A Canadian account of Vietnam

Press, 5 June 1982, Page 16

A Canadian account of Vietnam

Vietnam: The Ten Thousand Day War. By Michael Maclear. Thames Methuen, 1981. 358 pp. Illustrations, bibliography and index. $29.95.

(Reviewed by

Naylor Hillary)

No satisfactory history of the Vietnam War has been written. Perhaps none ever will be. Half the information, the view from the other side of the hill, is buried, or distorted, or simply does not exist. Europeans . and Americans. (and. N ew Zealanders), brought up on histories of two World Wars, asSOme that somehow truth will out. Given time, something like the truth is possible about war when the records of victors and vanquished are accessible. But one has only to reflect on. the ■ unsatisfactory and one-sided histories of the German-Russian war between 1941 and 1945 to realise that when the victors’ records remain buried the real

connections between . events are imponderable. How much more does this apply to Vietnam. Maclepr, like many authors before him, has fallen for the fallacy of accessibility. From the American side the amount of information — journalists’ reports and official records — is overwhelming. Maclear sifts expertly through all this matter, using personal interviews to flesh out the records. But to see the war from the perspective of the Saigon regimes, let alone from Hanoi, much less material is available. Maclear tries to redress the balance by drawing on his own experiences of North Vietnam where he was an occasional visitor, as a neutral Canadian journalist, during the war. He quotes, often uncritically, the uncheckable reports of propagandists such as Wilfred Burchett. He accepts in disarming manner. the pronouncements of North Vietnam’s

leaders. Had he accepted as uncritically the “official version” from the American side this would be a very different book. If there are lessons for the West from Vietnam’s terrible experiences between 1945 and the present they are surely that a democratic society cannot easily fight a war against a totalitarian system without, imposing, for the duration of the war, the same restrictions on the free flow of information as its enemy uses as a matter of course. Even then, within the Western tradition, there are limits on what may be politically possible when the means being used is military force. Vietnam was a lesson to show that firepower has to serve a policy. It cannot become a policy in itself.

All wars are horrible for the participants, and even more horrible for civilians caught up in the violence. Would either World War have taken the course it did if the horrors of trench warfare, or of the concentration camps, had been flashed by satellite into civilians’ homes every night? Where one side allows its people to see the horror, and the other does not, the side with censorship has been handed a powerful new weapon. America’s goals arid methods were sometimes suspect in Vietnam; they were probably less so than those of the North Vietnamese, but the only uncensored information on the war came out from the American side. Even now, North Vietnam’s atrocities are poorly known and documented.

Still, Maclear has: tried. He ends up telling again the story of American hesitancy and confusion about war aims and war methods in Vietnam. The tale deserves retelling even if the author sometimes seems. to accept or reject statistics to suit his arguments.' The book is a spin-off from a television series on the war, an anthology of matter from research and interviews carried out for the programme. We are back in the world of Vietnam as entertainment. Acknowledgement is made of the heroism on both sides, but for a history of the war Maclear hardly does justice to such, remarkable events as the courage of the North Vietnamese who captured and. held Hue early, in 1968, or the courage of the American Marines who finally drove them OUti' /'-V A?-'- ?,. ■

.. The result is a. book that assembles oncp again a great dear of fascinating information about the long, long war, from the time ,when the first American adviser contacted, the North Vietnamese communists behind Japanese lines, before the end of the Second World War, up to the fall of Saigon to the North Vietnamese Army 30 years later. Yet in the erid this book is no more satisfying than its predecessors, either as a narrative history, of the war, or as an explanation of how and why events took the terrible path they did. / . • • ‘ ’