Vietnam War Policy Analyzed; A Tour of Duty in Words & Images; A Collection of First-Rate Poetry

BY MARC LEEPSON

A tsunami of books, PhD dissertations, government reports, documentary films, and other materials that address why the United States did not prevail in the Vietnam War is readily available for anyone’s edification. While there is no absolute consensus on exactly why the war ended the way it did, virtually all observers agree on several key factors.

One is the fact that U.S. military and political leaders exhibited a profound lack of knowledge about Vietnamese history, politics, and culture. Another is the arrogance and hubris that most of those leaders displayed as they prosecuted the war.

And then there is the fact that American generals, presidents, cabinet secretaries, congressional leaders, and other policymakers uniformly underestimated the will of the North Vietnamese people and overestimated the patience of the American public in a highly political war that became the nation’s longest overseas conflict until the war in Afghanistan eclipsed it.

All of this brings us to James A. Warren’s Outmaneuvered: America’s Tragic Encounter with Warfare from Vietnam to Afghanistan (Scribner, 336 pp. $29.99), the latest book to weigh in on how the most powerful country in the world didn’t prevail against North Vietnam—a nation that the arrogant Henry Kissinger once called a “little fourth-rate power.”

Warren, a well-regarded historian, author (The Lions of Iwo Jima, et al.), and foreign policy analyst, looks at the wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan as well as the conflicts that came in-between, including the ongoing war on terrorism. He convincingly contends that every one of those conflicts was an example of “irregular warfare,” which Warren defines as “organized armed violence” in which “military operations between conventional armies neither take center stage nor determine the outcome of the conflict.”

Politics, Warren notes, plays a much more prominent role in irregular warfare than it does in conventional wars, in which set battles and combat campaigns take center stage. Therefore, as Warren puts it, irregular warfare, which is marked by “politically motivated assassinations, other acts of terror, propaganda, and the methodical construction of shadow governments” cannot be countered “by strictly military means alone.”

Warren devotes two meaty chapters to the American war in Vietnam—one of which concentrates on the Vietnamese communists, whom he calls “the masters of irregular warfare.” His analysis of what went wrong in the Vietnam jibes with the three big factors we noted above.

As Warren puts it: American policymakers “gravely misjudged the character of the war” and waged it with “disastrous strategic gaffes.” That played into the hands of the enemy, who possessed a “superior understanding of the kind of war in which they were engaged.”

After he received his draft notice late in 1969, Lon Holmberg heeded the advice of his former English professor and decided to “make a book” about his upcoming military service. It took 55 years, but said book, Crossing the Pass of Clouds: An Army Photographer’s Vietnam Journal (University Press of Mississippi, 196 pp. $40), an engaging memoir in words and images, came out earlier this year.

After finishing Basic Training back in ’70, Holmberg got lucky. A friendly sergeant arranged for him to skip AIT and he became a still photographer, MOS 84B20. His first assignment was a cushy one at the 221st Signal Company at Fort Ord. Cushy or not, Holmberg volunteered to go to Vietnam after serving about a year in Northern California. He arrived in-country in January 1971 and joined a 221st unit at Long Binh Post.

Photographs that Holmberg took in the months before he was drafted, during his two years on active duty, and on two post-war trips to Vietnam are the heart of Crossing the Path of Clouds, a well-written, large-format memoir that includes 147 black-and-white photographs.

Aside from several pics of artillery guns in action, though, there are no combat images in the book. Sill, Holmberg’s photographs evoke wartime South Vietnam in 1971 very well. Most focus on landscapes, Vietnamese civilians, and G.I.s doing their jobs at firebases and elsewhere from Saigon to the Central Highlands. Holmberg got to see a lot of South Vietnam after becoming U.S. Commanding Gen. Creighton Abrams’ official photographer.

Holmberg includes more than a few detailed descriptions of the cameras, film, and photographic equipment he and his fellow Army photogs used, which fellow photographers will appreciate. Anyone with an interest in the American War in Vietnam in its later stages will appreciate this rare look at one soldier’s tour of duty through words and scores of evocative pictures.

Bill McCloud, a VVA life member who served a 1968-69 tour of duty in Vietnam with the 147th Assault Helicopter Company, is a multi-talented and prolific writer, poet, book reviewer, and college history professor. His first book of poetry, The Smell of the Light: Vietnam, 1968-1969, a collection of verses that were inspired by McCloud’s letters home from the war, came out to rave reviews in 2017.

McCloud’s excellent new book of poetry, The Error of the Stars (Silence Dogood Books, 144 pp. $33, hardcover; $16.85 paper; $2.99, Kindle), edited by Charles Templeton, contains 62 short, mostly free-verse poems. Many deal with the complicated and differing facets of love. Some are wryly humorous. Four center on the Vietnam War. All are well worth reading.

Here’s one that stood out to me: “A Great Life”:

I may never have a poem/in a major anthology or in a/prestigious literary magazine/but today a poem of mine is/folded up in one of the back pockets of the state/poet laureate’s jeans and/all I can think is Is this/a great life or what?

Full disclosure: Bill McCloud has been a colleague and friend since 1988 when he asked me to help find contributors to what would become his much-heralded book, What Should We Tell Our Children About Vietnam? That book came out in 1989 and is still in print. It contains the words of 128 veterans, writers, politicians, and military leaders in response to the title’s question. Thirty-six years ago, The Los Angeles Times presciently called it a “remarkable historical record, one that will be of value to scholars for years to come.”

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