An unusually savage war

Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy 1945-1975, by Max Hastings, HarperCollins GB, $40. Reviewed by Dominic Sandbrook.

On February 25, 1969, a group of US Navy Seals landed in the Vietnamese village of Thanh Phong in the country’s south. The community had reportedly been infiltrated by the Vietcong, and Lieutenant Bob Kerrey had been ordered to flush them out. Almost immediately, the operation turned into a bloody mess.

The communists launched an ambush, trapping women and children in the crossfire. But Kerrey’s men fought heroically and won the day.

A week later, the fortunes of war turned against him. Leading his team on a daring night assault, Kerrey was hit by a grenade and lost his foot. He stanched the bleeding and directed a counterattack before being airlifted to safety.

After 50 days, his war was over. Richard Nixon awarded him the Medal of Honour.

Kerrey returned home a hero. A former college football star, he later became governor of Nebraska and a US senator. At one point he dated actress Debra

Winger, famously joking that she ‘‘swept me off my foot’’. But then his story took a horrible turn.

In 2001, the New York Times uncovered the truth about Thanh Phong. Kerrey’s men had been butchers, not liberators. On arrival they had slaughtered the inhabitants of one hut with knives, then rounded up at least a dozen unarmed villagers and murdered them. Half were women and children. The last to die was a screaming baby.

Confronted with the evidence, Kerrey did not deny it. ‘‘It’s far more than guilt,’’ he said. ‘‘It’s the shame. You can never, never get away from it.’’

As Max Hastings’ magnificent and moving new history shows, few wars have been as poisonous as Vietnam.

In France, which fought unsuccessfully to retain its grip for 10 years after 1945, defeat was a national humiliation.

In America, which committed 500,000 soldiers to Vietnam, it consumed the lives of more than 58,000 men, blighted the presidencies of Lyndon Johnson and Nixon, and left deep scars that endure to this day. And for the Vietnamese it was an environmental and human disaster, taking the lives of at least two million people and leaving the survivors under a cruel Marxist regime. Not for nothing does Hastings’ subtitle call it ‘‘an epic tragedy’’.

For Hastings, this is a book with a personal history. As a young journalist he was once invited to the White House to hear Johnson defend the war. Later, he reported from the battlefield for the BBC. And, in April 1975, he was in Saigon during the last, desperate days of South Vietnam.

Although Hastings deals with the high politics brilliantly, it is his account of the war on the ground that lifts this book above its competitors. He is never boring and doesn’t get bogged down in obscure data. And he has a peerless eye for colourful and revealing details: the North Vietnamese civilian diet of stewed rat and silkworm larvae; the US lieutenant who reads Conrad and Hardy during observation patrols; the marijuana and heroin use that reaches epidemic proportions among bored soldiers; the heady, erotic atmosphere of Saigon at night. He even points out that American soldiers rarely wore underpants, because the humidity bred ‘‘crotch fungus’’. ‘‘Everything rotted and corroded quickly over there,’’ one veteran says, ‘‘bodies, boot leather, canvas, metal, morals’’.

Was Vietnam a uniquely immoral war? Probably not, but it was unusually savage. US planes dropped millions of tons of explosives on industrial towns and peasant villages alike, far more than they had on Japan. But as Hastings points out, many historians, writing from an antiwar perspective, give a simplistic and one-sided picture.

The Americans committed atrocities, famously the massacre of more than 400 villagers at My Lai. But the Vietcong ruled by terror, disembowelling and castrating peasant adversaries, slitting babies’ throats, and burying whole families alive when they refused to take up arms. As the late John McCain found, they treated prisoners with sadistic brutality.

Even by Hastings’ own standards, this is a masterful performance: deftly balanced, immaculately researched and written with immense flair. He is admirably clear-sighted about the Americans’ failures. But he is also clear about their opponents, repressive Marxist revolutionaries who celebrated victory by throwing 300,000 South Vietnamese into concentration camps and launching a catastrophic collectivisation programme.

In the final pages, Hastings quotes a former army medic, David Rogers, who later returned to Vietnam as a reporter. Rogers found his old enemies had been instructed to treat Americans especially warmly because they needed Congress to pass a trade deal. ‘‘If all you guys wanted was a McDonald’s,’’ he wondered, ‘‘surely we could have worked this out a long time ago?’’