Huế 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam by Mark Bowden
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The American Unconscious

“The Battle of Hue would be the bloodiest of the Vietnam War, and a turning point not just in that conflict, but in American history.” Mark Bowden’s claim is no exaggeration. The Tet Offensive in 1968, particularly the fighting for the city of Hué, was decisive. The Americans claimed a military victory despite what many perceived as a sort of gruesome political triumph for the forces of the North. Certainly the euphemistic phrase ‘peace with honour’ took on an urgency it hadn’t had. And the battles of Tet put a continued presidency out of reach for Lyndon Johnson.

But what Bowden shows through his incredibly extensive personal histories - from both sides of the conflict - is that these are not the most significant changes in the historical trajectory of the United States. The battle of Hué was revelatory, not just about the war but also about the United States whose real character was demonstrated to the participants, to the world, and more dramatically to itself as a nation. Hué was a road-to-Damascus moment for the national psyche. The contents of this revelation were overwhelming and difficult to appreciate at the time and even long after, but became the core of a malignant reaction that dominates the politics of America ever since.

Here are, I think, the most important parts of the revelation, shown on the evening news and in the morning newspapers throughout America at the time:

1. All the military presumptions, both strategic and tactical, about the war were wrong. The institution of the US military was demonstrated to be incompetent in every area from intelligence gathering to reporting its own actions.
2. The understanding of the US intentions, culture, and weaknesses by the North was far greater than the reverse. The political institutions of the United States were shown to be incapable of comprehending either the character of the people they were dealing with or what the war meant to them.
3. The diplomatic and foreign service institutions of the United States had consistently aligned themselves with the most corrupt parts of Vietnamese society, making clear the indefensibility of US presence in VietNam.
4. The official statements that had been made by government official for years about the progress of the war had been merely propaganda. Virtually every major social institution in the United States, from the churches, to the civic hierarchy, to local fraternal associations had been duped into accepting the war as necessary and winnable through these communications.

In short, what Hué represents is the institutional failure of the United States on a massive scale. The evidence of systematic racism (among American soldiers as well as with the Vietnamese), careerism (military, diplomatic, government and corporate), obdurate ignorance (among the military, government officials and the entire nation), and rampant casual inhumanity (free fire zones, pacification, the McNamara Line, village destructions and massacres), were impossible to deny. So it was largely ignored or actively repressed.

The fact that the decisions of four individual presidents or that a series of senior officers took misguided actions that led up to Hué is not nearly as significant as the fact that almost every major American institution was shown to be either corrupt, ill-led, or extremely credulous. This is a horrifying revelation. So horrifying that it cannot be consciously processed. The troops on the ground knew this, their superiors knew this, those reporting events to the world knew this, and certainly the Vietnamese on both sides knew this. But it could not be consciously accepted. So the memory of Hué was suppressed but never entirely forgotten, and passed down as a sort of folk-wisdom to successive generations.

Bowden’s book was published almost half a century after the events it documents - just in time to meet the peak of national nihilism which is the unconscious legacy of the revelations of Hué. The disappointment of Americans in America is the reason Donald Trump got elected and continues to rule the Republican Party, for example. Although the grief and regret often shows up as aggressive self-assertion by Americans, it is really a sort of embarrassment and shame about seeing themselves as they really are in the VietNam war, repeated in all relevant details in Iraq and Afghanistan. These wars inhabit them, hidden but with therefore great effectiveness. They seem to be constantly attempting to make a sort of inverted atonement by flexing their muscles yet somewhere else.

In line with Bowden’s personal histories, I think it’s appropriate to include a bit of my own. I remember my father, a veteran of WW II and very much a nationalistic supporter of the war in VietNam, reading Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara’s memoir In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam in 1996. The book is clearly a self-serving rationale for McNamara’s decision not to insist on his doubts about the war and make them public. But my father’s only comment when he finished the book was “They lied to us.” He would say nothing else about it. But it was clear that he was profoundly disillusioned despite McNamara’s pretence to integrity. So much so that he never again displayed his American flag on national holidays.

I have no doubt that my father, had he lived, would have been a Trump supporter despite his lifelong commitment to the Democratic Party. He knew that McNamara’s admissions were the tip of an institutional and cultural iceberg. The implications contradicted his fundamental presumptions about American exceptionalism, democratic government, and the role of American power in the world. This was traumatic and too shameful to discuss.

Like many Americans, my father’s response to even these most veiled revelations about VietNam was a feeling of powerlessness. Even his Party affiliation and his vote would simply promote the pervasive institutional corruption that he could sniff in McNamara’s memoir. It is this sense, I think, that has since spread through the national unconscious as a shared experience, namely that America may be more nightmare than dream. This nightmare, one can credibly suppose, originated in those twenty-four days of terrible fighting in Hué. An historical turning point indeed.

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