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Finding myself, now, in a newly minted 2023, I had to decide how to embark upon the New Year of fifty-five years ago. I’ve just finished a string of leisure reading (assuming you’d call it that) and it would seem high time to take on another non-fiction and, perhaps, more challenging work. Besides, while The Short-Timers was, for me, a bit of introduction to the Battle of Hue, I think I owe myself better than a bit of absurdist fiction to aid me in getting up to speed about a major historical event.
I was briefly tempted by 1968: The Year that Rocked the World, which sits waiting for me on my library’s virtual shelf. I’ll save any further comment for the future, assuming I do come back to it, except for this: reviews suggest a flawed work. Not the least of the complaints is that the book comes off as a list of things that happened in 1968 rather than a compelling narrative. I decided to pass on that title for now and, fortunately, I had another choice.
Also courtesy of my library, I had waiting for me Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam, a book I had set aside based (apparently) upon the title alone. What wasn’t clear to me until moments before I began reading it was that Hue 1968 was written by Mark Bowden, who also wrote Black Hawk Down. That book I called “exceptional” in a kind of tangential review back when I read it. Suddenly I knew I had picked just the right material for my moment.
In line with my own mental space, the book begins in the months and years before the Tet Offensive with several chapters so as to set the stage for what happened in 1968. Most of it is what I should already know about America’s escalating involvement in Vietnam and the snowballing forces aligning against it. Bowden convincingly sells the idea that America’s involvement in Vietnam was doomed no matter what, without having to take an anti-American stance. Indeed, he is one of the few authors in recent years I’ve seen point out one unspoken truth. Despite the rhetoric about nationalism and ethnic self-determination, the Communist rulers of Hanoi were truly awful. They were terroristic, tyrannical, and ruthlessly intolerant of any challenge to their authority. Hanoi was objectively a worse regime than Saigon, even as a huge chunk of the population in the South believed otherwise.
America’s failure (and, for that matter, the Communists’ military disaster that was Tet) came from an all-to-common driver amongst military leaders. It is a concept akin to what the French call élan vital; an idea that positive attitude is the key to military success, perhaps overriding other mundane factors such as manpower, logistics, and preparation. Westmoreland was unshakable in his optimism that the war’s turning point, the final push to victory, was months away. To sustain that can-do stance, the field leaders were encouraged to create the data to back up the “vision,” even if that data was exaggerated (at best). Likewise, any communist military leader that pointed out the Tet had no chance of success might find himself purged for having said aloud what anyone should have been able to plainly see.
The stage is set for a disaster. The die is cast.
I am deliberately writing this “review” as my reading has me in the last few hours before the commencement of the Tet holiday attacks, before I’ve arrived at the meat of the book. Like the VC forces, who had to wait for their signal, I only want to surge ahead when I’ve mentally coordinated my thoughts. Yet from where I am at the moment, I’ll leave you with a couple of more comments.
Once I realized that this was the Black Hawk Down author, even before I had got anywhere with my reading, I began to wonder if that had implications about the making of a Hue movie; an adaptation of this book for the screen. Sure enough, rumors circulating in 2017 suggested that Michael Mann had signed on to direct a picture; presumably a somewhat-fictionalized, action-driven film in the mold of Black Hawk Down. Current information on IMDb points to a TV miniseries, probably done as a documentary. We may even see this soon.
By the way… while I’m on the topic of other authors and other works.
I am reading Hue 1968 as an ebook. This ebook format (or maybe it’s my reader software) really handles the endnotes well. Note numbers are hyperlinked and poking one pops up a smaller window with the endnote text; sometimes citations and sometimes illuminating additions. It makes it very easy to glance at a note without breaking one’s reading stride and, therefore, makes it more likely that I’ll actually read them.
In one case, I popped open a note to find it was simply a citation of a work from which the “fact” had been drawn. The author sounded familiar. A few keystrokes in, the Wikipedia search told me my memory was working that night. The cite was for Fire in the Streets: The Battle for Hue, Tet 1968 by Eric Hammel. Hammel wrote Six Days in June: How Israel Won the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, which greatly influenced my perception of the Six Day War. Looking him up also showed me just how much the author has written. He has around three dozen book credits to his name through 2011. Sadly, he passed away in the summer of 2020 at the age of 74. I will have to remember to look for his take on future topics.
Back to Bowden, this looks to be another very well written work. I’ve called the style “journalistic history”; writing that is narrative in form but built from interviews, quotations, and referenceable facts. it combines the informative nature of non-fiction with the compelling reading of the novel. I’m eager to continue on with this exercise.
Return to the master post for Vietnam War articles or wince at my decided lack of bombing skill, as evidenced in my next article.