Amazon prime has Watchmen: The Ultimate Cut available on Prime Video as I write this. Actually, it has three different versions of the movie, all on Prime. The Ultimate Cut is the longest, followed by the Director’s Cut, followed by the Theatrical Release. It was the Ultimate Cut that caught my eye. Never having watched this movie (in any version) before, this is the one I went with.
I am not typically a fan of comic book to movie conversions, mostly because I’ve never been a fan of comic books themselves. This one didn’t really speak to me when it came out nine years ago and hadn’t thought much of it since. Over the last couple of years, though, I’ve seen people post the opening credits on Facebook and I really like the look and feel of that sequence. More recently I’ve seen some positive comments (also Facebook) about the film so when it popped up on Amazon, it was on my radar.
As well it might be. The movie starts on October 12th, 1985 in an alternate reality where the U.S. has won the Vietnam War resulting in a nuclear showdown between still-going-strong President Nixon and the Russians over Afghanistan. Much of the details are revealed through flashbacks wherein we come to learn of a post-1930s world infused with masked superheroes. More importantly in 1959, a human achieves godlike powers through a nuclear accident and, via his new persona as Dr. Manhattan, comes to dominate world events.
I struggle with what to think of this film. It is a dark, violent, and explicit version of a superhero tale. Director by Zack Snyder following his success with 300, it is laden with style. I particularly like the soundtrack. The casting also is inspired. Actors bear a resemblance to other, older (80s?) actors bringing in subtle allusions from earlier film and television. In fact, the whole film is interwoven with oblique references. Sometimes it takes quite a bit of concentration, as so much of the film scatters clues for you to pick up rather than being shoving it all right in your face.
But is it just a mesh of pop-cultural snark, ultimately leading nowhere? Or does it all come together to produce something far greater than the sum of its parts? My suspicions are aroused by the decidedly left-wing bent to the whole narrative. Save one, the superheroes of course forgo the use of firearms. The one character who does not, The Comedian, is a rapist and murderer. The dystopia in which the film finds itself has birthed, apparently, from a right wing dream – Victory in Vietnam followed by permanent conservative majority. Is this just a canvas on which to paint a bigger message, or is it itself the message?
The source book was created in, roughly, the same timeframe as portrayed in its story. It was released as a comic book series in 1986 and 1987, using the alternate timeline to portray the recent past as dystopian future. The original series is lauded as a significant work of literature by critics and is credited by the BBC for launching the serious, mainstream appreciation of graphic novels. Given writer Alan Moore’s anarchic leanings, this all would argue for a more nuanced interpretation than the obvious “Republicans are bad” take within the movie’s script. Still, Moore does write that part of his message was to be an attack on the Reaganism of the time in which he wrote.
A film can rarely do full justice to its source material and apparently this holds true in the case of this graphic novel. I gather that the film makes an effort to stay true, particularly with the extended versions. There are some changes in plot. In particular the decision to insert an annoying sub-narrative about energy scarcity and evil automotive and oil companies seems rather childish, given its ultimate irrelevance in the main story. The movie also seems to a flipped history to make the U.S. the aggressor in Afghanistan that (assuming I’ve interpreted it all as intended) in what is an unnecessary jab of anti-Americanism. The extent to which the film follows the comic, in my mind, benefits the cinematic version by being able to draw for meaning on the greater depth of that material.
Regarding this particular version, it is a three hour and 35 minute marathon. It’s twenty-nine minutes longer than the Director’s Cut and just shy of a full hour longer than the theater release version. Having not seen the shorter versions, it is tough for me to really analyze the differences. I have read that between the Director’s Cut and the theater release, the missing material actually changes the story substantially (and that the longer version is truer to the source material). Much of the remaining difference going to the Ultimate Cut is from the inclusion of the cartoon short, Tales of the Black Freighter, interwoven with the movie. This is a graphic novel which a minor character reads periodically throughout the story. In the theatrical release, the reference to Black Freighter is through a single line which would seem to obscure the purpose of its message relative to the main story. Inserting the story in its entirety is either enlightening or overdone, depending on how critical you feel the short’s message is to the overall interpretation of Watchmen.
In the end, this is probably worth the watch. The bits that show true promise then get stepped on by pieces that muddle and simplify. In the end, it may all well be less than it appears. Getting the viewer to work their way through it all, though, that’s worth something in and of itself.
This is the thirteenth in a series of posts on the Vietnam War. See here for the previous post in the series and here to go back to the master post.
The Grandfather of the Vietnam strategic-level wargame has to be the out-of-print monster game from Victory Games, Vietnam 1965-1975.
The game was released in 1984. To get a context of the time, take a look at the Vietnam-themed films that were out before 1984. There was, of course, Apocalypse Now, which isn’t really about Vietnam. There was The Deerhunter, which wasn’t really about Vietnam. There was also a smattering of “returned vets” pictures and the occasional POW action film, but in general Vietnam was a nasty political mess that we had finally managed to extract ourselves from, and not a suitable subject for entertainment.
The world of wargames was similar. 1984 was the cresting of a decade of plenty in the hobby. The shelves at game stores were awash with games covering the old standbys; World War II, The American Civil War (especially Gettysburg), and the wars of Napoleon. While the success of those games enabled the industry to produce ever more variety in both mechanics (particularly greater complexity) and settings, Vietnam wasn’t really on the table. Part of it was the timing. A game dealing with the strategic-level war in Vietnam couldn’t really have existed* for more than a half-a-dozen or so years anyway, until after the ending of that conflict was known**. But beyond that, the topic remained rather taboo.
All that doesn’t even take into account what might be the greatest problem of all. The war defied the structure that made up most wargames to that point. There were no front lines, no clear demarcation between friendly and enemy held territory. Victory conditions remained puzzlingly elusive. Finally, while the military match-ups did produce expected results (typically overwhelming victories by U.S. forces), those did not translate into victory and loss. As Ho Chi Minh explained to the French, “You can kill ten of my men for every one I kill of yours. But even at those odds, you will lose and I will win.”
Before we get into discussions about asymmetric warfare and victory conditions thereof, Vietnam 1965-1975 does something else that is a little special for 1984. I recall an essay, or perhaps even a video, talking about how to get your friends and relatives to play games with you. It points out that most people’s gaming experience is limited to some “family games” they played as children; the Monopolies and Clues. It set up recommendations by taking things that people like about classic games, and recommending a newish game that has that same mechanic, but implements it better. A point I took away is that the current state-of-the-art in boardgame design tries to minimize the “down time” between turns. Simply waiting and doing nothing while others around a six-seat table play does not make for fun gameplay. Worse yet, being forced to concentrate on how those 5 other players move, because otherwise you might miss something important, is not only tedious but punishes you if your mind starts to wander a little. Giving every participant in the game something to do, even when it isn’t their turn, is a hallmark of today’s game design.
The monster wargames of the early 1980s took this problem to a level beyond anything a family game could even imagine. I recall several rulebooks from the ’60s or ’70s vintage wargames where the opening paragraphs tried to hit some basic concepts. Front and center was the idea that on your turn you could move any or all of your pieces, not just one. The next paragraph using explained the concept of movement allowance; How having elected to move a piece, the moves open to the player also were open to extensive choices (subject to various limitations). This was a key nod towards realism that differentiated Chess from PanzerBlitz. A real army can get all its parts moving simultaneously.
Now, extrapolate this to a monster wargame covering the entire Eastern Front or, more to the point, the whole of Vietnam. Each of hundreds of counters needs to be moved individually by the player, which could take an eternity.
We’ll start with the innovations of Vietnam 1965-1975 right here. Turns are played out as a series of “operations,” which are fairly small and focused engagements between pieces. To simulate the nature of the communist insurgency, they always have the opportunity to go first. Once their operation is complete, the U.S. gets a chance. In this way, getting through “all the counters” is done piecemeal, alternating with a few from each side. Furthermore, each operation is not simply a matter of the attacker counting up points then asking the defender to roll for his defense. Operations are dynamic. Units may retreat before a battle, or attempt to flee after it. As they move across the map, nearby units may join the fray, potentially shifting an attackers advantage to the defender. Finally, on top of all of this, either side may decline to take an operation when it is his chance, letting the other go first. There is a catch, however, that if both sides decline to operate, the turn is over. It is a formula for an extremely dynamic and interesting play where both players are involved throughout the course of a turn.
Another major innovation is the way that the core combat mechanisms of the game were altered to reflect asymetric guerrilla warfare. In your typical game, battles are joined and perhaps after some die rolling to determine victory, the loser’s piece(s) is removed and the winner advances to claim territory. In a more serious wargame, that formula can get complicated. The losing side may lose some, but not all of their forces, included partial losses – frequently flipping over a counter to show degraded functionality. The victor may also see a portion of their forces lost or reduced. Forced retreat of surviving units and mechanisms for the advance by a victorious attacker become part of the odds charts. Vietnam 1965-1975 makes some major changes to this formula. In the previous paragraph, I mentioned that retreat and pursuit is a much more hands on affair, and that is part of it. A bigger change is that, when suffering losses, a player may opt to make good those losses via replacements rather than using any units on board. Overwhelming losses in battle may end up in destroyed units but maybe, if the player so desires and has the resources to back it up, all units will remain intact.
The key is that victory is not determined simply by gaining territory and eliminating the enemy. The course of the game is heavily determined by the tracking political and morale factors, which are impacted by things like the losses taken via reinforcement. This both ties the combat indirectly into the victory system as well as further opening up the tactical possibilities of an operation. In some cases, a particular battle might extend well beyond its initial expectations, with losses being made good through reinforcements and additional forces being fed into the battle through the reaction mechanisms.
Going back to that odds chart, in this also the designer has a methodology I’ve not seen elsewhere. Typically, after some math work to calculate odds, a die is rolled to determine which result (for the particular ratio computed) will be used. It is a little different here. While the die is still rolled, it often feels like a minor randomization of what is mostly a deterministic procedure. The odds themselves don’t give you the results column. They give you another die roll modifier to be applied to the results. It is an interesting twist on what one might have been accustomed from charts in 1984. It is also a lot more complicated that what players of 2018 games are probably used to.
I’ll forgo the urge to hit the features of this game point-by-point. This is a complex game with many and diverse aspects of the war in Vietnam being factored in. Almost unbelievable so. The game gets down into the weeds with the hex-by-hex, unit-by-unit fighting that breath detail into these operations. At the same time, at the other end of the scale, the (U.S.) player must manage the the military leadership of the ARVN. The command structure is bound to become saturated with political appointees, which will degrade the effectiveness of your allied units. Try to weed out all the incompetents, though, and you might trigger a coup, which would also destabilize and weaken the fighting forces. All of this under the umbrella of balancing morale and commitment for the U.S.
The brilliance of this design is in the interplay between these factors. Contrast it to more current implications, and you would expect something like a card-based event system to help drive the narrative. But this is a game that was published almost a decade before We The People. It also forgoes the die-roll based event tables that preceded the more modern card-based events. Instead, the narrative is driven a seemingly simple interaction between the rules. As the U.S. player, you will be forced to ramp up your forces to save South Vietnam from the early advantage of the Viet Cong. But you’ll have to temper your commitment to avoid prematurely crippling your war effort by offending the politicians at home. At some point, they will be fed up with your warmongering, and you must begin withdrawing troops to satisfy the public cry to end the war. Ultimately the game will force a final U.S. withdrawl and compel a NVA/ARVN showdown much like that which ended the war in 1975.
This is a huge game. It contains complicated calculations that require each player to maintain off-board bookkeeping sheets. I’ve certainly never completed a game myself and I’ve read some speculation on-line how, probably, very few of the copies sold have been played through in an entire campaign game. To do so would almost certainly require having a board setup somewhere for months on end. It would also require having a comrade-in-arms who also enjoys this level of detail and would stick it out until the end. I also suspect that, for almost anyone, a few playthroughs would be necessary to understand the nuances. Practically speaking, it may take years of dedication before diving into a satisfying campaign game.
One complaint (on-line) is about how many operations need to be played through to complete a “turn.” Given the nature of this game and the victory conditions, the operations are needed to feed numbers back to the “big picture,” which is then used to feed numbers back to the “Seasonal Interphase.” Think of this a meta-cycle that occurs every two turns to layer the strategic elements on top of the operational elements. I could imagine that some operations would be very satisfying if the elements of a complex plan come together. For example, using the game mechanics, one could set up a trap where pursuit of a smaller force draws in an attack and then flips the odds on the attacker. There also could be “Hamburger Hill” type operations, where a players wind up creating a mountain from a molehill by continuing to feed resources into what originally was a fairly meaningless battle. I would also think it is just as likely to embark upon fairly routine operations where one side attacks, the other side retreats, and you go through the mechanics to figure out losses.
It’s my Total War conundrum, decades earlier and on cardboard-and-paper instead of on a computer screen. You’ve always got to be putting your best effort into each and every operation, because every little point lost or, perhaps, forgone (if you are in too much of a hurry and just want to get the season over with) might be that point you needed to put you on top in the strategic phase. Although again, thinking of the Total War comparison again, if you see the meat of the game as the operations and the strategic layer as the context to make it all work, then the operational part might feel just fine to you.
The Operation Starlight (tutorial) scenario is set up as a tutorial in Vassal as well. Vassal further enhances the game by providing tools, such as an order-of-battle viewer and marked hexes for units on patrol. My Marines are closing in for the kill.
To some extent, today’s reality may have saved this game from oblivion. Being out of print and difficult to play would destine it for fond memories from one’s youth. However, the likes of Vassal begin to solve some of the problems. You no longer have to convince a friend to play – you have the whole world over to search for an opponent. No need to keep the board set up and cat-free for the better part of a year – the save file will keep just fine until you are ready for the next turn. As a result, I’m reading descriptions posted to the internet of games which have taken place fairly recently.
Usually being the first makes it really tough to be the best – especially 30+ years on. Once someone has shown what to do and what not to do, future efforts should be able to improve upon that formula. In this case, I’m not sure that anyone has ever attempted something of this magnitude again. If I sift through the board game geek lists, I can find a few attempts that are more focused on individual campaigns. There are also several attempts restrict the game play more exclusively at the strategic level. Noteworthy to me are Victory in Vietnam, a 1999 design that still uses a hex-and-counter view of South Vietnam, but at a much larger scale. 2010 saw a card-driven game treatment with Hearts and Minds. And of course I just wrote about 2014’s Fire in the Lake.
For the computer, a user attempted to port (at least in spirit) the Vietnam 1965-1975 to The Operational Art of War. There have also been several other strategic-level attempts, both for the entire 10 years or smaller portions of them, implemented in TOAW. I am not aware of any PC game that is dedicated to the Vietnam War from a strategic level.
While Victory Game’s Vietnam 1965-1975 may not be among the frequently-played board games on anyone’s list, I’d be surprised if any subsequent designer of strategic and/or operational Vietnam game did not use it as a starting point for their work.
*I make my statements definitive here, but it does oversimplify. They say that “the exception proves the rule,” and one can name exceptions without too much effort. A comprehensive scan of publishing dates shows up to a dozen games that with a Vietnam theme coming out in 1984 or earlier. These include a game printed in 1965 to simulate the war at a strategic level, even as the war itself was only beginning. Jim Dunnigan had some designs contemporary to the battles they portrayed (as is his thing), including a 1972 Easter campaign game released in 1972. Other games focus on segments of the war that were more conventional, such as the Battle of Hue or the more evenly-balanced campaigns of 1972 and later. Likewise, there were Vietnam movies like Go Tell the Spartans, from 1978, which predated Hollywood’s interest in the Vietnam War starting in the late ’80s.
Return to the master post for Vietnam War articles or go on to the next article, discussing a TOAW take on the entire Vietnam War operation.
**One of the reasons The Green Berets didn’t make it into my list of movies in the previous paragraph is that it came out, not only before the war ended, but before it was even beginning to end.
When organizing my previous entry on Fire in the Lake, into my timeline, I mention that it is “one of the few games that begins its treatment of the U.S. Vietnam War in 1964, before direct U.S. action began.” I know this because the manual tells me that it starts in 1964.
From direct experience, however, this can be a hard thing to pin down.
Fire in the Lake is part of the COIN (Counter Insurgency) series of games from GMT. I’ve previously discussed the pedigree of these games that seems to stretch back from various games included in under this banner, to Labyrinth to Twilight Struggle. In turn, the last extends the principles of card driven games as the key play mechanism. Within this group of historically-focused games, the cards introduce into the game various notable, historical events. The cards and their mechanics generally have multiple functions within the game, but put it into a historical context and connect the table-top exercise with the actual history. They can also serve as “wild cards,” disrupting the the otherwise predictable flow from turn-to-turn, creating excitement, uncertainty, and replayability within the games.
Fire in the Lake, and from what I’ve seen* of the COIN series as a whole, is an interesting implementation of this. Unlike the traditional understanding of a “card game”, cards are not drawn and held in a hand to be played by each player. Instead, the cards are dealt face up from the deck and are visible to all players. The cards are also visible one turn ahead, allowing planning to encompass not just the current turn but also the next. This information is equally visible to all players. There is no “hidden knowledge.” Even unplayed pieces are displayed for any player to tally up and consider as needed. Typically two players can take actions in a given turn, so the two-turns worth of cards is also a complete cycle through all four players. The player order is elective, with the right of first refusal being determined by the active card. So you can’t choose what card to play; instead you choose how to play the card in front of you.
Contrast this with Twilight Struggle. In that game, each player’s turn** is conducted with cards from their hand, allowing them leeway in determining which events get played and the order in which they are played. There is the mechanism where, in most circumstances, events for your opponent are automatically executed but, that aside, the players could chose to simply not execute any events. Fire in the Lake also contains a similar method to suppress an event – if you have priority in a turn, you can prevent an event from being played by any other player through curtailing your own actions. However, in Fire in the Lake, events have two different outcomes, each tailored to benefit one side over the other. It would seem to make it likely that play would generally see the events triggered (either in their historical or counter-historical form) for most turns.
It is the cards and their events that propel one through the game’s calendar. The game consists of a number of “campaigns,” which are separated by special “Coup!” cards. The Coup! cards trigger extra resource management and scoring turns and, depending on the setup, mark the transition from one phase of the war to another. The next-to-last card, before a coup, is considered to take place during the monsoon season. The rule book states that each of these campaigns represents 1-2 years of the war. However, other than the effects of the monsoons, there is no other close tie to the calendar. Turns don’t represent (for example) 3 months of real time. Nor are there any seasonal effects other than the monsoon. Two cards played back-to-back might be taking place nearly simultaneously or they might be separated by many months.
I dwell on all this as an introduction to placing the tutorial on the calendar. The events that make up this game are fixed in order (for tutorial purposes, cards are not shuffled) and all taken from the “1964” event set. Some of them have precise ties to an historical date while others are more general, representing the application of various strategy and tactics appropriate to that time.
So when does the tutorial start? If we take a look at the first card, it is a reference to a fixed date event, but one that occurred in 1963. Pictured on the card (“Burning Bonze”) is Quảng Đức‘s death on June 10th, 1963. The problem is, the game also starts out with Dương Văn Minh in charge of the government, which puts us after the November 1st, 1963 coup that overthrew (and assassinated) president Ngô Đình Diệm. The Coup! card which ends the tutorial uses the overthrow of Minh by Nguyễn Khánh. Whether that refers to the replaced of Minh by Khánh the first time, on January 30th of 1964, or the second time on August 16th of the same year, or again in October, is another part of this to puzzle out for the obsessive-compulsive player. Given the intervention of the Gulf of Tonkin incident (the fourth card played) and the Brinks Hotel bombing (the fifth, representing a December 24th date), we should probably assume it is a later date.
To play through the tutorial, it is easier to set up in Vassal than to clear a table somewhere in the house. Viet Cong have the opening move.
To resolve this, frankly pretty pointless, exercise, I’m going to take a page from the book I’ve recently read. In those pages, one of the main characters witnesses a monk setting himself ablaze during a riot in a scene meant to invoke Quảng Đức’s suicide. However, the narrative of the book places this sometime in the middle of the summer of 1964. It’s purpose in the narrative is simply to show the impact of South Vietnamese instability on the special-forces operations, about which the book is written. Likewise, the play of this event to start off the tutorial drives the game in that it destabilizes the situation in Saigon, forcing the South Vietnamese player to spend his first turn reacting to the event rather than advancing his own plan.
Given all of this analysis, and to put this ridiculous musing to bed, I declare that the tutorial scenario in Fire in the Lake starts on the fourth of July, 1964. I will place it on whatever timelines accordingly. From July 4th to…
Oh dear. While we now have a monsoon season (late May? of 1965?) and a coup (one of three possible dates) to monkey with. What to do?
Return to the master post for Vietnam War articles or go on to the next article for a first look at a 1984 board from Victory Games.
*I also have A Distant Plain.
**I am being imprecise in my language. The Fire in the Lake rules use “turn” to describe the action of the player, “round” to describe the actions of one or more players associated with a single card, and “campaign” to to describe the series of rounds/turns that occur within one “pile” of cards (containing one Coup! card). If you’re familiar with the correct terminology, this might bother you.
The show itself was created in (I think) Lithuania by a Latvian/Lithuanian production house. The major characters are all played by British actors, some of them fairly prominent.
When a series is made for British TV, and British actors play the Americans, the American accents can be a mixed bag. Sometimes a regional accent will be used inappropriately. Often the accent is mostly good, but with a few slips that make it obvious its not an actual American actor playing the role. By way of contrast, when British actors play characters in U.S. productions, they can be shockingly good with the accent. I’m thinking, at the moment, of The Walking Dead, where a number of the main characters are non-American actors.
Knowing the provenance of this show, it should probably be judged more as the latter. Nevertheless, seeing the British actors in the cast, I immediately began thinking in terms of the former. For most of the major characters, I had no reason to doubt their American accents. The one exception was Aldrich Ames himself, who occasionally slips into some odd pronunciation. I was about to write it off as an attempt to portray him as a nerdy introvert, but the actor is Welsh, so I don’t know.
A little more jarring is the look of the actors. The one that really hit me is Julian Ovendon, whom I have seen before in Downton Abbey and Foyles War. He plays the non-CIA husband of the protagonist. His looks also scream to me “twenty-teens” as opposed to early ’80s. It’s a contrast to the other period pieces I name here, where it wasn’t so obvious. Part of it is that I remember the time portrayed in this series. Part of it may be these are real people rather than fiction.
I struggled with this as I watched. Why does he look so wrong? Is it just a matter of grooming and makeup, or is it something physiological? Do people, and in this case, men actually look so different in 2018 as compared to 1983. Or is it perhaps a greater divergence between the look of “regular people” versus actors. Part of it may be that he has a particularly British look, but I’m not sure what “Britishness” would have looked like in the ’80s either. It is a look would fit in well in, say, Brooklyn here in America, so I’m not even sure it’s particularly English (or Welsh). It’s puzzle that I can’t quite piece together.
Redeeming himself for his verbal slip-ups, the actor playing Ames (Paul Rhys, whom I haven’t watched much of) has adopted a plausible early-80s look. I wouldn’t say he could pass himself off as the real Ames, but he could pass himself of as a contemporary. I guess the human race hasn’t evolved beyond recognition on the last thirty years after all.
Entwined with this are the ages of the actors. The actress playing Grimes is a few years younger than the real Grimes would have been. She looks, perhaps younger, but definitely a lot more “glamorous.” That’s probably says more about casting of lead females than anything else, although again, she doesn’t really look 1980s to my eye. The actor playing Ames is a half-a-dozen or so years older than the character he portrays. Granted the pictures I’ve seen of Ames are from the time of his arrest, not the time he was spying, but the real Ames looks very much older.
This, I would say, really is a sign of the times. In 1985, a the fifty-something men I knew were probably somebody’s grandfather. Or maybe that coworker getting ready for retirement. In 2018, fifty-something actors seem to be at their prime. I think a lot has changed in just a generation while we weren’t looking.
But what about the story itself?
The show was made to be aired on ABC, but was pulled from prime-time after only two episodes. It was moved to a low-ratings spot on Saturday, to complete the run, but was pulled from there after only two more episodes. I think ABC may have finally showed the remaining episodes in a Sunday afternoon binge run and then passed the show of to Netflix to make what they could of it. Since I don’t follow what goes on in the world of broadcast TV, I knew nothing about any of this until Netflix decide to pull it off of streaming.
All of this would lead one to pretty low expectations.
The show is rather non-conventional for U.S. entertainment. It seems that we, here in American, prefer our spy thrillers to be along the lines of, say, a Mission Impossible. Maybe a bit of intrigue, but mostly carried by tense action sequences and culminating in a final showdown between hero and villain. Even when that hero is an analyst, we’re probably going to expect him to don the mantle of the action hero (think, here, the Jack Ryan series of movies).
Before I looked up the history of this TV show, and its failure on U.S. network television, I actually thought it was made for the British audience. Not only is it filled with British acting talent, but the narrative itself is more in that British style. The tone is more John le Carré than Tom Clancy. Details focus on recruitment and spycraft and the tension is emotional rather coming from physical action. The conflict itself is a mind game. We know that they know some, but not all, of our secrets. What can we tell about what they know by what we know? The Assets uses the analogy of chess to describe the depth of the game of deception and misdirection.
All-in-all, I say this series did an admirable job of dramatizing a historical event to create an interesting and watchable story without hurtling us into a fantasy world. It is a real shame that the television industry cannot properly manage the development and distribution of this kind of entertainment. This is one part of the reason I cut the cable cord and one part of the reason I keep paying Netflix their monthly tribute, despite my issues with them.
A master post for the Vietnam War. The U.S. version. The Quagmire.
After seeing a brief mention of Fire In The Lake in the Wall St. Journal, I picked back up readingWe Were Soldiers Once… and Young. From there, I got into looking at all the games/scenarios that take place during America’s involvement in the Vietnam War.
The big question, when it comes to Vietnam games, is how do you get this right? What scale or scales were capture the era? How to effectively model asymmetric warfare – either in Vietnam or in general? How do you balance the military portions of the game with the political?
Once upon a time, there was very little to chose from when it came to the Vietnam War. It is still not the most popular timeframe to place a game but, at this point, I would say it has solid coverage. There have been a number of treatments of the war as a whole, including of course the newish Fire In The Lake. Operational level scenarios take on different lengths and sizes as do the tactical games. This goes all the way down to the first-person shooter, with Rising Storm 2: Vietnam being (as of this writing and as far as I know) the most recent addition to the computer games with a Vietnam theme.
As I explore these questions, these games, and read up on the period, I expect I will be writing a lot of posts. This master post will serve as a collection point for them.
Vietnam posts (in order of their appearance) are as follows:
Way back when, I wrote a pair of posts on the French phase of the Vietnam War.
Another discussion of Fire in the Lake and, in particular, its tutorial scenario. The focus is on the connection between card-driven game events and calendar dates.
The 1984 Victory Games title Vietnam 1965-1975 is, arguably, the grandfather of all current strategic treatments of the Vietnam War in gaming.
In addition to the post, I also created new timeline. My goal with this was two-fold. First, the way I’ve organized my two Cold Wartimelines, I’ve split the war into two parts. That split doesn’t divide the war evenly or even logically*. A single timeline helps one to see the continuity of the 10+ year period from 1963 or so through 1975.
Second, I needed help organizing all of the scenarios. More than any era that I’ve looked at so far, the Vietnam War has dozens of scenarios from a whole bunch of different games, all scattered across the war’s timeline. It became impossible for me to remember what game to look at to find the next applicable scenario in chronological order. Sorting them all out on the timeline means I can discover various games haphazardly, stick them in their place, and then come back later and see them in the bigger picture.
*As I’ve explained elsewhere, the break in the Cold War timeline was done where it is for two reasons. First, there is a shift in weapons systems between the the more experimental pre-1966 and the structured post-1966 when it comes to American designs. Secondly, at the time I conceived of creating a second timeline, I decided start anew 50 years from the date that I did it.
At first glance, the books We Were Soldiers Once … and Young and Incident at Muc Wa would seem to be polar opposites. Yes one is fiction and the other borders on being a technical report, but that is not what I’m talking about.
In We Were Soldiers Once…, the Americans combatants are described as competent and professional. Furthermore, when the need arises, they are often heroic and resourceful. The North Vietnamese play a much smaller role, but they too come through almost entirely with a positive sheen.
In Incident at Muc Wa, nearly every character in the book is deeply flawed. The principles act for largely selfish reasons; reasons that put them at odds with other individuals in the story. In an endeavor where team effort, as exemplified in the narrative of Ia Drang, is at a premium, the level of cooperation seems nearly non-existent. Being fiction, we can follow the thought process of our characters and don’t need to dwell entirely on the fighting. While we don’t actually find ourselves among cowards or traitors, sometimes knowing the reason a man fights leaves us with a whole lot less respect for him than when we didn’t know. We see prisoners tortured, non-combatants killed, and women raped and it all just seems part of the collateral damage that necessarily rides in the wake of a war. In fact, these low-level war crimes seem less tragic than the clearly non-nonsensical decision process that puts the characters into pointless, stupid situations in the first place.
But what strikes me is that both books seem to get the nod from the war veterans themselves, who see in them a portion of the truth behind what they were a part of in Vietnam.
Now one reason for the difference in perception is simply one of focus. Hal Moore hints at some of the same ideas in his book. He describes how, with the ful knowledge that the North Vietnamese have withdrawn to the west, his air cavalry troopers are deployed to the east to search them out. He seems cognizant of the lack of competence but chooses not to dwell on it. Similarly, he talks in passing about how the needs of career officers (who are trying to fill in all the right boxes in their personnel files) drives policy to the detriment of the operation of the war. Its a major plot point in Incident at Muc Wa, but is brought up by Moore more as “something we could have done better.”
Incident at Muc Wa is, as I said, a work of fiction. There is no Muc Wa. While some of pointed out this could be a misspelling of Mộc Hóa, that real location is in entirely the wrong place to substitute for the Muc Wa in the book. In fact, the author points out that he made up the name to sound like how he, a New Hampshire native, would say “Muck War,” which he found a fitting description for Vietnam.
The characters in the book are all fictional, with one exception. The character named Cowboy, the unit’s interpreter, is based on a real person named Cowboy. Many of the others draw their inspiration from real people, but for all the names have been changed. The author, Daniel Ford, met Cowboy and the true-to-life counterparts in his novel while he was working as a reporter. He accompanied a South Vietnamese sweep operation in the general area and used his experiences as the basis for the novel.
Ford includes in the self-immolation protest of a Buddhist monk, perhaps attempting to referring to the protest/suicide of Quảng Đức (in 1963) or more likely simply attempting to portray the perpetual instability of the South Vietnamese governments and its impact on U.S. military operations. In his story, while a reporter (a proxy for himself) witnesses the protest, back in the field all friendly air support is grounded while the resulting revolt against the ruling government is dealt with. Perhaps tellingly, the story never explains (nor seems to care) whether the coup is a failure or a success. Eventually, air operations resume. It is enough to let us know that the U.S. military is hamstrung by political tides beyond its control.
At the time of the real events upon which this story was based, Ford was working as a reporter for The Nation and sent articles back home to the U.S. as piecework. The idea for the novel and its execution came several years later. The story takes place, one assumes, in 1964 shortly before the Gulf of Tonkin incident, if we correlate the fiction with Ford’s actual time in Vietnam. The novel itself was published in 1967, when the change in the character of the war has become obvious. To some extent, any prescient characters in the book really have the advantage of Ford’s own hindsight.
The book is a fairly short one, as far as novels go. It is written with some of Catch-22‘s style, such that we’re not expected to take everything at face value. The story makes for an easy read and the main story (the fighting over Muc Wa) is propelled with a secondary theme of sexual tension. Its the kind of thing that can work or come off as stupid but in this case it works.
Taken in the context of its publishing date, it can be seen as allegorical with respect to the forces at work in the escalating Vietnam War. We see how friction between supposed friends works to the determent of all. The regular army doesn’t approve of the special forces and their tactics. All Americans look down on the South Vietnamese, although Special Forces advisors come to respect those native combatants that others, far from the action, mostly just despise. Everyone depends on the South Vietnamese soldiers, officers, and politicians, but can never really rely upon them. Finally, we see opinions from the soldiers on what must be done to win the war, knowing (especially sitting here in 2018) that these steps will never be taken.
In 1967, the author admits, the reading public was not in the mood for this kind of a book. Real news from the already-escalating Vietnam was too common and too depressing to allow one to lose oneself in a fictional account of three years earlier. Eventually, its depiction on the big screen revived the book’s impact. According to the author, much credit here goes to Burt Lancaster’s interest and a personal investment of cash.
I stumbled across this book because it was the basis for that film, Go Tell The Spartans, which I have never seen. I found that movie while trying digging for that date where the Vietnam War became a suitable subject for filmmaking (roughly 1986 with the release of Platoon) and Go Tell The Spartans stands out as an exception to this rule. Surprisingly, given its age, the book is still being pushed by its author and is available in both ebook format and a fresh print run.
Seeing the ebook market as a new opportunity to distribute and old book, the author reworked his story a little bit in 2012 and published it afresh. His changes, so he says, were limited to taking some of the real events and places that, in the original novel, were obscured so as not to be identifiable. In the rewrite, he uses the real names where appropriate. The fictional location of Muc Wa and the fictional operation are retained.
We are fortunate that the author has taken the initiative to keep his book available. Too many good books become largely unavailable once a few years pass beyond their initial publication.
On January 18th of 2018, Dr. James Cobb passed away.
He’s been one of the fixtures as far as writings about computer wargaming since as long as I can remember. His articles were always the serious ones, discussing games in terms of the details of the battles. I’m not sure I necessarily looked to his reviews for the recommendations, but one could always expect to be informed.
I write about this so many months after the fact (for that matter, many months after I read his passing) because I just came across a review he wrote for the Wargamer website. Had I read the review at the time, I almost certainly would have picked up DEFCON-2 The Missiles of October as a counterpoint to my fooling around with 13 Days. I may yet, but at this point I doubt I could say any more he already has.
At the same time, I stumbled across a couple of other Wargamer articles that would have fit well among my own recent writings. As a result of this, I’ve decided I’m going to haphazardly link some Wargamer articles into my History of Games timelines where those links seem appropriate.
When I watched the movie about the Siege at Jadotville, I lamented the fact that were no games to accompany my viewing. Move history forward a few years, though, and coverage for the events in what had become the formerly-Belgian Congo was solved by scenario creator Tom DeShetler and his work with Steel Panthers. It is Scenario 172, “DRAGON ROUGE (Red Dragon).”
One of the ways to get around the fiddliness of off-board artillery is to have it all pre-configured. The scenario opens with a bombing attack of the town.
Throughout 1964, a communist rebellion raged against the government of Joseph Kasa-Vubu. The Simba rebels had coalesced around exiled political supporters of the murdered Patrice Lumumba and were backed by the communist governments of Russia, Cuba, and China. They quickly took control of roughly half of the Republic of Congo. With the national army of Congo letting the rebels capture territory largely without a fight, the government turned to mercenaries to combat the insurgents.
As the rebels captured territories, they took as hostages white Europeans. By late fall, the number was in the thousands with at least a thousand being held in Stanleyville. The government worked with the West to come up with a solution, one that ultimately consisted of a joint operation between Belgian troops, mercenary forces, and U.S. air support.
This is the first air drop scenario that I’ve played in Steel Panthers.
This scenario makes for a unique experience. Not only does it provide a look at a conflict that otherwise probably won’t see much game-wise (I don’t expect John Tiller to put out a $40 scenario package on the Congo Crisis), but it also has some unique features. It has a combined operation of mercenaries and the Belgians and a combination of para-dropped forces and some heavier vehicles. The objectives are interesting, both seizing territory and rescuing civilians (who are also represented on the map and controlled by the player). A few surprises also wait for the player as the scenario plays out.
Prior to November 14th, 1965, the military of the government of the United States had never fought a battle against the Army of North Vietnam.
The first U.S. combat troops, in the form of 3,500 marines, had landed in Vietnam on March 8th of the same year. Tens of thousands more followed through the summer. In the run-up to the fall of 1965, the war could be described as the South Vietnamese government attempting to subdue a communist uprising within its borders. Despite failures, both political and military, within the South Vietnamese government, the U.S. was confident that the government would ultimately prevail and was providing financial and military aid to assure that outcome. Kennedy had placed as many as 16,000 advisors in Vietnam and Johnson increased this number to 26,000.
For years, however, the government of North Vietnam had been sending aid to the guerillas in the South. This was both in the form of materiel and direct combatants. While the U.S. believed that the South Vietnamese would regain control over their nation, the North had to be dissuaded from participating in that war.
During the 1964 presidential election, Johnson campaigned as the less warlike of the two candidates. Candidate Barry Goldwater was critical (and somewhat prescient) of the policy in Vietnam and where it would lead, but his emphasis on stronger options (tactical nukes, for example) and the Democrats’ portrayal of him as a belligerent warmonger was contrasted with Johnson’s calls for peace. Even in the face of Johnson’s reaction to the Gulf of Tonkin incident, he remained the Peace candidate in the election. Goldwater lost in a landslide.
Johnson’s concerns were about his domestic policy and, for him, Vietnam was a distraction. That distraction could become a disaster, though, and he vowed he would not be the president who “lost Vietnam” in the same way Truman was accused of abandoning China to the communists.
In February of 1965, several Viet Cong attacks had resulted in American casualties and Johnson’s response was to initiate Operation Rolling Thunder. This was a bombing campaign by U.S. aircraft against North Vietnamese targets that would continue for the duration of Johnson’s presidency. At the same time, Johnson urged greater use of ground forces and expressed willingness to increase their deployment. Those 3,500 Marines were landed with the mission of protecting U.S. bases from further Viet Cong attacks.
Fairly quickly, it was clear that the North Vietnamese were not backing down in the face of the American air campaign. The South Vietnamese army had been defeated in the field, in the battles of Bình Giã and Đồng Xoài, and the North was increasing their aid to the communist insurgents. Add to that the increasing political turmoil in the South’s government, and the U.S. seemingly reached a point where they had to fish or cut bait.
In a secret memo from April 6th, Johnson authorized additional troop deployments as well as a change in mission to allow “more active use” of ground troops. By this he meant the authority to use U.S. forces on the offensive.
In August, the Marines launched their first large-scale offensive operation against the Viet Cong, Operation Starlight. This was planned to be a preemptive defensive measure, hitting the Viet Cong at their base to prevent raids on U.S. installations. By the fall, the Army was involved as well. At this point, however, the U.S. was operating against the Viet Cong, a force of irregulars that were no real match for the Americans in either equipment or training.
That changed with the Pleiku Campaign. After the South Vietnamese forces drove off an North Vietnamese Army (NVA) attack on the Pleime camp (with the aid of U.S. Air Power) in late October they requested that U.S. forces, in the form of the 1st Air Cavalry Division, pursue the retreating NVA. November 14th saw the Air Cav. move in and finally meet and then engage the North Vietnamese in two major battles, at Landing Zone X-Ray and a few days later at Landing Zone Albany. When these battles were over, the war in Vietnam had taken on a completely new character.
Washington was now thoroughly awakened to the ferocity of the fighting at X-Ray and Albany and to the large numbers of American dead and wounded beginning to arrive from the battlefields. The war was entering a new and much more deadly phase; President Johnson wanted to know what that meant and what it would cost.
It was a year or two before I started reading Black Hawk Down that I started reading We Were Soldiers Once… under the same circumstances. Another Thanksgiving visit had me take down my father’s copy of the book and read it between bouts of turkey. When I got back home, I bought my own copy of the book. At the time, however, I was reading some other stuff and decided to hold off with the Vietnam War until I was in the mood for such. As I am now.
I had watched themovie based on the book, so it was not a new story for me. But despite always meaning to, I’d never got around to the source material. I guess I saw the presence of the book on my father’s shelf as enough of an endorsement to push me over the edge.
I Can Hear the Choir
There are a number of ways to write a narrative of a battle. With The Killer Angels, the story is made smooth by filling in circumstance and dialog as needed. The “made-up parts” still have their basis in fact, but nobody is expected to believe that the words spoken by Shaara’s Lee, alone in his tent, are 100% accurate. Black Hawk Down was another excellent example, sticking to the facts as they were available, but forming them into an easy-to-read narrative. As I saw when reading that book, part of the advantage the author had in this case is that the battle was very well documented. It allowed a best seller to also become a scholarly source for information on the battle.
Usually, however, one writes potential-best-sellers in a different style than one would a scholarly presentation. With We Were Soldiers Once…, we see that very different style. Rather than saying something like, “Meanwhile, while the men of the 7th Cavalry were moving in to position, unbeknownst to them the enemy was…” the author breaks the narrative. Forgoing a smooth transition, we are switched between points of view. General Moore’s voice is interrupted to identify a North Vietnamese commander and quote him directly. If that commander, in his interview, repeated information that was just used a few paragraphs back, well, we read it again. As a primary-source, it is more important that the words of the interviewees get preserved correctly than to be concerned about the readability of the prose or whether the story retains its grip on the reader.
This is not to say that We Were Soldiers Once… is a tough read. It is not. It’s a very readable book and, indeed, a best seller in its own right. However, the style is heavily influenced by the multiple goals of the book. It is meant to be an accurate representation of source interviews and an original source for the battle. The authors also wanted to, perhaps above all, memorialize those killed in the battle. Again doing so interrupts the flow of the narrative. All things considered I agree with them that this is how it should be.
The book’s chapters are divided into three major sections. After some introduction, there is a section about the fight at Landing Zone X-Ray. The next section covers the second major fight, a few days later, at Landing Zone Albany. A final section considers the aftermath of the battles.
The first section, about LZ X-Ray, reads the best. First of all, given the way the battle played out, it is simply a more compelling story. It is no wonder that the movie adaptation limits itself to X-Ray. The battle is well planned and then the uncertainties and FUBARs that arise they are dealt with, ultimately reflecting well on the U.S. forces and its leaders. We are taken through some harrowing moments, but ultimately a combination of excellent leadership and a bit of luck allow the Americans to pull through. With heavy casualties, yes, but giving far more than they got. It also helps that it is Hal Moore’s voice that ties the narrative together. He was there. He was aware of the big picture, as best he could be, and he was successfully orchestrating the battle. When the story jumps to another participant, in another part of the command chain, it is to augment Moore’s own recollection of events.
LZ Albany was very different. Moore still tells the story, but as a non-participant, assembling the story after the fact. The plan, have the forces at X-Ray march out, split, and arrive at two other landing zones, does not seem (particularly in retrospect) to be well thought out. Once engaged, Moore’s counterpart, Lieutenant Colonel Robert McDade, was cut off from much of his command and was not cognizant of what was going on in the larger battle. For a time, for the worst part of the fight, nobody was. The story, then, is less of the “battle” than of individual cases of perseverance and heroism. The Americans again survived and again made a decent showing for themselves, but it lacks the direction of X-Ray.
The third section pulls together various aspects outside of the view on the ground on those long November days. Moore discusses political and strategic aspects of the battle. He also focus on the families of the fallen back at home. In one chapter, the narrative is turned over to various survivors, loved ones of those killed in battle. They are allowed to speak of their own experience in their own words. Moore, as narrator, makes no attempt to pull it all together.
All of these pieces may not come together as a unified whole in the way (for example) Black Hawk Down did. But they do all play their part. It is an informative book. It is also a moving book. Near the end Moore comments on a part of our culture that has drifted away. Once upon a time, he remembers, we had schoolchildren memorize the names and dates of the great battles of history. Writing in 1992, he sees that we no longer do that.
[P]erhaps that is the first step on the road to a world where wars are no longer necessary. Perhaps.
In a culture where the wars of our past are no longer accepted as part of our present, books like this one – good books which remember how things really were – become ever more important to connect us with where we have been.
At long last, I can compare the movie to the the source material. As a whole, I still think it was a decent adaptation. Critically, the film was changed from the testimonial style of the book to a story-telling narrative. The film is not meant to be a documentary. It is meant to be entertainment. As a result, there were some obvious deviations from the book. Certain elements were taken from the LZ Albany engagement and dropped into the movie during the LZ-XRay fight. Elsewhere, soldiers’ wives who were actually spread around the country were all, for the purposes of the film, placed at the Fort Bragg army base during the battle. While obviously deviating from “the truth,” I can understand the need to both streamline and “spice up” the story so that the movie flows well.
The change that I have a hard time getting on board with is the way the film ends the battle. In the film, Lt. Col. Moore anticipates an impending NVA attack at dawn and decides to defeat it with a counter charge of his own. He instructs his troopers to “fix bayonets” and leads them (literally leads them, mind you) in a charge that sweeps away the enemy attack and overruns a command post. The scene is not only entirely untrue but entirely implausible.
I understand the screenwriter’s problem here. The tension in the battle was highest on the first night, when the American’s struggled to maintain their lines with shortages in manpower, supplies, and proper defensive preparation. Our protagonists triumph on the second day when they receive ammunition, medical supplies, and reinforcements from other commands. By the time they are ready to be exfiltrated*, the enemy has largely retreated from the battlefield. Moore’s 1st Battalion is replaced on line with the 2nd Battalion. After Moore’s extraction, the 2nd Battalion marches away without any further engagements in preparation for a B-52 strike at the NVA base.
The true ending is triumphant, in its way, but does not follow the arc of film storytelling. We want the fighting to come to a desperate climax near the end of the movie, not somewhere in the first half. Again, I suppose I understand the need to have something like that bayonet charge, and I’m not sure I can come up with something better. Using a B-52 strike as the climax would just be kind of gruesome and, likely, also inaccurate. I don’t think we know whether the bombing was successful. Alternatively, simply showing that the NVA ultimately made it back into Cambodia to fight another day would end on a downer – not good for ticket sales.
One of the scenes that was in neither the book nor the movie (shown above, it is in the deleted scenes section of the DVD) has Moore giving a postmortem commentary on the battle to Robert McNamara and General Westmoreland. It appears to be an informal (perhaps off the record) meeting, maybe on an army base somewhere in Asia. On one hand, cutting this scene from the movie removes what is an excellent wrap-up, putting the battle into the context of the next 10 years in Vietnam. Problem is, again, it is entirely made up. Such a meeting did not take place and probably could not take place. Moore did brief McNamara and “the brass,” but it was in a formal context. The thinking that Moore expresses in the scene is close to what he attributes to McNamara in his book – that what the battle demonstrated was the true cost that victory in Vietnam would demand. It was a price that the U.S., in the end, was unwilling to pay.
Moore’s greatest criticisms, echoed by his fellow battlefield commanders, are for two areas of policy. The first is the unwillingness to pursue the North Vietnamese into Cambodia. It was a fairly open secret that the North Vietnamese were using the Cambodia to transport and shelter troops, yet the U.S. insisted on maintaining the facade of Cambodian neutrality. This meant that retreating NVA units had an invisible line which they could cross into safety and, like Moore’s enemies in this battle, would be allowed to rest and refit until they were ready to fight again. The other policy Moore felt was costly was the policy to limit terms of selective service to 12 months. Shortly after the events depicted in the book, the experienced soldiers who had won the battle rotated home. For the remainder of the war, just at the point where American soldiers had learned to master the terrain and fight against an unconventional enemy, they were withdrawn to be replaced with a new crop of draftees with zero experience.
There is one more area that neither Moore nor any other of the interviewees criticized directly but a pattern come out of what they did say. Throughout the book, repeated, are stories of failures of the M-16. Soldiers describe sifting through several damaged or failed rifles, trying to find one that’s working. Others talk about defending themselves with a 1911 when they found themselves without a working rifle. Some of the problems seem to be functional – jammed actions and the like. Others have to do with plastic parts being destroyed by enemy fire. Just how bad, or not, the M-16 was when initially deployed in Vietnam, is the subject of many heated on-line discussions. One wonders if the decision to replace the M-14 was a factor in America’s troubles in Vietnam. And if so, what does that say about the military today, where derivatives of the M-16 remain the main rifle of our armed forces?
*The term “exfiltration,” used to describe a military operation that is the opposite of an “infiltration,” seems to have first been used during the timeframe of the events of this book. Previous uses of the term, going back another hundred years, refer to something being “filtered out.” Modern usage often has it in reference to IT, playing on the military term, likely because it entered the common parlance via computer gaming.
The Gulf of Tonkin incident is more likely to be invoked these days in reference to accusations of some sort of modern conspiracy or “false flag” incident than referencing the historical facts. It was the impetus for the escalation of the Vietnam war but with our modern eye we probably doubt the wisdom of that decision.
It is generally agreed that the “multiple attacks” cited by Johnson in obtaining the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was not an accurate representation of what truly happened. Evidence available now would seem to prove that the intelligence which caused the USS Maddox and the USS Turner Joy to respond to an attack. The Government of Vietnam’s position, well after the end of the war, was that the August 2nd battle did occur, but there was no attack on August 4th. Even still, this remains uncertain. The battle occurred at night and combat was directed by radar. However, there were witnesses on the Turner Joy who have sworn to have seen, with their own eyes, evidence of U.S. hits on North Vietnamese torpedo boats.
Taking for granted that the August 4th fight never occurred, there are more questions that arise. At this point, while there may be people out their who know the actual truth, it is unlikely that it will ever become settled in the public record. We know that, even at the time, Johnson was aware of uncertainties in the information as he made his announcement to the nation. There were several Senators, during the passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, who had grave doubts about the accuracy of the information they were acting upon. In the end, though, the Resolution passed the House unanimously and the Senate with only two dissenting votes. It is likely, however, that decisions to brush aside the uncertainty were made in a good-faith belief that we were responding correctly and waffling would only get in the way of the necessary decisive action.
We know, however, that even as Johnson ordered retaliation, analysts had become convinced that the electronic evidence of an attack were in error. So how far up the chain of command did this knowledge go? While the positive evidence of the attack was acted on immediately, evidence to the contrary was held for further analysis. Was this merely a Cover-Your-Ass move from the intelligence community? Or was it a political decision somewhere in the chain of command to commit to an escalation, whether the facts warranted it or not?
If you believe the government, in this case, was not just wrong, but evil, the conspiracies go on from there. Think about it. The second incident occurred two days after U.S. warships were fired upon and then withdrawn. Then those same ships were sent back into the now-hostile waters. After that, we are told that another shooting incident has occur (when it clearly didn’t) and that announcement leads to major policy changes. Might it not be possible that the plan all along was to fake the second incident for political reasons?
We can go on. With the original, August 2nd, incident, the North Vietnamese stuck to two claims. First of all, that the Maddox was on a hostile mission, supporting South Vietnamese black ops on Northern territory and was therefore the aggressor from the beginning. Second, that the torpedo boats did not initiate the attack. Set aside the conflicting logic of the two claims (“I did not kill my wife, sir, but If I had, it would have been in self defense”), their claims are not so far fetched. Contrary to the Johnson administration’s position at the time, we now know the Maddox was on a mission of electronics surveillance (DESOTO). The North Vietnamese General Giap believed the DESOTO patrols were initiated with the intent of provoking a military response and there were, indeed, people within the U.S. administration had considered doing just that. The timing suggests that Maddox was probably not directly supporting the commando raid on a North Vietnamese island, to which a North Vietnamese military response was occurring. But even this is not certain and it would be impossible for the North to tell the difference either way.
As to the second claim, about who actually shot first – that also remains forever controversial. The Maddox responded to approaching torpedo boats by firing warning shots. So could the torpedo have interpreted warning shots as an attack, from which they merely tried to defend themselves? Again, if you’re all the way down the rabbit hole, maybe one of those warning shots struck home before the North Vietnamese started shooting. Maybe it was never meant to be a warning shot in the first place?
Less is More
When looking at the Cuban Missile Crisis I expressed surprise that nobody modeled an escalation between the U.S. quarantine warships and a Soviet vessel (perhaps with support) trying to pass through the blockade. While maybe not making for the best “game,” it seems like the kind of historical what-if many would love to explore with CMANO. With the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, someone did just that.
Communist torpedo boats have been shadowing Maddox for a day now. Intercepted communications indicate that they are preparing to attack. And there they are.
This scenario is about as simple as you can get. The player commands a single ship (although other friendly assets are nearby) and has enough firepower to annihilate the enemy with one punch of the F1 key. The instructions for conduct of the scenario require that the player return to station, south of the Gulf of Tonkin. The player is reminded that he may engage the North Vietnamese only in self-defense.
The orders say that I may engage only in defense. But what level of provocation can actually be considered aggression? How close is too close?
What is left for a game is a few brief minutes of tension. If you intend to experience that for yourself, go play the game before you read about it, because I’m going to give away the punch line (if I haven’t already).
The torpedo boats are faster than the Maddox, so any kind of reaction or evasive action won’t change the course of history. I watched as the torpedo boats approached within a few hundred meters wondering if such provocation should be considered an attack or not. In the screenshot above, I paused the game and mulled over knocking the enemy back a bit.
This exposes a shortcoming of this game engine for this scenario and, in fact, nearly any game engine for any similar situation. The real-life skipper ordered warning shots at this point. I really wanted to do the same but “shots over the bow” are not supported in CMANO. In fact, I can’t imagine anything outside of the Roll Playing Game genre (or an occasional one-off RPG-like element within a strategy game) where a non-lethal show of force might make a difference in the outcome. Computer AIs don’t respond to psychological motivators and can’t really consider the politics and implications of their actions upon the global stage.
In the end, I did not shoot. Especially knowing what really happened, I wasn’t going to be blamed personally for starting the Vietnam War for the U.S. because a boat motored too close to me. I unpaused the game and within a minute or so the commies fired something (I only saw the damage, not what did it) at me. I ordered my crew to take on all three approaching torpedo boats, which were sunk within another minute or two. The victory screen gave me a major victory.
Again, not a fun game per se, but I’m really glad someone out there takes the time to model these little bits of history. Maybe I learned something today.
