Books: Finished reading VIETNAM: THE AUSTRALIAN WAR by Paul Ham

Jan 11, 2008 22:20



I've finished reading VIETNAM by Paul Ham and it's an amazing book. Really, really absorbing and interesting. It was as gripping as a novel. Papa Koala has disputed some of the facts in the book but, like me, agrees that the writer has attempted to write the book in a very even-handed, matter-of-fact manner.

He discusses Australians, Americans, South Vietnamese, North Vietnamese and Viet Cong without demonising any of them but describing the situation as he understands it. The best part of this book is that it's not just a book focussing on the heroism of Australians during the Vietnam War, or even just Australians. The writer makes sure he discusses the history of the country, the factors and background that led up to the various stages of the conflict and the points of view of different people.

Some reviewers have been critical about the book and mentioned that they're not sure what the book is on about and what it's trying to achieve. For me that's probably why it works. It's not trying to push any particular agenda. The only complaint I have about the book is that when Ham describes Australians, he falls into the trap of using the Australian stereotype. The 'digger', the lovable, foul-mouthed, irreverent larrikin ... Much of the stereotype is actually true, but I suppose I grow tired of the manner of 'writing' when describing happy go lucky Australians which borders on yokelish and stupid. I think it's possible to convey the Australian sense of defiance and mate-ship without making us all look like backward bumpkins :)

Nonetheless, it's a minor peeve. The rest of the book is very good. It's a long book, 665 pages, 49 chapters so it's impossible for me to do it justice in this post because there were just so many bits I liked, but I'll try to discuss a few points that spring to mind beneath the cut.

Sorry for the typos. Typed up in a hurry because I have to pack this book away asap :)

Chapter 2, "The French"

I liked the way Ham cuts through all the fuzzy romantic notions perpetuated by movies and novels:

The intervening ninety four years [of French colonisation] were a bloody catalogue of French crimes against the Vietnamese people. Let us dispense at once with the colonial theories of 'assimilation' and 'association'. Let us draw aside the veil of sweet-smelling nostalgia for French Indochina, look beyond the charm and failed dreams of France's mission civilatrice and their doughty pioneers, and consider the reality of French imperialism and how it planted the seeds of the American War. The French used brute force to create a little France in Indochina. The transient gifts of French civilisation meant little while French officials and entrepreneurs busied themselves with the rape of a nation; the theft of Vietnamese resources - chiefly rice, rubber, minerals - and the brutal subjugation of the Vietnamese people. This oppression operated on a political, military and cultural level and pervaded every aspect of Vietnamese life. The French routinely and savagely crushed all resistance. They ruled through edict and direct control - unlike the British colonial poobahs, a few thousand of whom ruled 300 million Indians by local proxies.

French apologists argue that the gifts of technology, trade and infrastructure redeemed the worst excesses of the French occupation. If so, the Vietnamese clearly did not agree. India preserved something of the British legacy - democratic institutions, the English language, an independent judiciary and cricket - but the Vietnamese retained very little that was peculiarly French; certainly no recognisable political institution and nothing that the Vietnamese could not build themselves after decades of war.

Things that I didn't know:
  • In 1883, during what the French called the 'pacification' of Vietnam, one ship sent as part of an expeditionary force up the Perfume River to Hué contained an official named Francois Harmand who was responsible for "native affairs". He gave the Vietnamese 48 hours to surrender. Failure to do so would be met with the "worst evils". He said: "imagine all that is terrible and it will still be less than reality." He also said: "The word 'Vietnam' will be erased from history". The Vietnamese did not surrender and Harmand gave them no quarter in the coming slaughter. Tens of thousands of Hanoians lost their lives during the 12 years of French 'pacification'.
  • Resistance to the French was punished by guillotining and imprisonment - Saigon still used the guillotine in the early 1960s.

Chapter 11, 1st Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment

This chapter talks about how Australia committed troops to an undeclared war and how Australia basically begged to be able to send its troops over :P It's embarrassingly lame. The chapter discusses how what should have happened was that the US and the Saigon government should have invited Australia to provide military assistance. In the end, Saigon accepted Australia's offer of assistance and Menzies pretty much misled Parliament when he implied that he had received a written request from Saigon.

Chapter 12, The Iron Triangle

I thought that this was particularly interesting:

At dugout level, the Aussies and Yanks struck up lasting friendships. The two armies laughed at each others oddities. 'The Yanks here wear really gaudy uniforms with great big badges - they have no idea of soldiering, they look like Christmas trees ...' wrote one officer. The Americans, in their starched fatigues and caps, mocked the grimy diggers in their baggy jungle greens and floppy bush hats. They look dressed for a safari, not a war, Butch Williamson reckoned. The diggers were poorly paid, too: two and a half days' leave for every month served in the theatre; tax concessions of up to £270 per year; and a tiered 'Vietnam Allowance', starting at seven shillings and sixpence per day for privates. Australian troops then stationed in Malaysia received twice the allowance and the Americans four different allowances. Australian conditions soon improved but never matched US levels.

Papa Koala confirmed this. He mentioned that he had observed at the time that the Australian soldiers had to make do with much less and so frequently had to be far more resourceful and economical about the way they did things. They were paid less, had crappier equipment and far less resources. He told me some stories of things that he had witnessed that confirmed that the Australians were frequently very naughty. For instance, some Australian soldiers were helping out nuns at an orphanage and were unsuccessful with their repairs so went and swiped the spare parts from the Americans :) In another story, he mentioned how once some Aussies needed to get back to their base so they got a US chopper pilot drunk, Shanghai'd his chopper back to their base and painted the chopper a different colour :D When the pilot woke up, he was back 'home' but confused about where his chopper was.

Whereas the Americans had considerable resources, the Australian soldiers if they lost things or broke things, had to go without. A village elder once told Papa Koala about how if the Americans were building roads, frequently a lot of the raw materials would be stolen overnight and then they'd have to get replacements shipped in. One time when the Australians had to build roads for the locals, they knew that if the parts were stolen they wouldn't get replaced by Australia, so they told the head guy of the village that they were going to build a road, these were the only materials they had and if the villagers wanted the road built - the parts had better be there in the morning. Sure enough, the next morning - all the materials were still intact. :)

This bit was also interesting:

The failure illustrated the striking contrast between Australian and American methods. The Team (and later Australian combat units) concentrated on grassroots infiltration in a gradual war. They championed individual skill, marksmanship ('one shot, one kill'), map reading, stealth, avoiding known tracks, ambush and counter-ambush, tracking and, 'above all, patience', as McNeill explained. It was a lesson born at Kokoda and honed in Malaya. 'The Aussies used squads to make a contact,' observed David Hackworth, America's most decorated soldier, 'and bought in reinforcements to do the killing; they planned in the belief that a platoon on the battlefield could do anything ...' The American Army, on the other hand, was trained to fight short, big unit wars, involving battalion - or division-strength battles, and applied massive indirect fire on wide areas. The American longing for a decisive, open confrontation, along the lines of the vast pitched battles of World War II, 'seemed almost to become an obsession'. The gradual infiltration and conversion of hostile villages - over years, if necessary - simply did not fit the US war plan. A drawn out guerrilla struggle in the jungle seemed unworthy of American firepower and training.

Instead the Americans sought to flush out the enemy through brazen scrub-bashing and massive firepower. The careless courage of the American ground troops amazed the Australians. The elite US paratroopers would stride down the jungle paths, smoking and chatting, radios blaring, their shoulders emblazoned with red-white-and-blue-patches. An Australian company involved in a joint ambush was 'astounded at the [in]discipline of US soldiers and their use in ambush of transistor radios, cigars, loud noises and mass sleep'. They used little camouflage. 'The Yanks made themselves targets,' said Private Terry Burstall. "Bring em on" they said. But it was a foolhardy courage, crashing through the bush'.

Yet the Americans had a lot to teach the Australians: about heliborne assaults, air and artillery support, joint armoured and infantry operations, and much more. In this sense, Vietnam was a testing ground for new manoeuvres using weapons of incredible destructive power. The fact that they were utterly unsuited to a guerrilla war did not inhibit their deployment: 'We used 'em because we had 'em' was a common American refrain.

I was discussing this with Papa Koala today. About how the Australian troops mainly abused beer not drugs, about how Papa Koala saw very few mixed-blooded babies around the area where the Australians were stationed whereas there were always a lot of Ameriasian babies around where the American troops were stationed and also the issue of atrocities. Papa Koala's view was that it wasn't that Australian soldiers were any 'better' or 'nicer' than American soldiers. He said the fact that the Australians had to make do with less of course influenced their fighting style. In terms of treatment of Vietnamese, he said that the Australians had undergone very recent combat experience in Malaya which gave them an insight into jungle combat as well as the importance of winning 'hearts and minds'. Because of their experiences in Malaya, they knew that the only 'road home'/way home was often by relying on the kindliness of local villagers and natives. It was these peopled who had food, supplies and a road home. In his view, it was probably pragmatism and recent experience that made the Australian approach to warfare slightly different and possibly better suited to jungle/guerrilla warfare to the American approach.

Refer back to my comments on the movie Kokoda.

I also asked him about why Australians wore the floppy hats instead of the hard hats and he said that again it was that the floppy hats were more suited for jungle/guerrilla warfare. Hard hats are too clunky and hard to hear in and the Australian soldiers needed to be stealthy.

There's also this bit:

In time, the US-Australian relationship at the Bien Hoa became unworkable. Westmoreland had assured Australia's Chief of the General Staff, Lieutenant General Sir John Wilton, of Australian tactical autonomy, yet on large joint operations, this did not work. More than once Brumfield openly cursed American tactics; for example, on patrols that required stealth and silence the US troops often fired parachute flares and star shells that turned night into day or, when the Australians had requested a single ranging round, US batteries would fire all their guns on the target, in a 'mad minute'.

In American eyes, however, the Australian tactics seemed timid, over-cautious, slow and effective. America's immense firepower, they felt, overruled the need for careful, gradual patrolling, grid square by grid square.

There's far too much in the book to go through in detail and I need to pack it away and post it back to myself tomorrow morning :) Ham describes in details Australian mistakes and shortcomings, for instance, the disastrous minefield that the Australians laid. At night, the Viet Cong would steal the mines and then use them against the Australians. Ham's descriptions of mine injuries and deaths are truly graphic and traumatising.

I really like how Ham examines the plight of the Vietnamese civilian. The Vietnam War had a horrific impact on the US and Australia, but the worst impact by far was on the Vietnamese people. The death toll, the continuing devastation caused by unexploded mines and the birth defects and deformities. Ham describes the deaths that took place in Vietnam AFTER the Australians and Americans pulled out i.e. the war did not end for Vietnam at the same time it ended for the rest of the world.

It's also really horrible to read the accounts of the soldiers returning to Australia. These were young boys who were too young to vote and yet they were old enough to be forced overseas to fight in a war that they didn't understand. A huge part of the responsibilities of the Australian troops was civil duty - road building, dental and medical, repair-work ... it was all part of the 'winning of hearts and minds' notion. Accordingly, when they returned to Australia and were accused of being baby-killers and murderers, it was truly horrific for them. Ham concedes that there were war atrocities committed by Australian soldiers, but it appears that there were relatively few.

Accounts of the fall of Saigon always make me tense. I feel the same way when I watch the Killing Fields - seeing the desperation of those left behind as the choppers fly away just makes me feel very, very unsettled. It's a trauma of mine I suppose. Ham describes how South Vietnamese people previously employed by the Australian embassy and who had been promised safe passage to Australia were prevented from getting into the aircraft at the time of the fall of Saigon. This was politically motivated by the Prime Minister Gough Whitlam who was hoping to establish relations with the 'new' government of Vietnam. :P Whitlam despite being a notional bleeding heart leftie, didn't want ANY South Vietnamese refugees to be let into Australia. If it was up to him, we would never have made it to Australia.

At 6pm on 25 April, Australian Ambassador Price and his entourage drove to Tan Son Nhut for the last time. Price had tried and failed to obtain visas for his 55 Vietnamese staff; Whitlam, the supposed champion of multiculturalism had blocked his visa requests until it was too late. Indeed, Whitlam had no intention of helping Australia's former allies in South Vietnam; in a handwritten note he branded their leaders 'war criminals'. Ever obeisant to the will of Hanoi, Whitlam's office cabled Australia's embassy in Saigon shortly before the fall: 'Locally engaged Embassy staff are not to be regarded as endangered by their Australian Embassy associations and therefore should not, repeat not, be granted entry to Australia.'

Wow. Harsh.

Hundreds of Vietnamese with official refugee status were also left behind. In the last weeks, the embassy had received asylum applications from 3,667 adult Vietnamese, of whom 342 were approved and just 76 actually reached Australia. Whitlam attempted to justify the abandonment of so many people to certain 're-education' and probable death on the tendentious grounds that he needed to build a constructive relationship with the new communist rulers. In short, the PM deferred to the will of Hanoi, a decision Labor's hard-nosed 'realists' defended as sensible - and the sacrifice of a few, admittedly loyal, South Vietnamese as regrettable. Others condemned Labor's refugee policy as a monumental act of inhumanity, political expediency and bureaucratic indifference. Several Liberal politicians believed that no upper limit should apply to Vietnamese refugees.

Chapter 45 that dealt with Vietnamese refugees was so heart-breaking:

In May 1975, Hanoi ordered the release of its prisoners of war. 'Go back to your home,' they were told, 'and be good citizens. Your country is united. We've got to hold hands and rebuild.' And it seemed Hanoi meant it. 'It was beautiful," Dr Tien Nguyen, a medical officer captured in the last days of Saigon, bitterly recalled. 'I was so stunned, how noble. And they gave us all a small amount of money for the bus far home. The communists were very clever, I have to admit.' Tien Nguyen's family had presumed he was dead: 'I walked into my house like a ghost. My mother and father just burst into tears, they thought I was a ghost'.

For a few weeks, a sense of peace and reconciliation seemed to prevail. And in this atmosphere of feigned goodwill, an edict went out 'inviting' all South Vietnamese soldiers and government officials to attend a short political 're-education course'. They were to bring only enough luggage for a month. This seemed a sincere gesture of 'concord and reconciliation', and the soldiers felt inclined to cooperate: after all, hadn't the victor behaved with commendable restraint in the days after the conquest?

....

'I tell you this was very clever,' repeated Dr Nguyen in his surgery in Sydney's Cabramatta. 'I became living proof of the generosity and the kindness of the new revolutionary government. They released me and the like ... to hook all the others.' In the next few months thousands of former soldiers and government officials turned themselves over to the new regime.

Their families expected to see them home in weeks. Weeks passed, then months, then years. In fact, tens of thousands would never come home. Communist 'people's tribunals' condemned them as 'lackeys of imperialism' who owed 'blood debts to the people'. They were packed off to 're-education camps', the Vietnamese equivalent of the Soviet Gulag. Officers and senior government officials were imprisoned for ten to fifteen years, ordinary troops for lesser terms, with hard labour and little food and in appalling conditions. By the end of 1976, 300,000 South Vietnamese were held in concentration camps and faced years of hard labour. They cleared land, ploughed fields, deactivated minefields and endured endless humiliating chores, such as polishing the shoes and cleaning the toilets of party bosses. Resistance met with severe punishment: beatings, solitary confinement, occasional torture and often death. 'Ralliers' - defectors to the southern army - were summarily shot. The combination of paltry food rations (200 g of rice a day), slave labour conditions and disease ensured that thousands suffered a slow, agonising death. In one camp, in Nha Trang, 50 people were consigned sardine-like to each cell. In total, the liberators of Vietnam executed a conservatively estimated 65,000 people; a further 250,000 perished in re-education camps.

....

On their release, usually sick and frail, the 're-educated' former soldiers and officials joined their fellow southern citizens in the larger prison, soon to be called the 'Socialist Republic of Vietnam'. The proletarian paradise treated them and their families as untouchables: they had little hope of a decent job. Many drove cyclos or swept roads; the lucky ones returned to their villages. I met several ex-ARVN officers - skilled, highly intelligent men - living in hovels besides the highways, broken in body and spirit, but not in mind: they were happy to discuss their experiences, as their remarkably cheerful wives served beer or tea.

Final quote! And Ham references Jon Swain's book The River of Time which I have also read! :)

In the intervening decades, millions have thought of escape from this post-war tyranny; more than a million have tried. Many of those who survived the flight went on to build new lives in America, Canada, Australia and Europe. Theirs is one of the most heart-rending stories of the war: unable to bear the new dictatorship, they put to sea in any vessel they could find, risking years in prison if caught and an uncertain fate if they escaped. Perhaps 10 to 20 per cent died at sea of starvation, pirate attack or drowning.

The Sunday Times journalist Jon Swain described the refugees' experiences in "River of Time", his exquisitely told memoir of the tragedy of Indochina. 'The suffering of the Vietnamese boat people was almost beyond imagination', he wrote, 'it consumed anyone who came into contact with it ...' The 'boat people' represented a spectrum of Vietnamese society: farmers, professionals, government officials, teachers, writers, lawyers, students, former soldiers, young men of draft age, prostitutes, fishermen, labourers, cyclo-drivers and disillusioned Viet Cong. There were single mothers of Amerasian children fleeing official discrimination; ethnic Chinese persecuted by Vietnam's anti-Chinese government; and ordinary soldiers, ostracised for joining the 'puppet army'.

...

Swain found 16 year old La Kiue Ly, the sole survivor of a pirate attack on her boat, lighting candles for her sister in a makeshift Catholic church in a refugee camp near the Thai-Cambodian border. Hers was a story of unimaginable agony. Ly, her 10-year old sister Kim and their aunt had put to sea in a 7 metre fishing boat with nineteen others. A few hours offshore, Vietnamese fishermen stole their money. Then, nearly two days alter, Thai pirates rammed and sank them. Everyone was left to drown - the pirates beat off the men with knives - except six females, including the two sisters. They became the pirates' playthings, 'repeatedly raped and terrorised with fists, hammers and knives'. Ly remembered Kim's cries as three pirates raped her little sister in succession. 'Her last memory of Kim was of a sobbing, pain-racked little bundle of humanity, begging for life. No trace of Kim was ever found,' Swain wrote. After tiring of the older girls, the pirates tossed them overboard, including Ly. She managed to stay afloat for nine hours, when another Thai fishing boat found her, nursed her back to life and left her with police at the port of Nakhon Si Thammarat.

When Swain heard her story, 'I remember thinking with humility how she reflected the special dignity of Vietnamese women and their instinct of survival. But when I looked into her eyes they were expressionless. They were dead. They were the eyes of Vietnam - the eyes of someone who had borne the unbearable'.

So many sad stories. So many tales of heroism. I think Ham does a very good job of describing and evoking the stories of the Australians and the Vietnamese. I'll definitely be reading this again and I think I'll go and read his book Kokoda as well. The Jon Swain line about being 'dead' reminded me of part of Journey from the Fall which is a movie I think I'll watch again as well.

*

More about the book here. Links there for how to buy it as well.



vietnam, books, australian history

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