lucasw's Journal: After Tet by Ronald H. Spector

I usually don't go out of my way to read books on the Vietnam War, but if there's one that looks interesting at something like a Friends of the Library sale or a dollar or less I'll probably pick it up. From then on, if a book sits on the shelf near eye level long enough, chances are I'll read it.

There's nothing spectacular about After Tet, hundreds or thousands of books have covered similar territory. Probably every so often information is declassified in the U.S. or someone in Vietnam writes their memoirs and they are translated, and this merits a new work that cites these new sources.

After Tet focuses on the year 1968, which saw record numbers of combat losses despite the advent of peace talks and other indications that the war might be gearing down. (Deaths in Vietnam aside, MLK and Bobby Kennedy were both assassinated in that year, and then there was all the riots and widespread civil unrest. The commander of Apollo 8, the mission that carried the first astronauts around the moon, received a telegram saying "You saved 1968." soon after returning to Earth. But that's not in this book)

Each chapter focuses on different aspects of the war and overlaps with the others chronologically, but some continuity is preserved over the whole of the book. I really enjoyed the way popular truisms about the war were identified and explored and sometimes debunked but other times simply clarified. For example, from the onset, all sort of U.S. generals and planners would speek of how Vietnam is a 'different kind of war', and then proceeded to do very little to follow up on those statements and with specific policies or programs. This is very interesting, because the most superficial overview of this history says about the same thing and implies that it was a hard-learned lesson: 'if only they had realized that, things would come have come out differently' etc. But they did know, and it didn't matter in the end. Maybe it's the difference between a organization knowing a thing, and that organization merely possessing members (even those in charge) that know that thing.

Some of the text gets a muddled with too many numbers and facts. With a high density of 20,000 this, 4.2% that, such-and-such a company, platoon, or battalion and I can't really follow the thrust of the story or argument anymore, and tune out a little. Fortunately this doesn't happen too often. I like footnotes and end notes and other indications that the author actually worked a little to tell a true story, but there's a line that shouldn't be crossed.

The objectiveness of the author is appealling, as there is no second-guessing that claims that if military tactic x or pacification program y would have had more widespread use, the war would have been 'won' in a timely fashion. Better to say that while better results could have been achieved in some political or military theatre, just presenting all the other additional problems that would remain is enough to show how impossible the situation was.

Next in the queue for Vietnam literature is the David Halberstams's classic "The Best and the Brightest", but before then I've got some lighter weight science fiction and space exploration history (note the Apollo reference above) to read through.