Overly sentimental about the French military (😬 @ the mobile bordello unit endorsement) and undoubtedly anti-communist/pro-west but excellent combat writing and incisive political analysis - particularly the astute observation that the Vietnamese were fighting a revolutionary war and both the French and Americans had no serious political counter-proposition that could contest its social base. Painful to consider that all of this was clearly perceived by 1961 (when it was first published) and yet the US still couldn't stop itself. Good thing that never happened again.
331-337
The result of this situation was that, in the "Laos war" of 1959, the Laotian forces were at a considerable disadvantage in relation to the rebel groups. But here again, as in the case of many events in Asia, it is necessary first to eliminate some of the misinformation speard about the matter by incredibly sloppy press reporting for the sake of pure sensationalism. It can be said that, with the laudable exception of the Wall Street Journal, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and Time, the American press gave a completely distorted picture of what happened in Laos in the summer of 1950, with the Washington Post and the New York Times being among the worst offenders. [...]
Press dispatches bore such news as "Viet-Minh troops advanced to within 13 miles of Samneus city" (UPI), and even the staid British agency Reuters headlined on September 3 that "the Royal Laotian Army was today preparing to defend the capital of Vietiane"; while on September 5, an editorial of the Washinton Post, citing the "splendid examples of alert on-the-spot reporting" of its columnist Joseph Alsop, spoke of "full-scale, artillery-backed invasion from Communist North Viet-Nam." All this was just so much nonsense.
There is, of course, not the slightest doubt that certainly North Viet-Nam and perhaps even Red China, gave military and political support to the Laotian rebellion. But their aid was in no way as overt as originally suggested in the alarming reports spread around the world by American press media, some of which went so far in their affirmations as to accuse almost anyone who doubted their stories as being either a blind fool or "soft" on Communism. Joseph Alsop's "Open Letter" to Henry Luce, the publisher of Times and Life (both of which refused to be stampeded by their less hard-headed colleagues) is a prime example of this attitude.
While the British and the French--whose sources of information in Laos already had proved more reliable the year before--awaited more hard facts to go on, Washington took up the cudgels in full, both officially and in the press. In a somber colum, Mr. Joesph Alsop spoke of the "yawning drain" which Loas was likely to be engulfed in; compared the 1954 Geneva settlement to the Munich sell-out of 1938; and called our Canadian allias who had staunchly defended the Western viewpoint in the international cease-fire commission (the other members being India and Poland). "appeared appoximately neutral."
https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/bernard-fall-man-who-knew-war
“In revolutionary war,” he wrote, “the allegiance of the civilian population becomes one of the most vital objectives of the whole struggle.
He did not hesitate to level criticisms against the harshness of the regime (notably regarding the excesses of its land reform campaign in 1953-1956), but he grasped that the Communists were no mere puppets of Beijing or Moscow, that they had a nationalist ambition as well as an ideological one. And he saw, crucially, that they had support where it counted, in the villages where a vast majority of Vietnamese lived.
The unleashing of such awesome high-tech weaponry might make the war “militarily unlosable” in the short term, but at profound cost: the destruction of Vietnam. He quoted Tacitus: “They have made a desert, and called it peace.”
https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2011/spring/bernard-fall.html
describes Fall's rejection for a diplomatic post in Cambodia, Dorothy Fall's memoir
This opposition stemmed from Fall's speech in New York. In the subsequent article that reiterated the main points of that speech, however, Fall merely stressed the need for real economic development stimulated by more effective foreign assistance programs in support of Diem. Although Fall also attributed the growing unpopularity of President Diem to political corruption, he strongly preferred Diem to the unification of Vietnam under a Communist dictatorship. For Fall in 1958, President Diem's political problems made it all the more important for the United States to improve its foreign assistance programs as a means of promoting economic development that would win popular support for Diem away from the rising Communist insurgency.
Fall believed that the failure of land reform to allow more farmers to own the land they farmed would over time lead discontented farmers to support insurgents. He wrote, "Land reform, widely hailed as giving the small farmer a share in his country's economy, has bogged down in red tape and inefficiency, and is not even keeping pace with the natural growth of the farming population."
At the heart of Fall's critique was the observation that the failure of American economic assistance to develop the competitive advantages of the local economy led to economic deterioration and a dependence on foreign aid that fueled local support of the insurgents. In Vietnam, despite the potential to cultivate export surpluses, the lack of local currency for local investment led to increasing imports of food and American consumer goods.
decent article series though it could do without the few distateful asides admonishing the Vietnamese for "not remembering their history"
In the delusional words of aspiring politician Ronald Reagan, who said in 1965: “We should declare war on North Vietnam. . . . We could pave the whole country and put parking strips on it, and still be home by Christmas.”
Sheehan describes Vann’s reaction in 1965 to the coming of U.S. combat forces into Vietnam: “The American soldier was merely buying time,” Vann warned. “The major challenge now facing the U.S. in Vietnam” was to use that time to break the Communist monopoly on social revolution.
In 1981, the CIA had dragged him into the Supreme Court, to block his earnings from the book and to teach other agents in the field that there were costs associated with tell-all books about the failings within agency. I remember being shocked that Snepp lost his appeal to the Supreme Court and that he had been forced to pay $300,000 in book royalties to his former CIA handlers.
In his book The Real War (much of it was published in 1968), New Yorker correspondent Jonathan Schell writes about Tet: “The precise target that was destroyed by the foe at Tet was not any military installation but a certain picture of the war that had been planted in the minds of the American people by their government.”
Geographically, Vietnam was an invitation to a hanging, and the same illusion that in 2003 would prompt the invasion of Iraq with 145,000 men and some Blackwater contractors would send to Vietnam an army of 550,000 men, and think it could make any headway along a front that stretched more than a thousand miles, if measured along the coast. (By comparison, consider that it took 600,000 American troops to pacify Okinawa, and that battlefront was ten miles wide and about forty miles long.)
Another epitaph was spoken for Fall when Lt. Colonel Lucein Conein summed up the American experience in Vietnam. Conein was a freebooter, with both the French and American armies in Indochina. Plus he did time, so to speak, with the CIA. Of the war effort, he recalled, as is quoted in Cecil Currey’s biography of General Giap: “So... we sent ten times the amount of air force. The B-52s. Rolling Thunder. And we had our own little Beau Geste outposts which we called fire support bases. We were... roadbound. The same thing that happened to the French happened to us. We didn’t learn one goddamn thing.”