I found the first episode of The Vietnam War by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick to be so simplistic that I wanted to stop watching, but in the end I did keep watching, and I’m glad that I did, as the second episode gets better, and I’m now watching the third.
The most valuable part of this documentary are the interviews, as the people interviewed say things that are more complex and revealing than the narrative in the documentary.
For instance, through some of the interviews we can learn about the presence of racism in the interactions between Americans and South Vietnamese soldiers, a topic that the narrative of the documentary does not directly address.
Let’s look at two examples, one from Episode Two and one from Episode Three.
The second episode covers the Battle of Ấp Bắc. This battle was fought in early 1963 and it was the first time that the Viet Cong “stood and fought,” that is, that they stayed in one place and continued to fight rather than launching a guerrilla attack and then disappearing.
The South Vietnamese forces suffered a serious defeat in this battle.
In The Vietnam War, this loss is presented as evidence of the supposed incompetence of the South Vietnamese army. While the narrator does mention that “communist spies” had obtained information beforehand, the narrator does not explain that this battle marked a major intelligence failure on the part of the US because the Americans had passed on a great deal of information to a spy, Phạm Xuân An, who they unknowingly continued to provide information to throughout the war (see Perfect Spy: The Incredible Double Life of Pham Xuan An, Time Magazine Reporter and Vietnamese Communist Agent).
In any case, in The Vietnam War a participant in this battle, American army advisor James Scanlon, talks about the aftermath of this battle. The narrator notes that “At least 80 South Vietnamese soldiers had been killed. So had three American advisors, including Captain Ken Good, a friend of Scanlon’s.”
And then Scanlon states about first the South Vietnamese dead that “We stacked the armored personnel carriers with bodies, stacked them up on top until we couldn’t stack them anymore, and um. . .” And then he says about the American dead that, “I wouldn’t let the Vietnamese touch the Americans. So I carried the Americans out. . .”
[Ít nhất 80 lính Nam Việt Nam thiệt mạng, cùng 3 cố vấn Mỹ, có cả Đại úy Ken Good, bạn của Scanlon.
“Chúng tôi chất xác lên xe thiết giáp, chồng xác lên nhau đến khi. . . không còn chất thêm được nữa. Tôi không để phía Việt Nam động vào thi thể lính Mỹ. Tôi tự tay khiêng xác họ về.”]
The third episode then talks about a similar situation at the battle of Bình Giã, a battle that took place at the end of 1964. In this battle an American helicopter was shot down, killing four Americans.
In The Vietnam War we learn that a battalion of Vietnamese marines was sent in the next day to retrieve the American bodies. Here we see one of those marines, Tran Ngoc Toan, recall what happened.
Tran Ngoc Toan states that “The commanding officer from Saigon told the battalion you have to come and get all four American serviceman body.” [Sĩ quan chỉ huy ở Sài Gòn lệnh cho tiểu tôi vào để lấy xác 4 quân nhân Mỹ.]
12 South Vietnamese marines from Toan’s unit were killed just trying to get to the helicopter. The narrator then says that “Their comrades wrapped them in ponchos and laid them out next to the dead Americans. An American chopper dropped into the clearing. The American crew jumped out under fire, picked up the four Americans, climbed back into their chopper and took off again.” [12 Thủy quân lục chiến Việt Nam trong đơ vị của Toàn thiệt mạng khi cố tiếp cận chiếc trực thăng rơi. Đồng đọc cuộn xác họ vào tấm tang và đặc họ cạnh xác lính Mỹ. Một trực thăng Mỹ hạ xuống trảng trống. Phi hành đoàn Mỹ nhảy ra giữa hỏa lực dịch, nhặt 4 xác người Mỹ, mang lên trực thăng, rồi bay đi.]
Tran Ngoc Toan then says, “And we told them, ‘Hey, try to get all my body out of here too.’ But they refuse to pick up our body.” [Này, chở xác lính tôi đi nữa chứ. Nhưng họ không chịu nhặt xác lính chúng tôi.]
Tran Ngoc Toan and his men waited by their dead for three hours. An American tried to get them to leave, but they wouldn’t, and then the Viet Cong attacked.
The narrator then says that “When it was all over, 5 Americans had died at Bình Giã. 32 Viet Cong bodies had been left on the battlefield. 200 South Vietnamese were killed. 200 more were wounded.” [Khi trận đánh kết thúc, 5 lính Mỹ thiệt mạng tại Bình Giã. Việt Cộng bỏ lại 32 xác. 200 lính Nam Việt Nam bị giết, và 200 lính khác bị thương.]
So let’s think about this. We learn that American military advisors at that time thought that the South Vietnamese soldiers were incompetent, and then we also learn that Americans did not treat dead South Vietnamese soldiers the same way that they treated their own dead.
Why was that? Aren’t soldiers supposed to be equal “brothers in arms”?
These two stories reveal something that I suspect is extremely important for understanding the Vietnam War. Why did the Americans in these two instances not treat the South Vietnamese dead equally? Although the term “racism” is overused these days, the fact that Vietnamese were physically different from the Americans probably did combine with other ideas that Americans in Vietnam had at that time (like a sense of frustration that they were going there to help and yet were getting killed) to create beliefs/views about Vietnamese that we can call “racist.”
How widespread were those beliefs/views? What effect did they have on the war? If these two examples are part of a larger trend, then racism must have had an enormous impact on the war.
Could it be that the “incompetence” of South Vietnamese soldiers and their refusal at times to follow American orders had something to do with their dislike of the racist beliefs/views of the Americans who were giving them orders?
This is a topic that definitely deserves to be researched.
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You have made an excellent point, professor!
Excerpts from VN war hero , Col D. Hackworth ‘s interview :
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/peoplescentury/episodes/guerrillawars/hackworthtranscript.html
[ Q: Would it surprise you to know that the chief concierge at the Continental Hotel, Saigon’s top hotel, was in fact working for the Vietcong?
Hackworth: It wouldn’t be surprise me. At Tet of ’68, the secretary to the commanding general of U.S. Forces Vietnam, General Westmoreland, was found holding an AK-47. With the whole Vietnamese apparatus, I never once trusted a Vietnamese. I never trusted a Vietnamese general. I never allowed a Vietnamese inside my camp, my firebase. If I were going to meet a Vietnamese colonel, I would meet him outside my firebase, because I didn’t trust him. I assumed everybody was a Vietcong.
Q: And these are the people you were meant to be fighting for…
Hackworth: That’s right, and that was the attitude. My soldiers from the 9th Division hated the South Vietnamese soldiers more than they did the Vietcong. They saw them going out on operations and not meeting the enemy, but avoiding the enemy. They called it ‘search and avoid,’ where it was supposed to be ‘search and destroy.’ My battalion could go all the way through that same area and come back bloodied and battered. That really got to my guys.
I was walking the perimeter one night; I used the British system of stand-to in the evening, where everybody was at their post with a weapon, ready to go, just as the sun was going down. One of my snipers said, “Sir, how’s the body count today?” And I said “Not so good, we only had 8 or 9 for the day, for the battalion.” And he said, “Well, I’ll get you 2 more.” Before I could stop him he took his sniper rifle… I looked down at the end of the weapon to see where it was pointed, and it was pointed at two South Vietnamese soldiers guarding a bridge about 40 meters from my perimeter. I knocked his weapon up before he had a chance to squeeze off a round and said, “What are you doing?”He said, “Man, a gook is a gook, and that’s a bad gook.” That was the attitude of a lot of the soldiers. They didn’t like the South Vietnamese, because they didn’t pull their weight.]
Col . Hackworth ‘s biography
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/06/nyregion/col-david-hackworth-hero-of-vietnam-war-dies-at-74.html
I’m not sure if those perceptions are racist or just a clash of two different cultures / ways of doing things.
I remember the battle of Ấp Bắc (3 Jan 1963) quite well as I was the translator in the 7th Division advisory team. Captain Goodall was an infantry battalion advisor and killed while walking in the brush with his battalion (I remember this as being in late 1962 not 1963). Scanlon was a Captain and an advisor to the 7th Division G3. He and his Sgt (Bowers?) went in with the US Army helicopters and an ARVN battalion (Scanlon was there for Air Support). One (pre-Huey) couldn’t take off and the choppers turned around to rescue their buddies (bad decision — going into a very hot LZ) which led to some shot down and the dead Americans. Scanlon and the sgt were hunkered down in rice paddies the whole day under machine gun fire. The VC were units from the 261st Main Force Battalion (major unit of VC Military Region 8) and the 517th Local Force Battalion of My Tho Province (Dinh Tuong province in GVN speak) in dug-out machine gun positions directly facing the landing zone of the helicopters. The 7th ARVN Divison M113 unit (with .50 cal machine guns) refused /couldn’t cross canals until the battle was over and the VC fled — apparently he didn’t want any bullet holes in his new vehicles. I think Scanlon’s action could have been a reflection to that rather than anything else. fyi: Perhaps the ARVN Division Commander’s main worry during Ap Bac was to ensure none of the newly issued AR-15’s (later re-named M-16) were lost because that was a big no-no from Diem.
Two days later Lt Col John Paul Vann committed the entire advisory team as a blocking force to stop the “VC” fleeing out of an area being bombed. It was a Saturday and half of us were in civilian clothes but we grabbed our guns, didn’t change clothes, and came under fire as soon as we got to the blocking site on Highway 4. Apparently no ARVN units were available
A couple of months later during a Division operation, the (ARVN) G3 staff briefed on first morning events and that all units were moving into place. At the Artillery tent, I heard artillery observers say that two battalions were still on boats because the tide was out until the afternoon. I told the senior American officer who questioned the Division commander which promptly led to the commander lecturing his people on staff responsibilities. Five minutes later the division commander asked me to tea and told me to never leave his side. His staff didn’t want to tell him bad news, particularly in front of the Americans.
I worked every day with Vietnamese during my ten plus years in Vietnam (before 29 April 1975) and got along well — maybe because I dealt with them as individuals. There were quite a few I respected (including that Division Commander).
Thank you, Jim, for your detailed comments!!
I tried to be careful in using the term “racism” as I think that term gets used so widely now that it is often no longer helpful. Yes, I think a “clash of civilizations” is something important and related. Associating people with certain behaviors simply because they are members of a group (Vietnamese, etc.) is not something that people are born with. It comes from interacting with those peoples, and particularly from interacting with those peoples in situations of misunderstanding.
I was just reading some articles on colonial Burma and you can see the same thing. The British kept saying that the Burmese were incompetent, but it was also obvious that the British had no idea what was going on in the minds of Burmese because they couldn’t communicate with them on a sophisticated enough level to obtain that kind of understanding. My guess is that the same situation existed in South Vietnam between members of the American military who could not communicate in Vietnamese at a sophisticated level (the majority) and members of the South Vietnamese military who could not communicate in English at a sophisticated level (the majority).
In such a situation, both sides are not going to understand each other, and eventually these misunderstandings will just simply be attributed to the other group as intrinsic in their nature.
There is a great book on the American conquest and colonization of the Philippines called The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines by Paul Kramer. In this book Kramer argues that when the Americans first went to fight the Spanish in the Philippines they had no ideas in their heads about the Filipinos, and at first they were impressed by them.
Then when the Americans decided to take over the islands and Filipinos started fighting against them, they started to refer to the Filipinos in derogatory terms as “Injuns” and “N&^^$rs.”
Then when they had “pacified” the Philippines and had to collaborate with elite Filipinos, they referred to Filipinos as “our little brown brothers.”
I would say that there is something racist in referring to Filipinos as “Injuns” and “little brown brothers,” as those terms associate behavior with the physical reality of Filipinos. The ideas implicit in these terms, meanwhile, emerged through interactions, through a “clash of civilizations,” but a clash in which one side was dominant.
This is what I suspect we can see in South Vietnam if we make the effort to research this topic.
I read a similar encounter that General Norman Schwarzkopf when he was an adviser to the South Vietnamese airborne. There were few Vietnamese airborne troopers whose body needed to be evacuated but the US Huey helicopter didn’t want to take them saying, dead bodies have blood all over them and it will be splattered all around the helicopter. Schwarzkopf got irritated by this man’s indifference about the dead of the Vietnamese airborne troops and pulled out his revolver and told the Huey pilot either you take these bodies or I’m not leaving this copter. The bodies were evacuated and Schwarzkopf’s action endeared him to the South Vietnamese paratroopers from then on. People like Norman Schwarzkopf are the very best of America while US soldiers with the racist attitude are the very worst.