What Is History? Afghanistan and Vietnam

"That's what war is, you know. If it's a lie, then we fight on that lie. But we got to fight."
--Slim Charles to Avon Barksdale, The Wire.



One strange thing about aging is things you remember are now being taught as history; your kids come home with history books from school which have chapters on the Vietnam War, as if it is some distant thing, like the battle of Bunker Hill. 

Of course, remembering Lyndon Johnson and the nightly news from Vietnam and the stories of men coming home from Vietnam, you think you "remember" that war. The thing about history and the past, as some wag said is:  It isn't even past, which is to say, as long as you remember it, it is walking around alive.

But what do you remember?  I remember Johnson as that obtuse, clueless Southerner, with his down home accent, and his lofty generalizations about fighting Communism and bringing freedom to the Vietnamese which sounded so transparently phony it was astonishing he or anyone bothered repeating that tripe. 

It was very clear then, as it is now, we were fighting in Vietnam, not because a Communist Vietnam posed any threat to the United States, not because we cared about the Vietnamese--as if they were some new girlfriend the USA had fallen head over heels in love with--but we were in Vietnam because we had stumbled into this domestic brawl and we had taken a few punches and thrown more than a few, and now we could not figure out a way of backing out because we were afraid somebody might call us cowards.

So it was all stupid pride. Johnson said he was not going to be the first United States President to lose a war, damn it. So for that, 18 year old kids from Osh Kosh, Brooklyn, Tuscaloosa, Oakland, Detroit, Watts and Baltimore had to have their legs blow off, had to kill and had to be shipped home in body bags.

That's what I remember about 1965-1975.  

But now I can see and learn more, through the magic of the information age, and the commendable openness of American society. 

Listen to the Johnson tapes, readily available on the internet, and you hear Johnson wrestling with the decision about whether or not to get in deeper into the war. He speaks with Richard Russell on the phone. If you have listened enough to Johnson as he speaks with other people, you can immediately hear the difference when he talks to his ol' buddy Russell. Russell, from Georgia, speaks in a slow, down home drawl, deep enough to make Johnson's own accent sound positively patrician.  Russell tells Johnson, "If you were to tell me that I was authorized to settle as I saw fit, I would respectfully decline to undertake it. It's the damn worse mess that I ever saw...I just don't see it."

For my money, listening to Presidential tapes is by far superior to reading any history presented by any historian. There is no intermediary; you can draw your own conclusions. You can hear how clueless Johnson really is. He can understand the details of how many bridges across the river to Hanoi have to be bombed and how many troops are scheduled to arrive in country on what dates, but he simply does not understand the nature of his adversary. He keeps listening to McNamara, Dean Rusk and all the Best and the Brightest crowd who think they are fighting the last war, against the German Wehrmacht, against people who think like Westerners.

Johnson, like President Obama, keeps talking about "the mission," as if we actually had objectives, like capturing the flag, rolling into a capital city and declaring victory. But there was no real mission in Vietnam, just as there is no mission in Afghanistan; there is only a peasant population which just wants to be left alone in the 15th century.

George Carlin had a riff about Vietnam. "You know why we're there...[long pause, much laughter from the audience because everyone knows nobody had a clue about why we were really there, then...] Oh! That's right. We are there to whip a little freedom on them!"

One thing listening to actual history as it is happening on the tapes  has taught me is what made Johnson so effective as an executive. He actually does have command of the details, and he is very emphatic about reminding people who they have to call and what they are to say. 
Johnson has the administrative details under control. 

What he fails is to see the big picture: No war fought by a democracy should be about the ego of one man. No war fought by a free people who can ask questions can be successful if the premise for that war is a lie, or if it is patently absurd.

In the case of Afghanistan, it is to "deny sanctuaries" to Al Qaeda and the Taliban. In the case of Vietnam it was to keep Communism from toppling one country after another like dominoes. Both were and are absurdities.  Al Qaeda needs no Afghanistan for staging and launching its operations. They launched 911 from an apartment in Berlin and a motel in Florida. 

I'm not sure Mr. Obama has any ego tied up in Afghanistan, but he clearly is worried about withdrawing our troops quickly, and that comes down to the same worry Johnson had--he would look bad.

I am imaging Mr. Obama on the telephone, asking for advice from the Phantom:

Mr. Obama:  What do you think about this idea of getting the troops out now, like as fast as we can put them on the planes?

The Phantom:  I think it's a good idea. Why should another kid loose a leg or an arm or his life, now that we've decided to get out? You wait six more months, how many more arms and legs we going to lose? How many more amputees in the petting zoo at Walter Reed?

Mr. Obama: But, if we run out, it will look like we are dropping our weapons and running from the field of battle.

The Phantom (heavy on the Down East accent): The thing is, Mr. President, you know you are going to have to bring those young men and women home, eventually.

Mr. Obama:  That's right.

The Phantom: Well, the thing is the Taliban, and the villagers we are supposed to be protecting, they know that, too.

Mr. Obama: But we've said we want to give time for the Afghan forces to step up and take our places.

The Phantom: But you need an Afghan government to have Afghan forces, and you don't rightly have that in Afghanistan.