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What We Didn’t Learn from Vietnam | In past wars, the delusion among Americans was identical: the belief that violence, skillfully wielded, can change hearts. This war is different—a war of no imagination, of null imagination.
David Halberstam’s “The Americanization of Vietnam,” one of the most powerful critiques of America’s divergent presence in Southeast Asia, was published by this magazine in January 1970. It was the culmination of a series of antiwar articles run by *Playboy*, a magazine widely read by the young men fighting in Vietnam. (“One of the things that made my Vietnam tour endurable was seeing *Playboy* every month,” a soldier wrote the magazine upon returning home.) Halberstam had been in and out of South Vietnam since the early 1960s, back when only a few thousand American military advisers were trying, and mostly failing, to turn the tide against the country’s Communist insurgency. “Now,” Halberstam writes, “we are both the initiator and the victim of a hopeless, bitter war that has ripped aside so many of our more comfortable illusions about ourselves. … Where once we had few doubts about American capacity, American intentions, American achievement, now we have more doubts about that capacity to deal with social problems, not just in Southeast Asia or Latin America, but at home.” It was almost as if the American experience in Vietnam removed our very ability to imagine.
Few who start a war expect to lose, and no one losing a war can be expected to admit it, especially in a politically divided country. It’s thus important for leaders about to wage war to set the imaginative parameters—to develop and communicate a firm idea of what they’re trying to accomplish and why.
During Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, American citizens were forced to swallow the snake oil of wartime optimism, but this war has given us something more insidious: a Defense Department so keen to emphasize its “lethality” that it might as well be standing on a street corner, in a trench coat, selling snuff films.
Read the piece by Tom Bissell here: https://www.playboy.com/read/politics/what-we-didnt-learn-from-vietnam
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David Halberstam’s “The Americanization of Vietnam,” one of the most powerful critiques of America’s divergent presence in Southeast Asia, was published by this magazine in January 1970. It was the culmination of a series of antiwar articles run by *Playboy*, a magazine widely read by the young men fighting in Vietnam. (“One of the things that made my Vietnam tour endurable was seeing *Playboy* every month,” a soldier wrote the magazine upon returning home.) Halberstam had been in and out of South Vietnam since the early 1960s, back when only a few thousand American military advisers were trying, and mostly failing, to turn the tide against the country’s Communist insurgency. “Now,” Halberstam writes, “we are both the initiator and the victim of a hopeless, bitter war that has ripped aside so many of our more comfortable illusions about ourselves. … Where once we had few doubts about American capacity, American intentions, American achievement, now we have more doubts about that capacity to deal with social problems, not just in Southeast Asia or Latin America, but at home.” It was almost as if the American experience in Vietnam removed our very ability to imagine.
Few who start a war expect to lose, and no one losing a war can be expected to admit it, especially in a politically divided country. It’s thus important for leaders about to wage war to set the imaginative parameters—to develop and communicate a firm idea of what they’re trying to accomplish and why.
During Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, American citizens were forced to swallow the snake oil of wartime optimism, but this war has given us something more insidious: a Defense Department so keen to emphasize its “lethality” that it might as well be standing on a street corner, in a trench coat, selling snuff films.
Read the piece by Tom Bissell here: https://www.playboy.com/read/politics/what-we-didnt-learn-from-vietnam
#people
source
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