Witness portraits of Vietnam War horror expose Hollywood film versions as fake

BOOK OF THE DAY: A Vietnam War Reader: American and Vietnamese PerspectivesEdited by Michael H Hunt Penguin 223pp, £9.99

MICHAEL H Hunt is professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His Vietnam War Readeris an edited collection of direct quotes from the speeches, interviews, diaries, letters and war-time interrogations of a selection of politicians, soldiers and ordinary civilians whose experiences define the Vietnam War.

Hunt weaves a mix of primary sources to provide a panoramic set of perspectives on the war which, crucially, include Vietnamese as well as American voices. As such, it runs counter to what Hunt refers to as the "myth" of Vietnam perpetrated by Hollywood movies such as Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket, or Oliver Stone's Platoon. Hunt refers to the omniscient narrative style of these all-American, all-male versions of Vietnam as a "Full Metal Genre", where military vernacular and iconography is fetishised and where male bonding and the militarised male voice is heard to the exclusion of Vietnamese men, women and children. In this way, through "powerful, frequently reiterated images, Vietnam became a fantasy world where Americans tested their manliness, underwent youthful rites of passage, embarked on perilous rescues . . . or replayed frontier dramas with the Vietnamese as the 'wild Indians' ".

Hunt’s book sidesteps such mediated accounts of Vietnam and plunges the reader directly into the war by way of raw witness statements he has archived over 30 years. The material speaks for itself.

Some of the data is exceptionally stark. Rifleman Herbert Carter, giving sworn testimony in 1969, writes about entering the village of Son My with the Americal Division: “A woman came out of a hut with a baby in her arms and she was crying. She was crying because her little boy had been in front of her hut and someone had killed the child by shooting it . . . Radio operator Frederick Widmer shot her with an M16 and she fell. When she fell, she dropped the baby, and then Widmer opened up on the baby with his M16 and killed the baby too.”

In May 1969, Dang Thuy Tram, a Vietnamese doctor working with the Viet Cong, wrote in her diary: “The other day I met some very young scouts, their skin still fair, the hair on their cheeks still soft and downy . . . All day and night, the sounds of bombs, jet planes, gunships circling above are deafening. The forest is gouged and scarred by bombs, the remaining trees stained yellow by toxic chemicals . . . I sit with silent fury in my heart. Which is burned in that fire and smoke?”

Hunt makes reference to the 1½ million Vietnamese women who fought in the war. He also highlights the fact 80 per cent of the personnel who built, maintained and defended the Ho Chi Minh Trail were women.

Against this backdrop of human suffering, transcripts of US presidential discussions on the war are disturbing. In 1971, as the war lumbered on, Richard Nixon, in taped Oval Office conversations with secretary of state Henry Kissinger, stated, “The North Vietnamese are bastards . . . We’re gonna hit ’em, bomb the livin’ bejesus out of ’em.” Nixon contemplated the use of nuclear weapons. “I’d rather use a nuclear bomb. Have you got that ready? . . . A nuclear bomb, does that bother you? . . . I just want you to think big Henry, for Christ’s sake!”

Hunt’s book evokes the true meaning of the Vietnam War on many levels. He also demonstrates that America’s decision to go to war was flawed. The evidence he gathers points clearly towards a war that was unwinnable. Readers will note striking parallels with current US and allied (including Irish) operations in Afghanistan.

Tom Clonan is Irish TimesSecurity Analyst. He is a retired Army Officer and a Fellow of the Inter University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society, Loyola University