David Urbano

History 6393

Professor Buzzano

April 28, 2000

Gabriel Kolko. Anatomy of a War: Vietnam and the Modern Historical Experience. New York: The New Press, 1985. Pp. 660+index.

On April 29, 1975, a United States Marines helicopter scurriedly rescued four U.S. Marines- the last remnants of American military personnel in Vietnam- off the rooftop at the U.S. Embassy in Saigon in the midst of the last major victorious DRV (Democratic Republic of Vietnam) and National Liberation Front military offensive that not only realized the latter’s liberation objective but also the unification its people had sought after over four decades of foreign domination. This episode culminated U.S. involvement in “the longest war” that spanned over two decades and four presidential administrations and brought closure to a disdainful chapter in American history that witnessed the “the unraveling of America.” The war exposed the sordid contradictions in an U.S. foreign policy gone awry that ultimately led to the demise of a consensus on U.S. foreign affairs. Due to Vietnam conflict, the nation endured profound changes in its social, political, and economic institutions while it suffered simultaneously the stigma of global humiliation. The war exposed the failure of a U.S. sponsored foreign policy that dedicated itself to shaping the world by imposing its capitalist hegemony on the global community.

Gabriel Kolko’s monograph, The Anatomy of a War, chronicles in detail the origins, causes, and consequences of the Vietnam epic. Utilizing a plethora of archival sources, Kolko provides an insightful and cogent analysis of the economic, social, political, and cultural institutions of the four antagonists in the Vietnam epic and elucidates the complexities of that quagmire. Although this massive study presents a colossal challenge, Kolko’s penchant for organization, synthesis and scholarly analysis graces the narrative and enhances its readability. Kolko, in dissecting the “anatomy” of the war, describes in detail the salient socio-economic and political characteristics of South Vietnam (RVN); the Revolution (Democratic Republic Vietnam, National Liberation Front, and Peoples Army of Vietnam); and the United States. Kolko is correct is describing war as a conflict between diverse social systems and posits “that to comprehend the mechanisms of war as a social process and ideological conflict is essential to understanding of the events in Vietnam over four decades.”(5) Consequently, at the zenith of the Cold War hysteria, the United States erroneously unleashed its massive military and economic forces to combat a sardonic social system when in reality the conflict was nothing more that a nationalist uprising.

The threat of monolithic Communism overshadowed U.S. foreign policy decisions during the Cold War as the nation contemplated “the domino theory.” This theory stessed the importance for the U.S. meeting the threat of global Communism by imposing its capitalist order on the Third World. Accordingly, the U.S. believed that if one nation in Indochina, as well as in other parts of the world, succumbed to Communism, other nations would follow suit thus threatening U.S. economic interest’s abroad and domestic tranquility. Kolko writes the United States sought “to create a controllable, responsive order elsewhere, one that would permit the political destinies of distinct places to evolve in a manner beneficial to America’s goals and interests far surpassing the immediate needs of domestic society. The regulation of the world was at once the luxury and the necessity it believed its power afforded, and even its might both produced and promised greater prosperity if successful, its inevitable costs were justified, as well as earlier imperialist powers had also done, as fulfillment of an international responsibility and mission.”(72,73)

In South Vietnam the U.S. made a quantum attempt to halt Communist aggression and it was there the United States realized it obsessive compulsion to impose a capitalist hegemony on an impoverished Third World nation conflicted with limited resources. In South Vietnam the U. S. counterinsurgency invested massive sums of money, military personnel, and sophisticated weaponry to thwart the DVR’s effort to unify Vietnam according to the Geneva Accords. Unfortunately, the United States relied on to two repressive, corrupt, and inefficient regimes to win the war. Furthermore, the U.S. also financed and outfitted a massive and inefficient army whose corruption also wreaked throughout the nation’s socioeconomic and political institutions. Consequently, the U.S. backed institutions failed dismally to counter the Revolution. Kolko correctly asserts that “whatever the human and physical toll of the war on the Revolution throughout Vietnam, it was the myriad weakness of the foreign- sponsored society and the Communists’ own strength which produced the decisive equation in the war.” (545, 546) Kolko is right on target when asserts that the U.S. never understood the social basis for the revolt nor the limits of its power.

Although the United States air campaign inflicted massive damages to Vietnam’s rural and urban enclaves and the U.S. equipped its allies with sophisticated weaponry, the conflict, ironically, was still asymmetrical. U.S. sponsored military operation and air fire notwithstanding, it was asymmetrical because the U.S. failed to account for the social causation. And while the U.S. unleashed its military prowess, the DVN employed a strategy that exploited not only the weaknesses in U.S military operations and weaponry but also U.S. sponsored political and economic institutions. Kolko correctly describes the Revolution’s pragmatic approach to novel situations and its knack for presenting a united front by including the peasants and other factions within DVR.

As the war progressed it exposed the folly of U.S. military and global policy as well as its failure to instill viable political, economic, and social institutions in South Vietnam. Conversely, the Revolution’s ascendancy manifested successive strategies to confront a massive and technologically superior military apparatus. Hence, “the Communist overcame the most formidable array of arms in history with a protracted war based on decentralization, mass mobilization, and highly adaptive tactics tailored to technology’s specific vulnerabilities.” (550) Kolko makes strong argument for the role that a socialist and revolutionary morality played in motivating the nationalists to endure the ravages of a protracted conflict and correctly attributes success to that genre.

Kolko’s monograph on Vietnam makes a significant contribution to U.S. historiography. The work is comprehensive, detailed, imaginative, and extremely well researched. Furthermore, his novel approach of probing the war’s anatomy and informing his analysis through the four antagonists makes an invaluable contribution to history and certainly fills a void in the literature. Perhaps scholars may find the unbalanced treatment he affords the war’s antagonists detracts from the overall analysis. Kolko presents both societies in a dichotomy in which his aversion for the RVN and ARVN some scholars may find overbearing. And even though his Marxist analysis perhaps stretches Peter Novick’s “Noble Dream”, his work is a comprehensive picture of a significant chapter in U.S. history.