Battle of APp Bac by Neil Sheehan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Willful Ignorance

Military officers are trained in the deformed entrepreneurialism of American football, a game of rigid rules, set plays and clear criteria of success. You take your shot when the opponent blinks. What matters, the decisive differential between teams, it is taught, is the will to win. Leadership ability is proportionate to the commitment to overcome all obstacles in order to score touchdowns. Not winning is a symptom of insufficient zeal. This is my experience as a regular officer in the US military during the 1960’s and it is Neil Sheehan’s experience of Vietnam in 1962.

As a result, the response of military commanders to difficulties - either combat or strategic - is to dig the hole they’re in deeper, to commit more 'assets' (mainly teenaged boys) to danger of death, thus demonstrating one's resolve. Enthusiastic encouragement of one's subordinates turns to petulant insistence and then to threatening bullying depending on the intensity of circumstances and one’s place in the chain of command. The Battle of Ap Bac is an instance typical of all subsequent military involvement in Vietnam - a cunning plan for zealous defeat.

After the Battle of Ap Bac there was nothing else for the American military to learn about fighting the Viet Cong. All of the next eleven years was contained in the one day of intense conflict. But they learned nothing - nothing about the skill of their adversary, nothing about the fatally destructive politics of South Vietnam, nothing about pervasive sympathy in the countryside for the Viet Cong, nothing about how much the Americans were despised by their nominal allies, nothing about the vulnerability of high-technology to clever necessity.

Military technology - not just its weapons but also its organisation and culture - is a delicate ecology. Small changes are not possible to make without disrupting the functioning of the whole. Learning at the coal face, as it were, isn’t recognized as such up the line until the will to win is proven to be inadequate to the task at hand. This requires incremental progression of ‘ground-truth’ at an agonizing pace toward the top of the heap. By the time ‘authority’ is reached, of course, whatever there was to be learned is obsolete.

So the Americans learned nothing from their French predecessors; nor anything relevant from their own experience for subsequent adventures in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. Collective military stupidity seems only exceeded by the collective political stupidity of American government, which believes it can actually direct power effectively. The military class-structure preys on the individual stupidity of prospective grunts who believe that camaraderie and personal loyalty extend to their officers. This is perhaps true as an exception but not the rule. Common soldiers are the football; everyone wants a piece of them. This is widely known but ignored. Willful ignorance is the name of the game.

View all my reviews