sick-to-death despair of the grunts who just wanna go home, but also the inexplicable compulsion of the soldiers who extend their tours, sign on for more. And also the terrible alienation of those who finish their time, ‘rotate back to the World’ – but discover they just don’t fit in any more; nothing makes sense or is so intense or meaningful as what they’ve just been through; who miss their comrades; who have to come back.

Otis Redding – (Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay (January 1968)

And then this section goes deeper still to consider the strengths and failures of media reporting on the entire war and Herr emerges from the stoner prose to make some really strong, sober points.

His generation, he says, were saturated with TV and films – they experienced the war even on the ground in terms of movie scenarios, expecting people to get up after the firefight, adopting poses they’d seen in the movies – all of which prevented them, for a while, from realising this was ‘real’.
The official version of events given out by the Army at their daily press conferences (nicknamed by the press corps the ‘Five O’Clock Follies’) was ludicrously detached from events on the ground, which correspondents had often witnessed for themselves that same day (‘most of what the Mission wanted to say to the American public was a psychotic vaudeville’, p.173). But the correspondents still had to report it, the official view. And since they all reported the same Official Version then – compared to the scattered, disorganised, highly personal nature of each of their alternative views – the Official Version tended to dominate the media and create the strongest impression on the Great American Public, simply by nature of its repetition and its consistency.
Also militating towards the Official Version was the fact that most photographers and journalists worked for daily newspapers or TV stations and so were always in a tearing hurry to file a ‘story’, some – any – pics and words to send back to their agency or paper or channel, and the Official Version was always the easiest, the readiest-to-hand. This was another factor in its predominance, even though almost all the correspondents in the country knew it was horse shit.
And another element of its dominance was the sheer amount of information the officials gave out, using a bewildering and evergrowing set of metrics, data and statistics – ‘kill ratios’, ‘tonnage of bombs dropped’, ‘enemy casualties’, ‘territory seized’, ‘light losses’, ‘moderate losses’, ‘heavy losses’ – to lie, lie and lie again, to hide the bitter truth that they were losing and ‘the Mission’ was failing. These blizzards of stats were easily printed and broadcast, they filled space and sounded impressive – they reassured the public that everything was under control.

Only slowly did Herr realise what a privileged position he was in because he was not a correspondent – he was a writer sent with an open-ended brief from the monthly men’s magazine Esquire, which he interpreted as the freedom to skip around, catching choppers to wherever sounded ‘interesting’, wherever the ‘action’ was, which gave him the time to really get to know the grunts, to get under their skin, to see the war from their point of view.

All of this leads up to what I take to be the credo or manifesto or thinking which lies behind Herr’s deliberate adoption of the common soldier’s point of view, language, drugs and spaced-out attitude. Which is that:

The press got all the facts (more or less), it got too many of them. But it never found a way to report meaningfully about death, which is of course what it was all about. (p.173)

So on one level the entire book can be seen as an experiment in trying to create a prose style which can report meaningfully about death. Not facts or history, though some are required to give context. Instead a turbo-charged attempt to capture the incredibly intense emotions of bewildered, confused soldiers under fire in a chaotic, incomprehensible war.

In interviews Joseph Heller claimed that his World War Two classic, Catch-22, was actually more a satire about corporate America, about project management and management theory and management speak than about the actual war. In Vietnam the ghastly wedding of management speak and grotesque carnage reached new heights – Herr contemptuously refers to the more senior officers who asked the press corps to:

… get with the programme, jump on the team, get in for the Big Win. (p.184).

But Herr was blissfully free of the straitjacket of daily reporting which tied up most of his comrades, free to understand the crucial central fact, that:

Conventional journalism could no more reveal this war than conventional firepower could win it. (p.175)

And hence, quite simply, the rationale for his new journalism approach – for his stoner, tripped-out, grunt-level view of the madness. And that’s why his book is still a classic. Nearly 60 years after the event, nearly 50 years after it was published, it still captures and describes in the gaudy poetry of American street slang the unbelievable intensity, horror and beauty of modern armed combat, as no straight journalism, military reports, or sober histories ever could.

The Kingston Trio – Where have all the flowers gone? (1961)

This section winds down with very personal reminiscences of his gang of buddies as the legendary Tim Page returns to Nam, and Herr, Page and Flynn enjoy wacky, frat-house adventures, getting stoned, playing the Mothers of Invention real loud, winding up Army Press Officers – he makes it sound like a swell life, like one long mad party, driving down to China Beach to catch some rays, then travelling back to Hue, now completely pacified and cleaned up, incapable of believing all the pain and carnage he witnessed there.

The Mothers of Invention – Trouble comin’ every day (March 1966)

From what I can make out, Herr was only in Nam for about nine months, from the end of 1967 through the Tet Offensive (Jan-Sep 1968), the Battle of Hue (January to March 1968), the siege of Khe Sanh (January to July 1968) and leaving in September 1968.

The end of the book is desperately sad, like coming down after a great party. Herr is back in the States when he hears that Tim Page has received his final, almost fatal, head injury, and flies back to see him. Page has definitely retired, has a girlfriend, slowly recovers the use of his legs and even his left arm. They get stoned with Flynn and other friends, laugh about the old times, cry about the old times. It’s all over. Time to go back to ‘the World’, where they will never quite fit in or feel at ease.

6. Breathing out (pages 200 to 207)

A few last pages struggling to make sense of 1968 and the way the war and the rock music fused in that year and then short-circuited the decade. Then came the awful 1970s and Herr watched on TV the choppers he had loved cadging lifts across war zones on, being pushed off U.S. aircraft carriers into the South China Sea after the final American troops were withdrawn from Vietnam in 1973.

And then, finally, in spring 1975 the North Vietnamese Army fought their way south to conquer and unite the country after thirty years of struggle. Herr poignantly reports seeing pictures of victorious Viet Cong soldiers sitting on the banks of the Danang River, exactly where the U.S. Press Centre had been and where Herr and his pals had sat smoking and joking and laughing. All gone now.

Analysis

The fantastically powerful and evocative trippy, stoner prose and the ‘attitude’ it describes can be analysed out into distinct strands:

Meaningless chaos

Coming under fire in ‘random contacts’ – the GI who points his gun at Dana and, they all felt, could easily have pull the trigger. The whole war effort ‘out of control’ (p.45) all mirrored by the deliberate sense of getting-out-of-control created by the drugs of choice, pot and acid.

Bob Dylan – Visions of Johanna (February 1966)

The risibility of the official version

Handed out at the daily 4.45 news conference, also known as ‘the Five O’Clock Follies’ – the man handing out press passes ‘thought it was all a fucking circus’ (p.177), and the actual troops on the ground often seemed lost souls in a demented fantasy.

Entire divisions would function in a bad dream state, acting out a weird set of moves without any connection to the source. (p.50)

To Herr and his stoned contemporaries the entire conduct of the war seemed like a very bad dream, irrational, insane.

Search and Destroy, more a gestalt than a tactic, brought up alive and steaming out of the Command psyche. (p.55)

That phraseology is not a rational analysis of a military strategy, but Herr has thought it through and the insanity didn’t call for a sane response. ‘(Who’s crazy? What’s insane?)’ (p.61), the only ‘answerable style’ for the madness is a mad style.

Drugs

Dope is referred to openly throughout, the evening sessions with joints passed round, the household fuelled by booze and grass, the widespread smoking of joints among the troops. As to stronger drugs, Herr refers once to the powerful hallucinogen psilocybin (the active ingredient of ‘magic mushrooms’) but surprisingly rarely to the other great 1960s drug, LSD or ‘acid’.

And yet the prose reeks of acid, of the way LSD strips your sense of their blinkers and protection and exposes your nervous system to massive sensory overload. Indeed that concept of too much information, of the brain, nervous system and mind being subjected to more than it can cope with, is mentioned throughout the text as a metaphor for the experience of combat when the adrenaline shock, and the rush of terrified awareness, is experienced as just ‘too much’ to process or handle.

Once your body was safe your problems weren’t exactly over. There was the terrible possibility that a search for information there could become so exhausting that the exhaustion itself became the information. Overload was such a real danger, not as obvious as shrapnel or blunt like a 2,000-foot drop, maybe it couldn’t kill or smash you, but it could bend your aerial for you and land you on your hip. (p.58)

Even when Herr quits the war and ‘rotates back to the World’, Page gives him a small ball of opium to float him through the flight home (p.200).

Pop culture

Is all around them, every unit has tape cassette players and either in bunkers or even out on patrol are liable to click Play and the room or trail or trench would echo to the sounds of Purple Haze by Jimi Hendrix or the latest single by the Rolling Stones.

The Rolling Stones – 2000 Light Years From Home (December 1967)

Prose poetry

The rangy, slang, street poetic prose owes a lot to the Beats, to Allen Ginsberg’s poetic rants and William Burroughs’ cut-up prose, but also to the eloquence of American slang, a can-do attitude to the English language which creates openings and expressions from a recalibration, a special angling, of even the most ordinary words. During the 1960s the drug-cum-Zen-cum-Beat poetry language of a small sub-section of 1950s Bohemian culture, along with Black street slang and the argot of the urban jazz world, all mixed and went feral, spreading across street culture and into the songs and films and eventually official channels of the media and even the Army itself.

The book is alive with slang terms from all these sources, mashed together:

‘believer’ – a dead Viet Cong (p.41)
‘dig’ meaning to ‘get’, to ‘understand and enjoy’ – ‘can you dig it?’
‘dink’ meaning ‘Vietnamese’ (92)
‘gook’ meaning ‘enemy Vietnamese fighter’
‘greased’ meaning ‘killed’
‘grunt’ meaning infantry soldier (15). According to the online etymological dictionary the term originates from the Vietnam war and is first recorded in print in 1969.
‘hip to’ meaning ‘up to speed with’ (86) as in ‘hip to…the sound, the trip, the mission, the attitude’
‘jag’ meaning ‘prolonged bout’ as in ‘a crying jag’
‘jive’ – routine, schtick, can be negative or positive – ‘don’t jive me, man’
‘luck out’ meaning ‘get lucky’ (69)
‘Slope’ meaning ‘Vietnamese opponent’ (86)
‘spade’ meaning ‘Afro-Caribbean’ (98)
‘tightly wrapped’ meaning ‘uptight, tense’ (97)
‘tough shit’ meaning ‘bad luck’ (86)
‘totalled’ meaning ‘killed’
‘wiggier’ from ‘wiggy’ meaning ‘weird, freaked out’ (p.52), ‘wigged-out crazies’ (p.189) ‘the wiggiest goof of them all’ (p.197)
‘zip’ meaning ‘enemy Vietnamese’

Beyond individual words, Herr records slang phrases which capture the alternative realities opened up by drugs and war and the lethal combination of both:

‘Well, I’ll be dipped in shit.’
someone looks like ‘ten thousand miles of bad road’
‘get some’ can refer to sleep, or just ‘action’, hence a demented chopper machine gunner can fire randomly into the jungle yelling ‘get some, get some’ – in a cracking throwaway Herr refers to this phrase as ‘the American banzai‘ (p.184)
‘have a pair’ (p.53) or ‘grow a pair’, as in a pair of testicles, to prove you are a man
the ‘thousand yard stare’, a vivid description of the distant look in the eyes of soldiers fresh from action – ‘Hill 861 was the home of the thousand-yard stare…’ (p.101)
‘it’s hotter than a bastard’ (p.164)

But it’s the way often fairly simple vocabulary is stacked together in spaced-out ways designed to capture the fleeting moment, the psych, the thereness of the impression, you had to have lived it, you had to know it, which transcends the context of Vietnam to become a series of experiments in time-encapsulating language, and helps give the book its enduring sense of life and weirdness.

Sitting by a road with some infantry when a deuce-and-a-half rattled past with four dead in the back. The tailgate was half lowered as a platform to hold their legs and the boots that seemed to weigh a hundred pounds apiece now. Everyone was completely quiet as the truck hit a bad bump and the legs jerked up high and landed hard on the gate. ‘How about that shit,’ someone said, and ‘Just like the motherfucker,’ and ‘There it is.’ Pure essence of Vietnam, not even stepped on once, you could spin it out into visions of laughing lucent skulls or call it just another body in a bag, say that it cut you in half for the harvest or came and took you under like a lover, nothing ever made the taste less strong. (p.203)

Tracks referenced in the text

‘Whenever one of us came back from an R&R we’d bring records, sounds were as precious as water.’
(p.187)

The text is littered with references to contemporary pop songs. One of the things which made the war seem so special was the way that pop music evolved incredibly quickly into more adult (pretentious) rock over precisely the same period (1965 to 1970), and so seemed to be directly commenting on the escalation and spiralling insanity of the conflict. Thus Herr can comment on the Beatles track, Magical Mystery Tour – ‘That was a song about Khe Sanh; we knew it then, and it still seems so.’ (p.91).

I began making a list of tracks as I came across them mentioned in the text and listening to them off the internet. Taken together, they evoke a vivid revolutionary world, which is immensely evocative even though it is all at least 50 years old, having gone through nostalgia, into obsolescence, been revived, and now becoming history. I remember some of these songs from my boyhood – my kids have never heard of any of it.

Rolling Stones – Have you seen your mother baby standing in the shadow? (September 1966)
Archie Bell and The Drells – Tighten Up (1968)
Claude King – Wolverton Mountain
Miller’s Cave by Hank Snow
Ring of Fire by Johnny Cash
The 5th Fifth Dimension – Up Up and Away (May 1967)
Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs – Little Red Riding Hood (June 1966)
I’d love to be an Oscar Meyer Wiener (p.96)
Bobbie Gentry – Ode to Billy Joe (July 1967)
Aretha Franklin – Satisfaction (1967)
Glen Campbell – Galveston (February 1969)
Los Bravos – Black Is Black (1967)

Credit

Sections of Dispatches by Michael Herr were published as articles in American Review No. 7, Esquire and Rolling Stone in 1968 through 1970. It was published in book form in 1977 by Alfred A. Knopf. References are to the 1982 edition of the 1978 Pan Books paperback edition.

Vietnam war reviews

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by Simon on March 1, 2017 • Permalink

Posted in American literature, History, Vietnam War

Tagged 1977, Dispatches, Michael Herr, Saigon, Viet Cong, Vietnam War

Posted by Simon on March 1, 2017

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Embers of War by Frederik Logevall (2012)

This is a staggeringly good book. The main text is a hefty 714 pages long, with another 76 pages of endnotes, a comprehensive list of further reading, and a thorough index. It is beautifully printed on good quality paper. It is in every way an immaculate book to own and read and reread (in fact I found it so addictive I read the first 500 pages twice over).

Vietnam before the war

Most histories of the Vietnam War focus on ‘the American War’ of the mid- and late-1960s. Logevall’s epic account comes to an end in 1959, when there were still only a few hundred U.S. troops in the country, before the American war of the movies and popular legend had even started (the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in the U.S. Congress which gave President Johnson full power to prosecute a war was passed in August 1964.)

Instead, Logevall’s focus is on everything which preceded the full-blown American involvement. It is a masterly, incredibly detailed, superbly intelligent account of the long struggle for Vietnamese independence from French colonial rule over Indochina, which has its roots way back before the First World War, but whose major and fateful decisions were made in the years immediately after the Second World War. For the core of the book covers the twenty years between 1940 and 1960 which saw the First Indochina War of Independence and the bitter defeat of the French imperial army. Logevall’s intricate and comprehensive account for the first time makes fully comprehensible the circumstances in which the Americans would find themselves slowly dragged into the quagmire in the decade that followed.

Above all this is a political and diplomatic history of the events, with a great deal of space devoted to the personalities of the key political players – Ho Chi Minh, Viet Minh General Giap, U.S. Presidents Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower, French president Charles de Gaulle – along with exhaustive explanations of their differing aims and goals, and thorough analyses of the diplomatic and political negotiations which were constantly taking place between a dizzying and continually changing array of politicians, statesmen and military leaders.

The attractiveness of the book is the tremendous intelligence with which Logevall dissects and lays bare the conflicting political goals and shifting negotiating positions of all these players. Time and again he puts you in the room as Truman and his team discuss the impact of China going communist (in 1949) on the countries of the Far East, or Eisenhower and his team assessing the French forces’ chances of winning, or the debates in the Viet Minh high command about how best to proceed against the French army at Dien Bien Phu. In every one of these myriad of meetings and decision-points, Logevall recaptures the cut and thrust of argument and paints the key players so deftly and vividly that it is like reading a really immense novel, a 20th century War and Peace only far more complex and far more tragic.

Ho Chi Minh

A central thread is the remarkable story of Ho Chi Minh, who could have been a sort of Vietnamese Mahatma Gandhi, who could have led his country to peaceful independence if the French had let him – and who certainly emerges as the dominating figure of the long struggle for Vietnamese independence, from 1918 to 1975.

Ho Chi Minh was born Nguyễn Sinh Cung in 1889. In his long life of subterfuge and underground travel he used over 50 pseudonyms. The text skips through his education to his travels from Asia to Europe via the States (as a cook on merchant navy vessels, seeing the major American cities, establishing himself as a freelance journalist in Paris), and then the story really begins with Ho’s presence at the peace conference which followed the Great War.

Vietnam had been colonised by the French in the 1850s and their imperial grip solidified around the turn of the century. The French divided Vietnam into three units, Tonkin in the north (capital Hanoi), the narrow central strip of Annam, and Cochin China in the south (capital Saigon). Logevall eloquently evokes the atmosphere and beauty of these two cities, with their wide boulevards, French cathedrals and opera houses. The French also colonised Laos, which borders Vietnam to the central west, and Cambodia, which borders it to the south-west. These three countries were collectively known as French Indochina.

Between the wars

U.S. President Woodrow Wilson arrived at the Versailles peace conference which followed World War One brandishing his much-publicised Fourteen Points, the noble principles he hoped would underpin the peace, the fourteenth of which explicitly called for the self-determination of free peoples.

As Logevall points out, in practice the Americans were thinking about the self-determination of the peoples in Europe, whose multicultural empires had collapsed as a result of the war e.g. the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires; the principle wasn’t really addressed at the inhabitants of Europe’s overseas empires.

In a typically vivid snapshot, Logevall describes how the young optimistic Vietnamese nationalist Ho Chi Minh, who had already gained a reputation as a journalist advocating independence for his country, hired a morning coat and travelled to Versailles hoping to secure an interview with President Wilson to put the case for Vietnamese independence. But his requests were rebuffed, his letters went unanswered, nobody replied or took any notice. It was the start of a long sequence of tragically lost opportunities to avert war.

Instead the ‘victorious’ European empires (Britain and France) were allowed to continue untroubled by American interferences and French colonial administration of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, with all its snobbery and exploitation, strode on into the fragile 1920s and troubled 1930s.

Dispirited by the complete lack of interest from the Allies at Versailles, Ho traveled to Soviet Moscow in the early 1920s, where he received training from the infant Communist International (or Comintern) before returning to Vietnam to help organise a Vietnamese nationalist and communist movement.

But according to Logevall’s account, Ho continued to have a soft spot for America – not least because it was itself a country which had thrown off colonial shackles – and continued for decades to hope for help and support in Vietnam’s bid to escape from French control. In vain. Maybe the central, tragic theme of the book is how the American government went in the space of a decade (1940 to 1950) from potential liberator of the world’s colonial subjects, to neo-imperial oppressor.

The impact of the Second World War

In the West, and particularly in Britain, we think of the Second World War as starting with the German invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939, which prompted Britain and France to declare war on Nazi Germany. But the war in the East had its own timeframes and geography, and is really marked by the step-by-step aggression of Japan through the 1930s. For the highly authoritarian, militaristic Japanese government was the rising power in the East. Japan invaded Manchuria in northern China 1931 and then, in 1937, invaded the rest of coastal China, penetrating south. China was already embroiled in a chaotic civil war between various regional warlords, the nationalist movement of Chiang Kai-Shek and the nascent communist forces of Mao Zedong, which had been raging since the late 1920s. The border between north Vietnam and China is 800 miles long and the French colonial administrators watched developments in their huge northern neighbour with growing trepidation.

Meanwhile, in faraway Europe, Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime successfully intimidated the western democracies (i.e. Britain and France) into allowing him to reoccupy the Rhine (March 1936), occupy Austria (March 1938) and seize the Czech Sudetenland (September 1938). But it was the surprise Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939 and then Hitler’s September 1939 invasion of Poland which plunged the continent into war.

None of this affected distant Indochina until the Germans’ six-week Blitzkrieg campaign in May 1940 against France. The victorious Nazis allowed a puppet right-wing government to be created in France, under the 84-year-old Marshall Petain and based in the spa town of Vichy. As a result of their defeat, the colonial administrations around the French Empire – in West and North Africa, in the Middle East and in Indochina – found themselves obliged to choose between the ‘legitimate’ new Vichy administration, which soon began persecuting socialists, freemasons and Jews (Logevall makes the ironic point that there were only 80 Jews in all Indochina and most of them were in the army) or the initially small group of followers of the self-appointed leader of the ‘Free French’, Charles de Gaulle.

When the highly armed and aggressive Japanese continued their expansion into northern Vietnam in September 1940, the Vichy French briefly resisted and then found themselves forced to co-operate with their supposed ‘allies’ – or the allies of their Nazi masters back in Europe. The Japanese wanted to cut off supply lines to the Chinese nationalists opposing them in China and also needed the rice, rubber and other raw materials Indochina could offer. In an uneasy understanding, the Japanese allowed the Vichy officials to administer the country at a civil service level – but they were the real masters.

Pearl Harbour

By setting it in its full historical context, Logevall for the first time made clear to me the reason the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour (on 7 December 1941) and the central role played in this cataclysmic event by Indochina.

From 1940 U.S. President Roosevelt and his advisers were concerned about Japan’s push southwards and especially their seizure of Vietnam. If they continued, the Japs would be in a position to carry on down the Malay peninsula, taking Singapore and threatening the Philippines in the East and Burma to the West.

When, in July 1941, Japanese troopships were sighted off Cam Ranh Bay on the south coast of Vietnam, it set American alarm bells jangling and, after much discussion, the President imposed a goods blockade on Japan, including oil and rubber, insisting the Japanese withdrew from China. Negotiations with the moderate Japanese Prime Minister Konoye continued through the summer but neither side would back down and, in October 1941, Konoye was replaced by General Hideki Tojo, who represented the aggressive stance of the armed forces. His government decided the only way Japan could continue to expand was by eliminating the American threat and forcibly seizing required raw materials from an expanded Japanese empire. Hence the plan was formulated to eliminate the American Pacific fleet with a surprise attack on Pearl Harbour, and it was in this context that the Japanese Fleet launched the notorious attack on 7 December 1941.

Logevall describes this tortuous process and its consequences with great clarity and it is absolutely fascinating to read about. He introduces us to all the key personnel during this period, giving the main players two or three page biographies and explaining with wonderful clarity the motives of all the conflicting interests: The Vichy French reluctant to cede control to the Japanese and scared of them; the Japanese busy with conflicts elsewhere and content to rule Indochina via the compliant French; the Americans reeling from Pearl Harbour but already making long-term plans to regain Asia; and in Vietnam, alongside Ho’s communists, the activities of the other groups of Vietnamese nationalists, as well as numerous ‘native’ tribes and ethnic minorities. And far away in embattled London, the distant but adamantine wish of General de Gaulle and the ‘Free French’ to return Indochina to French rule.

Roosevelt and Truman

For most of the war the key factor for Asia was President Roosevelt, a lifelong anti-colonialist, who condemned and opposed the European empires. Admittedly, he had to tread carefully around key ally Winston Churchill, who was doggedly committed to the preservation of the British Empire, but he had no such qualms about France, which he despised for collapsing so abjectly to the German Blitzkrieg of 1940.

Roosevelt was only reluctantly persuaded to support the haughty, pompous General de Gaulle as representative of the so-called ‘Free French’ – he preferred some of the other leaders in exile – but took a particular interest in Indochina. Roosevelt gave strong indications in speeches that – after the Germans and Japanese were defeated – he would not let the French restore their empire there. Instead, the president got his State Department officials to develop the idea of awarding ‘trusteeship status’ to post-colonial countries – getting them to be administered by the United Nations while they were helped and guided towards full political and economic independence.

Alas for Vietnam and for all the Vietnamese, French and Americans who were to lose their lives there, Roosevelt died just as the Second World War drew to a close, in April 1945, and his fervent anti-imperialism died with him.

He was replaced by his unassuming Vice-President, plain-speaking Harry S. Truman from Missouri. (In the kind of telling aside which illuminates the book throughout, Logevall points out that Truman was only selected as Vice-President because he was so non-descript that when all the competing factions in the Democratic Party cancelled out each other’s nominations, Truman was the only one bland enough to be left acceptable to all parties.)

Vietnam’s first independence and partition

The atom bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki crystallised Japan’s defeat and she surrendered on 2 September 1945. Within days of Japan’s fall, Ho and his party were organising major celebrations of Vietnam’s independence. In a historic moment Ho spoke to a crowd of 300,000 cheering compatriots in Ba Dinh Square, central Hanoi, on 2 September 1945, formally declaring Vietnam’s independence. Logevall quotes American eye witnesses who were startled when Ho quoted extensively from the American Declaration of Independence, as part of his ongoing attempt to curry favour with the emerging world superpower.

But alas, back in Washington, unlike his predecessor Roosevelt, President Truman had little or no interest in Indochina and all talk of ‘trusteeship’ leading to eventual independence disappeared. Instead the victorious allies had to make practical arrangements to manage Indochina now Japan had surrendered. It was agreed that the north of the country would be taken over by an army of the nationalist Chinese (at this stage receiving huge aid from America) while the British Indian Army would take over temporary running of the south, in a temporary partition of the country while both forces waited for the full French forces to arrive and restore imperial rule.

Riven by political infighting and a spirit of defeatism, the French had rolled over and given up their country in 1940. Then a good number of them spent five years collaborating with the Nazis and shipping Jews off to concentration camps. Now they expected the Americans to give them huge amounts of money and military resources to help them return to their colonies, and they expected the colonial peoples to bow down to the old yoke as if nothing had happened.

General de Gaulle typified the militaristic, imperial French view that ‘metropolitan’ France was nothing without its ‘magnificent’ Empire; that France had a unique ‘civilising mission’ to bring the glories of French culture to the peoples of Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia (and Algeria and Syria and Mali and so on). Of course, the Empire provided cheap raw materials and labour for France to exploit.

The tragedy is that the Rooseveltian anti-imperial America which Ho and his followers placed so much hope on, betrayed them. Why? Two main practical reasons emerge:

1. Restoring France

Almost immediately after the end of the Second World War Stalin set about consolidating his grip on the Russian-occupied nations of Eastern Europe by establishing puppet communist regimes in them. The communist coup in Czechoslovakia and the start of the Berlin Airlift, both in 1948, epitomise the quick collapse of the wartime alliance between Russia and America into a Cold War stand-off. In this context, the Americans thought it was vital to build up Western Europe‘s capitalist economies to provide economic and military counterweight to the Soviet threat. Hence the enormous sums of money America poured into Europe via the Marshall Plan (which came into force in June 1948). A glance at the map of post-war Europe shows that, with Germany divided, Italy in ruins, Spain neutral, and the Benelux countries small and exposed, France emerges as the central country in Western Europe. If France’s empire contributed economically (through its raw materials), militarily (through colonial soldiers) and psychologically to France’s rebuilding, then so be it. The nationalist aspirations of Algeria, Tunisia and the other African colonies, along with Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia were sacrificed on the altar of building up a strong France in Europe to act as a bulwark against the Soviet threat.

2. The domino theory

It was only later, after China fell to communist control in October 1949, that Cold War hawks began to see (not unjustifiably) evidence of a worldwide communist conspiracy intent on seizing more and more territory. This received further shocking confirmation when North Korea invaded South Korea in June 1950. It is from the communist victory in China and the start of the 1950s that the Americans began to talk about a ‘domino effect’ – seeing non-communist countries as dominoes lined up in a row, so that if one fell to communism all the others would automatically follow. As the map below shows, the fear was that i) communist victory in Korea would directly threaten Japan ii) communist forces in central China would threaten the island of Formosa and the other western Pacific islands, and iii) most crucial of all – the collapse of Vietnam would allow communist forces a forward base to attack the Philippines to the east, open the way to the invasion of Thailand to the west, and threaten south down the long peninsula into Malaya and Indonesia.

Map of Asia showing Indochina in relation to China, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines

Cast of characters

Logevall introduces us to a number of Americans on the ground – diplomats, analysts and journalists – who all strongly disagreed with the new American line, but were powerless to change it. Against their better judgement the Americans allowed the French to return to run Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

Logevall explains the arguments among the French themselves, and accompanies his account of the next nine years (1945-1954) with a running commentary on the changing patterns of the very fractured French political system (19 governments in just 8 years), and the conflicting priorities of the French communist party, the Socialists, the centre and the Gaullist right.

In contrast to French perfidy and inconsistency, Ho emerges as very much the hero of this account for the patience and mildness of his demands. Ho was in communication with both the French and American authorities – the French ignored all requests for independence, but he had some hopes the Americans would listen. Ho guaranteed that his independent Vietnam would allow for capitalism – for private property, a market economy. He said American firms would receive preferential treatment in rebuilding the post-war economy.

All on deaf ears. The same crowds who had greeted Ho’s historic declaration of independence in September 1945, stayed away from the pathetic French re-entry into Saigon the next year. On their first night of freedom, French troops who had been interned by the Japanese were released and went on a drunken rampage, beating up Vietnamese in the streets for being collaborators. Photo journalist Germaine Krull saw Vietnamese nationalists paraded through the streets with ropes tied round their necks while French women spat on them. Krull realised, right there and then, that the French had lost all respect and deference – instead of befriending the Vietnamese and creating a genuine partnership with promises of ultimate nationhood, the French hardliners had insisted nothing must question the ‘Glory’ and ‘Honour’ and ‘Prestige’ of La Belle France.

And so the quixotic quest for gloire and grandeur and prestige condemned France to nine years of bitter war, hundreds of thousands of death and, ultimately, to crushing humiliation. It feels like a grim poetic justice for the arrogance and stupidity of the French.

Dien Bien Phu

Almost immediately armed clashes between French soldiers and small guerrilla units or individuals began in all the cities and towns. Various nationalist groups claimed responsibility for the attacks but slowly Ho Chi Minh’s communists emerged as the best disciplined and most effective insurgent forces. The communists made up the core and most effective part of the coalition of nationalist forces christened the Viet Minh. Saigon became a twitchy nervous place to be, with an irregular drumbeat of gunshots, the occasional hand grenade lobbed into a cafe, assassinations of French officials in the street.

Logevall gives a detailed narrative of the slow descent of the country into guerilla war, with the dismal attempts of successive generals to try and quell the insurgency, by creating a defensive line of forts around Hanoi in the north, or sending search and destroy missions into the remote countryside.

The diplomatic and political emphasis of the book comes to the fore in the long and incredibly detailed account of the manoeuvring which surrounded the climactic Battle of Dien Bien Phu, from the beginning of its inception in 1953.

I have just reviewed a classic account of this battle, Martin Windrow’s epic military history, The Last Valley: Dien Bien Phu and the French Defeat in Vietnam, so won’t repeat the story here. Suffice to say the French had the bright idea of creating a defensive stronghold in an isolated valley in remote north-west Vietnam which could only be supplied from the air. Why? a) They intended to use it as a base to undertake offensive actions against Viet Minh supply lines running from China past Dien Bien Phu southwards into neighbouring Laos and b) they planned to lure the Viet Minh into a set piece battle where they would be crushed by overwhelming French artillery and airborne power.

The plan failed on both counts, as the Viet Minh surrounded the fort in such numbers that ‘offensive’ missions became suicidal; and with regard to luring the Viet Minh to their destruction, the French a) badly underestimated the ability of the Viets to haul large-calibre cannon up to the heights commanding the shallow valley and b) the battle took place as the monsoon season started and so air cover was seriously hampered (and in any case the Viet Minh were masters of camouflage, who only manoeuvred at night, making them very difficult to locate from the air).

The result was that the series of strongholds which comprised the French position were surrounded and picked off one by one over the course of a gruelling and epic 56-day battle.

Logevall devotes no fewer than 168 pages to the battle (pp.378 to 546) but relatively little of this describes the actual fighting. Instead, he chronicles in dazzling detail the intensity of the political and diplomatic manoeuvring among all the interested powers, particularly the Americans, the British and the French. Each of these governments was under domestic political pressure from conflicting parties in their parliaments and congresses, and even the governments themselves were riven by debate and disagreement about how to manage the deteriorating situation. Press reports of the French Army’s ‘heroic’ stand against the surrounding forces for the first time caught the public imagination, in France and beyond and the battle began to become a symbols of the West’s resolve.

It is mind-boggling to read that the Americans repeatedly mooted the possibility of using atom bombs against the Chinese (who were by now openly supporting the Viet Minh forces) or of giving the French some atom bombs to deploy as they wanted. The generals and politicians rejected dropping atom bombs directly onto Dien Bien Phu since they would obviously wipe out the French garrison as well as the attacking forces. Extra peril was added to the international scene when the Americans detonated their first hydrogen bomb at Bikini Atoll in March 1954, intensifying the sense of Cold War superpower rivalry.

But it is in his running account of the minute by minute, phone call by phone call, hurried meetings between ambassadors and Foreign secretaries and Prime Ministers, that Logevall conveys the extraordinary complexity of political and strategic manouevring during these key months. The central issue was: Should the Americans directly intervene in the war to help the French? The French pleaded for more, much more, American supplies and munitions; for American troops on the ground; or for a diversionary attack on mainland China; or for more, many more bombing raids over Viet Minh positions.

Republican President Eisenhower was himself a supremely experienced military leader and had come to power (in January 1953) by attacking the (Democrat) Truman administration’s ‘capitulation’ in letting China fall to communism – and then for letting the Korean War to break out on Truman’s watch.

Logevall’s account is so long because it chronicles every important meeting of Eisenhower’s cabinet, examining the minutes of the meeting and analysing the points of view of his political and military advisers. And then analysing the way decisions were discussed with other governments, especially the British Foreign secretary (Anthony Eden) and Prime Minister (an ageing Winston Churchill).

Basically, Eisenhower found himself forced into a position of issuing fiercer and fiercer threats against the growing communist threat. In a keynote speech delivered on 7 April 1954, he warned of the perils of the Domino Effect (the first time the phrase entered the public domain) but hedged his bets by insisting that America wouldn’t go to war in South-East Asia unless:

a) the decision was ratified by Congress (one of the Republican criticisms of Truman was that he took the Americans into the Korean War by Presidential Decree alone, without consulting the Congress)
b) it was a ‘United Action’ along with key allies, namely the British

The focus then moves to the British and to British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden. Would he agree to U.S. demands to form a coalition, and thus give the Americans the fig leaf they needed to go in and help the French, whose situation at Dien Bien Phu was becoming more desperate each day.

But Logevall explains the pressure Eden was under, because he knew that any British intervention to prop up the ailing French imperial position in Indochina would be roundly criticised by India and other members of the newly-founded Commonwealth at an upcoming meeting of Commonwealth heads of state, and the British very much wanted to ensure the continuation of this legacy of their Empire.

Moreover, British government opinion was that the French were losing and that the Americans, if they intervened, would quickly find themselves being sucked into bigger and bigger commitments in Vietnam in a war which the British thought was doomed to failure. The risk would then be that the Americans would be tempted to ‘internationalise’ the conflict by directly attacking the Viet Minh’s arms supplier – China – possibly, God forbid, with atomic weapons – which would inevitably bring the Russians in on the Chinese side – and we would have World War Three!

Hence the British refusal to commit.

American Secretary of State John Foster Dulles flew to Britain several times but failed, in one-on-one meetings, to change Eden’s position. And it was this failure to secure British (and thence Australian and New Zealand) support to create a ‘United Action’ coalition which meant that Eisenhower wouldn’t be able to win round key members of Congress, which meant that – he couldn’t give the French the vital military support they were begging for – which, ultimately, meant that Dien Bien Phu was doomed.

It has been thrilling to read Martin Windrow’s bullet-by-bullet account of the battle (The Last Valley: Dien Bien Phu and the French Defeat in Vietnam) alongside Logevall’s meeting-by-meeting account of the diplomacy. Logevall gives you a sense of just how fraught and complex international politics can be and there is a horrible tragic inevitability about the way that, despite the French paratroopers fighting on bravely, hoping against hope that the Americans would lay on some kind of miracle, a massive air campaign, or a relief force sent overland from Laos – none of this was ever to materialise.

Instead, as the battle drew towards its grizzly end, all the parties were forced to kick the can down the road towards a five-power international conference due to start in Geneva in May 1954. This had been suggested at a meeting of the Soviets, British and Americans in Berlin late the previous year, to address a whole range of Cold War issues, from the status of West Germany and a final peace treaty with Austria, through to the unfinished aspects of the Korean War Armistice, and only partly to the ongoing Indochina crisis.

Dien Bien Phu had begun as only one among several operations carried out by General Navarre, head of French forces in Indochina, but it had steamrollered out of control and its air of a heroic last stand had caught the imagination of the French population and, indeed, people around the world, and had come to symbolise all kinds of things for different players – for the West a last ditch stand against wicked communism, but for many third-world populations, the heroic overthrow of imperial oppressors. And so the military result came to have a symbolic and political power out of all proportion to the wretched little valley’s strategic importance.

In the event, the central stronghold of Dien Bien Phu was finally overrun by the Viet Minh on 7 May 1954, the Viet Minh taking some 10,000 French and colonial troops (Algerian, West African, Vietnamese) prisoner. About two-thirds of these then died on the long marches to POW camps, and of disease and malnutrition when they got there. Only a little over 3,000 prisoners were released four months later.

The Geneva Conference (April 26 to July 20, 1954)

Meanwhile, Logevall works through the geopolitical implications of this titanic military disaster with characteristic thoroughness. Briefly, these were that the French quit Indochina. News of the French defeat galvanised the Geneva Conference which proceeded to tortuously negotiate its way to an agreement that a) the French would completely quit the country; b) Vietnam would be partitioned at the 17th parallel with the North to be run by an internationally-recognised Viet Minh government, while the South would be ruled by the (ineffectual playboy) emperor Bao Dai (who owned a number of residences in the South of France and was a connoisseur of high class call girls).

The negotiations to reach this point are described with mind-boggling thoroughness in part five of the book (pages 549 to 613), which give a full explanation of the conflicting views within each national camp (Americans, Russians, French, Chinese, British, Viet Minh) and the key moments when positions shifted and new lines of discussion became possible. Maybe the key breakthrough was the election of a new French Prime Minister, the left-of-centre Pierre Mendès France, who broke the diplomatic stalemate and set himself the deadline of one month to negotiate an end to the whole wasteful, crippling war.

Why did the Viet Minh in the end accept less than total independence for their country? Because they were leant on by the Chinese Premier Chou En-lai, himself carrying out the orders of his master, Mao Zedong. Mao didn’t want to give the Americans any excuse to intervene in the war, with the risk of attacks on mainland communist China. In fact the Russians and Chinese partly agreed to this temporary partition because they secured agreement from everyone that full and free elections would be held across the entire country in 1956 to decide its future.

The Americans, meanwhile, held aloof from the final agreement, didn’t sign it, and now – with the French definitively leaving – felt that the old colonial stigma was gone and so they were free to support the newly ‘independent’ nation of South Vietnam by any means necessary. When July 1956 – the date set for the elections – rolled around, the elections were never held – because the communist North had already in two years become very unpopular with its people, and because the Americans knew that, despite everything, Ho Chi Minh’s nationalists would still win. So both sides conspired to forget about elections and the partition solidified into a permanent state.

This then, forms the backdrop to the Vietnam War – explaining the long tortuous history behind the creation of a communist north Vietnam and a free capitalist South Vietnam, why the Americans came to feel that the ongoing survival of the south was so very important, but also the depth of nationalist feeling among the Vietnamese which was, eventually, twenty years later, to lead to the failure of the American war and the final unification of the country.

The volta

A high-level way of looking at the entire period is to divide it in two, with a transition phase:

In part one America under Roosevelt is trenchantly against European empires and in favour of independence for former colonies.
Under Truman there is growing anxiety about Russian intentions in Europe, which crystallise with China going red in 1949 and the North Korean attack in 1950 into paranoia about the communist threat so that –
In part two, America under Eisenhower (president for the key eight years from January 1953 to January 1961) reverses its strategy and now offers support to Imperial powers in combating communist insurgencies in Indochina, Malaya, Indonesia, as well as in Africa and South America.

What I found particularly rewarding and instructive was the detail on the earlier, wartime Roosevelt period, which I knew nothing about -and then Logevall’s wonderfully thorough explanation of what caused the change of attitude to the European empires, and how it was embodied in anti-communists like Secretary of State from 1953 to 1959 John Foster Dulles, and Eisenhower’s clever Vice-President, Richard Nixon.

Dien Bien Phu as symbol of French occupation of Indochina

Ngo Dinh Diem

The last hundred pages of the book cover the six and a half years from the end of the Geneva Conference (July 1954) to the inauguration of John F. Kennedy as the youngest ever U.S President in January 1961.

Titled ‘Seizing the Torch 1954 – 59’, this final section deals relatively briefly with the French withdrawal from Tonkin and northern Annam i.e. from the new territory of ‘North of Vietnam’ which was now handed over to the control of Ho Chi Minh’s Democratic Republic of Vietnam. (There is a good description of this difficult and potentially dangerous operation in Martin Windrow’s book).

The partition triggered the flight of an estimated 900,000 Vietnamese refugees from the North to the South – shipped to the South in a fleet of American passenger ships in what was titled Operation ‘Passage to Freedom’.

And in the North, the communists began to implement a foolishly harsh and cruel regime copied direct from the communist tyrannies of Russia and China. Most disastrous was their ‘land reform’, based on the categorisation of rural dwellers into different types – landlord, rich peasant, middle peasant, poor peasant etc – made with a view to rounding up and executing, or torturing or sending to labour camps everyone arbitrarily put in the ‘rich’ categories.

All this led swiftly to the predictable collapse of rural markets and the threat – yet again – of famine. There are records of Ho himself berating his top comrades for the brutality and foolishness of this brutal policy, but he doesn’t seem to have done much to stop it: the cadres had learned it from the masters; this was how Stalin and Mao had led their ‘revolutions’.

But Logevall’s real focus, as always, is not so much on these domestic social changes but on the continuing international diplomatic and political jockeying, now focusing on the supposedly ‘independent’ and ‘democratic’ regime in the new territory of South Vietnam. With the French withdrawing all colonial forces and administration during 1955, the path was for the first time clear for the Americans to act with a free hand. As usual Logevall explicates the complex discussions which took place in Washington of the various options, and shows how policy eventually settled on installing the peculiar figure of Ngo Dinh Diem as President, under the aegis of the docile emperor Bao Dai.

Logevall first paints a thorough picture of Diem’s personality – a devout Catholic who went into self-imposed exile in Europe at various Catholic retreats in between cultivating American opinion-formers in his perfect English – and who, upon taking power in South Vietnam, began to immediately display authoritarian traits, namely confining power to a small clique of his own direct family, and launching harsh persecutions of suspected communists and ‘traitors’.

In parallel, Logevall shows the tremendous efforts made by the American government to justify his corrupt and inefficient rule. The fundamental problem in Vietnam, as in so many other U.S. puppet states, would turn out to be that the Americans’ candidate was wildly unpopular: everyone knew that if a genuinely democratic election were held, Ho Chi Minh would win a decisive victory, even in the capitalist south. Thus the Americans, in the name of Democracy, found themselves defending a leader who would lose a democratic vote and showed clear dictatorial behaviour.

Diem wasn’t the representative of ‘democracy’ – he was the front man for free-market capitalism. As such he was enthusiastically supported by Eisenhower, Dulles and – as Logevall shows in some fascinating passages – by the stranglehold that mid-twentieth century U.S. media had on public opinion. Logevall lists the activities of a well-connected organisation called the ‘American Friends of Vietnam’, which included all the main publications of the day, most notably Time magazine, which ran glowing tributes to Diem in every edition.

Logevall introduces us to the born-again anti-communist doctor, Tom Dooley, whose account of working as a medic among refugees from the North – Deliver Us From Evil – was filled with the most appalling atrocity stories and became a highly influential bestseller, serialised in Reader’s Digest, which had a circulation of 20 million. Only decades later was it revealed to be a preposterous fake – with none of the atrocities Dooley recorded having any basis in fact.

It was ordinary American families who consumed this barrage of pro-Diem propaganda through the press and radio and TV from the mid-1950s onwards, with kids who in eight years time (when the States escalated the war in 1965) would be old enough to be drafted to go and give their lives to support the Diem regime.

But the reality in South Vietnam was much different from this shiny propaganda. Almost none of the huge amounts of American aid, soon rising to $300 million a year, went on health or education. Over 90% went on arming and training the South Vietnam Army which, however, continued to suffer from low morale and motivation.

America’s ‘support’ ignored much-needed social reform and was incapable of controlling Diem’s regime which passed increasingly repressive laws, randomly arresting intellectuals, closing down the free press, and implementing a regime of terror in the countryside.

More and more peasants and villagers found themselves forced to resist the blackmailing corruption of the Diem’s rural administrators, and revolt arose spontaneously in numerous locations around the country. This is a historical crux – many commentators and historians insist that the communist agitation in the South was created by the North; Logevall demurs and calls in contemporary analysts as evidence and witnesses. In his opinion, revolt against Diem’s repressive regime grew spontaneously and was a natural result of its harshness.

Indeed, newly opened archives in the North now reveal that the Hanoi leadership in fact agonised about whether, and how much, to support this groundswell of opposition. In fact, they were restrained by China and, more distantly, Russia, neither of whom wanted to spark renewed confrontation with America.

Nonetheless Hanoi found itself drawn, discreetly, into supporting revolutionary activity in the South, beginning in the late 1950s to create an administrative framework and a cadre of military advisers. These were infiltrated into the South via Laos, along what would become known as the ‘Ho Chi Minh Trail’. In response the Diem regime used a nickname for the communist forces, calling them the Viet Cong, or VC, a name which was to become horribly well-known around the world.

While the American press and President awarded Diem red carpet treatment, a tickertape parade in New York, and fawning press coverage when he visited the States in 1956, back home things were growing darker. As 1957 turned into 1958, Diem reinstituted the use of the guillotine as punishment for anyone who resisted his regime, and his roving tribunals travelling through the countryside used this threat to extort even more money from disaffected peasants. But simultaneously, the communist apparatus in the south began to take shape and to receive advice about structure and tactics from the North.

The beginning

The book ends with an at-the-time almost unnoticed event. On the evening of 8 July 1959 eight U.S. military advisers in a base 20 miles north of Saigon enjoyed a cordial dinner and then settled down to watch a movie. It was then that a squad of six Viet Cong guerrillas who had cut through the flimsy surrounding barbed wire, crept up to the staff quarters and opened fire with machine guns. Master Sergeant Chester Ovnand and Major Dale Buis died almost immediately, before armed help arrived from elsewhere in the camp to fight off the intruders. Ovnand and Buis’s names are the first of the 58,000 Americans who died in Vietnam and whose names are all carved into the black granite of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington.

Conclusion

Embers of War won many prizes and it really deserves them – it sheds light not only on the long, tortured death of French imperialism in Indochina, and gives incredible detail on the way the Americans inch-by-inch found themselves being drawn deeper into the Vietnam quagmire – it also shows any attentive reader how international affairs actually work, how great ‘decisions’ are ground out by the exceedingly complex meshing of a welter of complex and ever-shifting forces – at international, national, domestic, military, political and personal levels. On every level a stunningly informative and intelligent work of history.

Credit

‘Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam’ by Fredrik Logevall was published in 2012 by Random House. All quotes are for the purposes of criticism and review.

Related reviews

The Vietnam War by Mitchell Hall (2000)
The Last Valley: Dien Bien Phu and the French Defeat in Vietnam by Martin Windrow (2004)
Tim Page’s Nam (1983)

1 Comment

by Simon on February 26, 2017 • Permalink

Posted in History, War

Tagged 2012, Algeria, America, Annam, Anthony Eden, atom bomb, Australian, Ba Dinh Square, Bao Dai, Blitzkrieg, Burma, Cam Ranh Bay, Cambodia, Charles de Gaulle, Chiang Kai-shek, China, Cochin China, Colonel de Castries, colonialism, Comintern, Communism, Deliver Us From Evil, Dien Bien Phu, domino theory, Embers of War, First Indochina War of Independence, France, Frederik Logevall, French Indochina, General Giap, General Navarre, Geneva Conference, Germaine Krull, Great War, Hanoi, Harry S. Truman, Hitler, Ho Chi Minh, hydrogen bomb, imperialism, Indochina, Japan, John Foster Dulles, Korean War, Laos, Major Dale Buis, Malaya, Manchuria, Mao Zedong, Marshall Petain, Martin Windrow, Master Sergeant Chester Ovnand, nationalism, Nazi-Soviet Pact, New Zealand, Ngo Dinh Diem, Nguyễn Sinh Cung, Operation Passage To Freedom, Pearl Harbour, Pierre Mendès France, President Eisenhower, President Kennedy, President Truman, Reader's Digest, Richard Nixon, Roosevelt, Saigon, Second World War, Singapore, Stalin, the Cold War, the Commonwealth, the Ho Chi Minh Trail, The Last Valley: Dien Bien Phu and the French Defeat in Vietnam, The Philippines, Time magazine, Tom Dooley, Tonkin, USA, Vichy, Viet Cong, Viet Minh, Vietnam, Vietnam War, Winston Churchill, Woodrow Wilson

Posted by Simon on February 26, 2017

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2017/02/26/embers-of-war-frederik-logevall/

The Vietnam War by Mitchell Hall (2000)

This is one of the Seminar Studies series produced by academic publisher Longman, a set of short introductions to historical topics.

This one on the Vietnam War features an 87-page overview of the war’s long and tangled history, with 23 pages of original source documents, a 6-page chronology, a 2-page list of the main characters, a 3-page glossary, and an 8-page bibliography. Designed for A-level students, this is still a very useful short overview and reference book.

Vietnam geography

Vietnam is a 1,000-kilometer-long sliver of land along the east coast of the fat peninsular once known as Indochina. It widens in the north to form a kind of flowerhead shape around the northern city of Hanoi in the delta of the Red River, which is less than 50 miles from the border with China. Along the central belt which borders Laos in the west, it is sometimes as little as 30 miles wide. In the south it broadens out again before arriving at the southern city, formerly known as Saigon, on the big delta of the River Mekong.

Map of Vietnam

From 100 BC to 950 AD Vietnam was ruled by the Chinese. In the Middle Ages various dynasties tried to unite the long coastal strip and in the 1700s successfully seized the southern tip, the Mekong Delta, from the decaying Khmer Empire in Cambodia.

European explorers arrived in the 1500s, the French bringing Catholic missionaries, but it wasn’t until the 1800s that serious exploration and missionary work began. By the 1850s the French had established military control over most of Indochina, which they divided into administrative provinces and ran in the usual patronising, exploitative style.

The disastrous 20th century

World War Two was a catastrophe for European Empires all through Asia, which were overthrown by the triumphant Japanese Empire. The Japanese allowed Vietnam to continue to be run by the new Axis-friendly Vichy French regime. But when the Nazi regime in Europe collapsed in 1945, the Japanese briefly took direct rule, before their own defeat in August 1945.

Throughout the 1920s various Vietnamese nationalist movements had arisen, only to be suppressed by the French authorities. The most enduring was to be the communist one, led by Ho Chi Minh, who had trained in Bolshevik Moscow in the 1920s, and helped form the Vietnamese communist party in 1930. In 1941 Ho helped establish a broad-based nationalist movement, including moderates and radicals, which became known as the Viet Minh (full name ‘Việt Nam Độc Lập Đồng Minh Hội’, meaning ‘League for the Independence of Vietnam’). The communists were helped by Moscow to organise during the Vichy years and were given arms and advice by the American OSS during Japan’s brief period of direct rule.

This last year of the war saw a disastrous famine in Vietnam in which as many as two million starved to death. It had been inadvertently begun by Vichy French switch of agriculture from food crops to cash crops, and was exacerbated by Japanese rule, which was focused solely on feeding Japan’s home population. The collapse of civil authority and widespread hatred of the oppressor meant that, the moment Japan surrendered in August 1945, Ho Chi Minh’s call for a general uprising was met with enthusiasm in the northern and central provinces. This ‘August Revolution’ consolidated Viet Minh rule in the north and Ho called for Allied recognition of a united independent Vietnam.

What a world of pain would have been avoided if the Americans had simply agreed. Imagine if Truman had continued to supply arms and support to Ho, helped to establish a united nationalist government, and gained the eternal gratitude of the Vietnamese people.

Instead, as in Korea, the Allies i.e. America, designated a geographic division of the country: China to accept Japanese surrender in the north and Britain to accept it in the south. British soldiers occupied Saigon and put down nationalist and communist elements, pending the return of the French.

The French returned to find that: Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh organisation effectively controlled the north of the country; and the south included large pockets of Viet Minh and communist sympathisers, alongside competing nationalist interests, for example the Buddhist, Cao Dai and Hoa Hao religious sects, which made it very difficult to rule.

Dienbienphu

The French struggled to restore peace in the south and enforce their somewhat optimistic claim to be able to control the north. As sporadic outbreaks of violence dragged on, a French general, Henri Navarre, decided to draw the Viet Minh into an open set-piece battle such as his forebears had fought in Europe and set up a massive stronghold at Dienbienphu, far in the north and west towards the border with Laos, in the spring of 1954. The Vietminh’s leading strategist, General Vo Nguyen Giap, surrounded the 13,000 French with 50,000 Vietminh troops and after a grinding two-month conflict, took Dienbienphu.

This catastrophic defeat coincided with peace talks in Geneva about the entire region, and a deal was brokered whereby Vietnam was divided along the 17th parallel into a Vietminh-held north and the French-controlled south, with a promise to hold elections throughout the country in 1956. The French began withdrawing from South Vietnam, handing authority over to the ’emperor’ Bao Dai, who appointed Ngo Dinh Diem Prime Minister in June 1954.

American involvement

Immediately after the Second World War America, true to its vehemently anti-colonial principles, had sought to undermine and hamper the return of the French to Indochina. However, within a few short years Russia’s increasingly aggressive stance in Europe had driven a wedge between the wartime allies and changed US policy. Now US policy around the world was subordinated to the idea of ‘containment’: the fear that Russia would back or impose communist governments in every country it was able to, in an aggressive strategy to spread communism throughout the world – unless actively halted by the West.

This paranoid view of the world was strongly reinforced when Mao Zedong’s communists finally won the Chinese Civil War in October 1949, and then Kim Il-sung’s North Korean communists invaded South Korea in June 1950. It was easy to see this as a concerted effort to make all Asia communist, an outcome which would ultimately threaten pro-western Japan, and then the American West Coast.

And so the Americans switched from criticising the French to supporting them with supplies and advisers. Dienbienphu was a turning point. From then onwards hawks within the US administration began to win the argument. Thus, as the French withdrew their forces and administrators, the Americans found themselves getting drawn into supporting Diem’s southern government. This was despite Diem’s unsavoury policies. Himself a member of Vietnam’s Catholic minority, Diem forcefully repressed other religious groups and kept key positions of power within his family or clan. As with the unsavoury Syngman Rhee in South Korea, America found that the logic of its anti-communist position drew it into supporting a repressive dictator who breached every principle of human rights and good governance Americans supposedly believed in, solely on the basis that he wasn’t a communist.

The French leave Vietnam

In 1955 the last French troops left the country. In 1956 Diem instituted a fierce anti-communist drive. In 1957 fighting broke out between the Republic of Vietnam Army and anti-regime opponents, who Diem referred to as the Viet Cong – a name which would catch on. (The original phrase was Việt Nam Cộng-sản which means ‘Vietnamese communist’. It was abbreviated to Viet Cong, then just VC. In the NATO phonetic alphabet V and C are conveyed by ‘Victor’ and ‘Charlie’ – hence the widespread use of ‘Charlie’ by American troops to refer to the enemy.)

Hanoi, effective capital of the communist North, was able to recruit a wide range of anti-Diem forces in the name of overthrowing the dictator and reuniting the country. In 1959 Hanoi sent the first shipments of men and supplies to their forces in the south to fuel what had, in effect, become a civil war. The various nationalist forces were organised into the People’s Liberation Armed Forces, supplied and directed by communists. By 1961 they controlled significant parts of the countryside and had sympathisers in every southern city.

President Kennedy took office in January 1961 and walked straight into the Vietnam problem. Like his predecessors he saw it through a Cold War lens as a case of communist aggression. Kennedy authorised the despatch of US special forces to Vietnam to train and support the South Vietnam army. By 1962 advisers estimated that Diem held only 49% of South Vietnam – but instead of recognising historical reality, this only spurred the Americans to redouble their support for the losing side. In 1963 the North commissioned isolated attacks on southern military targets, in which growing numbers of Americans were killed. It was a red rag to a bull.

Why America lost the Vietnam War

1. Civil war or Cold War ‘invasion’

The Americans saw the Vietnam conflict solely in terms of the global Cold War, and solely as a communist conspiracy. They failed to acknowledge the nationalist motivation of many of their opponents, who simply wanted to see their country reunited and all foreign oppressors thrown out.

Thus the Americans persisted in thinking about the war as an ‘invasion’ from the communist North, which could be put down by bombing the North, as if this conflict resembled Germany invading France. But this book makes clear that as much as 40% of the population of the south were opposed to Diem’s regime and, after he was assassinated in a coup, his numerous successors were even less popular.

The Americans manoeuvred themselves into the hopeless position of propping up the unpopular side in a civil war.

2. The failure of ‘attrition’

The American military adopted a policy of ‘attrition’. They thought they could wear down the enemy through constant conflict in which America’s vastly larger weaponry would inevitably triumph. It would become a contest of wills. Victory was measured by body count. If more VC died than US troops died then, eventually, finally, in the end, America would win.

But in the event the American willpower cracked first. Why? To this day the military men and their supporters blame the tremendous anti-war movement which grew up back in the States for undermining the war effort. But politicians have to represent the will of the people and by the end of the 1960s the people of America had had enough.

At a deeper level the whole sorry saga recalls the parable of the fox chasing the rabbit: the fox is quicker, cleverer and stronger than the rabbit; but the fox is only running for its dinner whereas the rabbit is running for its life. The Americans were only fighting yet another war for not very clear aims, with a manifestly failing strategy, in defensof a corrupt and unpopular government. The Vietnamese were fighting for a free, united country. The Americans could go home anytime; the Vietnamese had to live there. Which side would you bet on?

American involvement

Hundreds of thousands of books, articles, movies, newspaper and magazine pieces, academic studies and websites are devoted to the American part of the Vietnam War, from roughly 1964 to 1973. Suffice to say that when President Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, there were about 16,000 US troops in Vietnam, helping Diem’s government against Viet Cong insurgents. Six years later there were as many as 550,000 US military personnel in country.

Diem was himself assassinated a few weeks before Kennedy, and south Vietnam then suffered a series of coups by military men, rendering the southern government ever-more illegitimate and precarious. In 1965, after half a dozen military coups, Nguyễn Văn Thiệu became president and was the figurehead of the Southern regime the Americans were supposedly fighting for, for the rest of the conflict.

1964 was the key year when America could still have walked away with some dignity, and we now know it was filled with fraught debates at senior levels in the administration of President Johnson, who replaced the assassinated Kennedy.

The central event came on 2nd August when a US destroyer high up in the Gulf of Tonkin (aiding commando attacks against the North Korean coast) was attacked by some North Vietnamese boats. Two days later the same ship reported being under attack again. There is now consensus that the second attack never took place and, apparently, the first one resulted in precisely one bullet hole in the ship’s infrastructure. Nevertheless, this ‘attack’ gave Johnson administration the fig leaf it needed to go to Congress and force through the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution on 7 August 1964, which allowed the president ‘to take any measures he believed were necessary to retaliate and to promote the maintenance of international peace and security in southeast Asia.’ It was the legal fig leaf to take America into a full-blown war.

Rolling Thunder

Further North Vietnam-inspired attacks on southern targets, which killed some US servicemen, persuaded a dubious President Johnson that a bombing campaign against the North would bring them to the negotiating table. Having just read accounts of the bombing campaign of the Second World War and the Korean War, I share the President’s doubts – but the American air force won the argument and Operation Rolling Thunder – a sustained bombing campaign against Northern military targets – commenced in March 1965. Two things happened:

this stepping-up of the war sparked the first public protests, especially on university campuses, which formed the seeds of what would grow into a massive nationwide anti-war campaign
selective bombing didn’t either bolster the regime in the south or force the North to the negotiating table and so, as always happens, the generals insisted that the campaign be broadened to take in vital infrastructure, and then towns and then cities

Tim Page’s photo of the US air force man with a helmet with a set of stickers on it reading, ‘Bomb Hanoi’, ‘Bomb Saigon’, ‘Bomb Disneyland’, ‘Bomb Everything’, captures the horribly inevitable logic of all bombing campaigns. They never work and then their proponents say that’s because we’re not bombing enough.

That’s what the Luftwaffe told Hitler to get him to authorise the bombing British cities: did it bring Churchill to the negotiating table? No. Then Bomber Harris persuaded Churchill to allow indiscriminate ‘area’ bombing of German cities: did that bring Hitler to the negotiating table? No. the Americans fire-bombed Japanese cities for a year, reducing many to rubble, killing 100,000 civilians in the great firebombing of Tokyo alone: did that bring Japan to the negotiating table? No. The American Air Force bombed North Korean targets for years: did that hasten the negotiations to a conclusion? No.

But once again, the USAF persuaded a doubtful civilian leader to allow mass bombing of an enemy: did it bolster the South Vietnamese regime? No. Did it bring a defeated North Vietnam to the negotiating table? No. An estimated 50,000 North Vietnamese died.

The realisation that the (ever-expanding) bombing campaign wasn’t working, drove demands from the military authority on the ground, General Westmoreland, for more ground troops. Slowly, reluctantly, lacking a clear end-goal, Johnson authorised increasing US troops, 23,000 by the end of 1964, 385,000 during 1966, a massive 535,000 by early 1968.

The Tet Offensive

1968 was the decisive year. In January, taking the Americans completely by surprise, the North launched the Tet Offensive, striking a host of military sites all over South Vietnam, even attacking the US Embassy in Saigon.

Map of Tet Offensive targets

Although the Viet Cong lost at least 10 times the number of American dead in the Tet Offensive (45,267 to 4,124) the graphic TV images and newspaper reports, combined with the vigorous anti-war campaigns led by students back in the States, undermined American determination. It was a contributory factor to Lyndon Johnson deciding not to stand for re-election as president and to the election victory of his successor, Republican Richard Nixon, who became president in January 1969. Nixon had campaigned to bring the war to an end and tried to implement a policy of ‘Vietnamisation’ i.e. handing the war back to the South Vietnamese to fight.

Even with this determination it still took four years to get to the Paris Peace Accords of 1973, during which time plenty more pacification campaigns were carried out, plenty of programmes to bolster the South Vietnam government’s position and popularity – in fact bombing was actually increased.

In March 1969 Nixon took the fateful decision to extend the ongoing bombing into neighbouring Cambodia, through which the Viet Minh had been sending arms and supplies. This had the effect of destabilising the pro-American government there and bolstering the fierce local communist party, the Khmer Rouge, with catastrophic results.

The Americans also led a predominantly South Vietnamese Army campaign into Laos, to destroy Viet Minh bases, but the Southern army was badly worsted, abandoning much of its equipment on the field of battle. This augured badly for the whole ‘Vietnamisation’ strategy and, sure enough, once the Americans had withdrawn, the South was to ultimately lose the war. The Viet Minh knew they only had to sit tight and watch the American war effort collapse.

Decay and collapse

The biggest revelation to me in this short, punchy account, is the state of decay the American army reached during the war.

Drugs A Department of Defense study indicated that 60% of US military personnel in Vietnam used drugs in 1970.
Desertion The desertion rate hit an all-time high in 1971 – from 1963 to 1973 about half a million US soldiers deserted, nearly 20% of the total.

In 1972 the North launched the ‘Easter Offensive’, but were surprised at the solidity of the Southern fightback and the violence of the American response (this included the largest bombing campaign of the entire war, which devastated Northern supplies). As many as 100,000 Northern soldiers died and around 25,000 from the South. Even as it withdrew its troops, and transferred vast sums to President Thieu’s regime to train the southern army, America was still capable of lashing out.

Peace talks

Not only was their victory on the battlefield not as assured as they had assumed, but the international situation was shifting against the interests of the communist North. In February 1972 President Nixon made a historic state visit to China, and Hanoi could see that, ultimately, friendship with the U.S. was more important to Beijing than a never-ending war. At the same time Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger were pursuing a policy of détente with the Russians. Stymied on the battlefield and sensing that either Russia or China might start to cut off supplies and force an unfavourable settlement, Hanoi finally agreed to come to the negotiating table, where all modern wars end. In fact Kissinger had been having secret talks with Le Duc Tho, a member of North Vietnamese politburo, from as far back as August 1969. Now there was movement.

A draft peace agreement had been hammered out by October 1972. But President Thieu refused to sign it without significant concessions by the North which thereupon withdrew from discussion. This led Nixon to agree to a final mass bombing of the North – the so-called Christmas Bombing campaign – in December 1972, inflicting huge damage and bringing condemnation from at home and abroad. But it brought Hanoi back to the table and Peace Accords were finally signed in Paris in January 1973. They provided for:

a ceasefire to begin on January 28, 1973
US troops had sixty days to withdraw all of their forces
both side to release all their war prisoners
South Vietnam and People’s Revolutionary Government to negotiate a political settlement which would allow South Vietnamese people to decide their own political future
reunification of Vietnam was to be ‘carried out step by step through peaceful means’

The Americans withdrew their last forces but continued to send vast sums to Thieu’s administration. All prisoners were released, including some 591 U.S. prisoners of war. Only 159 Marines remained to guard the U.S. Embassy.

Final defeat

In spring 1974 the North launched a military campaign against the central highlands. In August President Nixon chose to resign rather than face impeachment over the Watergate affair. His successor, President Ford ignored Nixon’s secret promises to the southern regime. Emboldened by their success in the midlands, VC forces attacked towns and cities. Their strategists had thought it might take as long as two years to wear down the Southern army, particularly in light of the billions of dollars of munitions the Americans had sent them. In the event the entire campaign to conquer South Vietnam took 55 days.

Right up to the last week, U.S. officials avowed total confidence in the South, which explains the final, panic-stricken scenes of helicopters landing on the Embassy roof as communist forces closed in on Saigon. Saigon fell to the North on 30 April 1975, and Vietnam was finally, after thirty years of hugely destructive conflict, reunited.

Credit

‘The Vietnam War’ (Seminar Studies In History) by Mitchell K. Hall was published by Longman in 2000. All quotations are for the purposes of criticism and review.

Related reviews

Tim Page’s Nam by Tim Page (1983)
The Korean War by Max Hastings (1987)
The Last Valley: Dien Bien Phu and the French Defeat in Vietnam by Martin Windrow (2004)
Embers of War by Frederik Logevall (2012) A brilliant account of the rise of the Vietnamese communist party and its long struggle against the French colonialist power

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by Simon on February 6, 2017 • Permalink

Posted in Books, History, War

Posted by Simon on February 6, 2017

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2017/02/06/the-vietnam-war-mitchell-hall/

Tim Page’s Nam (1983)

No one was really sane, everyone on the point of a total numb shock, of hysteria, a madness that shrinks have only now begun to diagnose. (p.98)

The times

Page is a legendary figure about whom legends were weaved during the climactic years of a war which itself became the stuff of legends, during the legendary 1960s.

I read Michael Herr’s book of journalism from the war, Despatches, which features Page as a central character, when it came out (1977), and bought this book when it was new in 1983. I saw The Deer Hunter (1978) and Apocalypse Now (1979) in cinemas when they were released, and in 1980 went hitch-hiking across the USA, getting a long lift through the mid-West from a Vietnam vet who’d had a leg amputated and was stoned all the time. In Boston I hung out with a would-be rock band which featured ‘Weird Ira’ (on bass) and ‘Angry George’ (on frantic guitar), both very fucked-up Vietnam veterans, who lived in a permanent blur of drugs I’d never heard of.

That whole milieu, its culture of ‘dropping out’, drifting through casual jobs, insubordination to all authority, growing long hair, festooning yourself in beads and bangles, smoking dope, popping mandies or quaaludes or snorting speed – it all seems a long, long time ago. Another world.

The biography

In the early 1960s Page left his boring life in Orpington, a suburb of London, and made his way across Asia to Indochina, where he got aid-related jobs in Laos and taught himself photography by the age of 18. He was lucky enough to be in Laos during a coup and took photos which he was able to sell to news agencies. Then he moved across the border to Vietnam, just as the US army presence was ramping up from 1965 onwards, and as he turned 20.

Page began ‘stringing’, working freelance for whichever agencies would buy his pictures. He had survived a motorbike crash a few years earlier, and considering himself living on ‘free time’, took risks and went to places other photographers refused. He established a base in ‘Frankie’s House’, a bar-cum-hotel-cum brothel, with other western journalists and formed a close friendship with fellow photographer Sean Flynn – son of Hollywood megastar Errol. Their escapades formed the basis of a TV mini-series, Frankie’s House, broadcast in 1992.

Page’s colour and b&w photos from 1965 onwards capture all aspects of the war, military and civilian, with a raw immediacy which got them placed in news magazines especially Time-Life. He was wounded four times – the last time, in April 1969, when a soldier stepping out of a landing helicopter ahead of him trod on a mine, which blew his legs off. Page, right behind him, received a 2-inch piece of hot shrapnel in the head. He was considered dead at the scene but choppered back to the hospital, where they discovered he was alive. He was moved on to a series of hospitals back in the States where they removed part of his brain the size of an orange and stuck his skull back together.

Initially paralysed down his left side, Page slowly regained full movement, but his war days were over. He worked for a while rehabilitating other wounded and PTSD soldiers, before returning to work as a photographer for rock magazines in the 1970s. I remember finding out who Page was from a downbeat BBC ‘Arena’ documentary about him broadcast in 1979. I vividly remember him saying that these days he spent a lot of the time getting stoned and masturbating. Even then it felt like the notion that getting stoned and being ‘shockingly’ candid about sex would change anything (as they seemed to believe in the heady 1960s) was long out of date.

Tim Page’s Nam

It’s a large format book from the art publishers Thames and Hudson. Its 120 pages are divided into seven sections:

Chopper blitzkrieg
Portraits
The mechanics
Rock and roll flash
CV of carriers
Sufferings
The Dao of peace

A selection of images from the book is available on Page’s website.

Tim Page Nam photos

Blurbs on the back and online talk about the images’ ability to shock – but do they? It’s fifty years since many of these photos were taken, during which we have had plenty of shocking images – and even more shocking movies – depicting the killing fields of Cambodia, the Soviet war in Afghanistan, the first Gulf War (with those images of skeletons in tanks on the Highway of Death out of Kuwait), anarchy in Somalia, the massacres in Yugoslavia, the Rwandan genocide, 9/11, the American-Afghan war, the war in Iraq, and now the rise of ISIS.

We have drunk deep of horrors on TV and the press, made all the more ghastly by the CGI-enhanced violence of Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers and the hundreds of subsequent movies which have copied their terrifyingly realistic depiction of the effects of modern weapons on the vulnerable human body.

The work

For me the immense cloud of legendariness, and the repeated telling of Page’s wildness and his injuries and the brain surgery and paralysis, tend to show that people find it easier to talk and write about the biography of an artist, than about their work.

The most obvious thing about the work is its copiousness. He took a lot of photos, of everything he saw. And he went to dangerous places where other photographers didn’t venture – out on patrol with the GIs and flying all over in the choppers, as well as trips out to the huge aircraft carriers, and in patrol boats. As well as being alert to everyday scenes, particularly of Vietnamese civilians. So Page’s work demonstrates great copiousness and an impressive variety of subject matter.

Next there’s a variety of styles. Nothing is staged in a studio, but, at a formal level, some of the portraits of soldiers or civilians are carefully posed and framed. At the other extreme, he catches images of people in the street or in crowds, blurred, in action, just as he catches unrepeatable moments of choppers taking off or landing. There is a genre of ‘photos of the injured’ along with ‘photos of the dead’.

These people shots are the ones I think the critics are referring to when they write of ‘shocking’, ‘realistic’ and ‘brutal’ images of war. But it’s important to acknowledge the tremendous beauty of many of his photos, where the composition, framing and colour all combine to produce visual images as composed and complete as any painting. Especially featuring machinery – there’s a sequence of an Australian artillery piece where the contrast between the muscular men’s bodies and shining metal is beautiful. The helicopters played a key role in the war, and all the photos taken from choppers give a serendipitous frame and structure to the images.

I will always think that they make a great camera platform, but a better frame… (p.21)

So if you set aside the fact that it was a somewhat violent conflict, to a photographer the Vietnam War provided an enormous range of human situations, of types of human – soldiers, civilians, peasants, urbanites, the young and fit, the old and fearful, the dead – of intense or incongruous situations, and an enormous variety of ways human interact with beautifully-designed modern machinery – steering, guiding, flying, aiming, shooting – a really broad range of 20th-century Homo sapiens.

Some types of photos

action shots on the hoof which capture the spirit of movement and confusion –
- chopper landing
helicopter shots –
- from a chopper
- choppers in flight
grunts –
casualties –
beautiful compositions
- US 25th Division trops take cover from a US helicopter’s propeller wash as it lands near Du Co
- choppers and troops
humour –
Vietnamese –

The prose

Each of the sections is introduced by a page or two of prose. They’re made of stream of consciousness sentences, running to numerous clauses, listing equipment, feelings, impressions, studded with military jargon and acronyms.

A Delta day at 105 in the shade, 90 humidity pre-monsoon, when the air can be carved with a machete; extracting up out of 12.7 range, the airconditioned luxury of 1500 feet is truly magic, a whirl towards the PX normalcy, a sense of security after the endless plod humping 20 keys of gear through the bad dream (p.17)

The aim is to create a stoned overload of sense impressions threaded with knowing references to military hardware, and all radiating a strong sense of insiderness.

On the black you could get a hot chopper, a can of Cs or a PBR that fell of the back of a truck on the way to the front. (p.42)

Can you dig it, man? Page’s prose screams out, ‘We were there, nobody explained anything or took any pity on us, and so you readers are just going to have to work out for yourself what I’m talking about.’ The continual deployment of GI jargon maintains the author’s superior cool.

Sitting in the door gunner’s seat in a Huey fragged by PIOs of the 25th Div, getting lost over Charlie’s turf up by the Fish Hook and watching those blue-green tracers of 12.7s hover towards you… (p.21)

‘Don’t know what a Huey is, or the 25th Div, a PIO or a 12.7? Who Charlie is? Where the Fish Hook is? Come on, newbie, keep up!‘

There’s no map because you’re expected to know where all these places are, as you’re expected to know so much else. Meanwhile, have a puff of this and enjoy Page’s helter-skelter of quick intense impressions, sketches of:

… field trips, scout tracks, refuelling in the monsoon, more GIs voting for noone, Ranger advisers deep in the Plaines des Joncs on assignment for Match, black machine-gunners stoned and leech-infested south of Saigon, and LURP deer-hunter look-alikes in the Michelin sorting out Victor Charlie for Georgie Patton Junior’s 11th Armoured cav, tank drivers boring at you out of their steel hutches, the black dude from Force recon after a week out there, legs, officers, corpsmen, ARVN, ROKs, the whole lot a kaleidoscope of survivors, dead or alive. (p.32)

What comes over is how much he loved it, the glamour and excitement and fear and stylishness of it all:

So many of the lethal gadgets had a pure and simple sexiness, the romance of power over life, ego-saving, black and white decisive life and death, the ultimate blast, the final wave on the best-equipped board in the surf. I am not sure if most, even in the depth of the soul-searching hawk and dove debates, really weren’t out there mainly for the hell of it, for the kicks, the fun, the brush with all that was most evil, most dear, most profane… the camaraderie, the sheer adventure of it all, were the biggest isms that could ever frag our hearts and minds. (p.51)

This is what so many anti-war campaigners find hard to understand or underestimate – that for some men, war is the most intense experience available, that it feeds and fulfils something deep in their souls. And even the calm, polite, gentlemanly men among us, many even of them from time to time fantasise and imagine themselves into warlike situations to live out those animal needs, urges and drives. Wars happen because men like fighting.

There are disappointingly few references to the actual craft and art of photography. It would be good to have a page explaining which cameras he used for different subjects, and which lenses, and why, and with what results. Nope. Maybe there’s more about this in his autobiography. The prose here isn’t explanatory; it is designed to replicate the immediacy and confusion captured in so many of the photos. Thus the camera doesn’t appear here as the tool of a trade, but as a psychological technique:

The camera became a filter to the madness and horror, a means of portraying it…It was a passport to witness the most insane events man can put together… There was too much to shoot. Too many frames to be made. No time to do it… (p.86)

Conclusion

If you’re happy to swing with the insider argot and submit to the bombardment of sense impressions, Page’s prose is immensely enjoyable, and the pictures – the more you look at them – the more they not only convey with force the place and time and people, but also say something else, about the man’s eye, and technical ability, and range of seeing. From the formally framed to the chaotic, he finds the core. It is the consistency with which he caught ‘frames’ in all kinds of situations, which builds up a tremendous sense of artistry and instinct.

You learn absolutely nothing about the origins, history, key events, strategy, geopolitics and diplomacy, battles or outcome of the war. For that, you have to look elsewhere.

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