David J. Kilcullen, Counterinsurgency (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 272 pp., $15.95.
Ted Morgan, Valley of Death: The Tragedy at Dien Bien Phu That Led America into the Vietnam War (New York: Random House, 2010), 752 pp., $35.00.
Megan K. Stack, Every Man in This Village is a Liar: An Education in War (New York: Doubleday, 2010), 272 pp., $26.95.
WHILE DISSIMILAR in style and focus, these three books—a history, a memoir and a theory—address the core of any insurgency: the relationship between a government and its people. Pulitzer Prize–winner Ted Morgan has created a masterpiece of research and insights connecting the front lines of Dien Bien Phu with the politics of the 1954 Geneva Conference that marked America’s entry into the Vietnam War. Los Angeles Times reporter Megan Stack presents a devastating collection of personal anecdotes about callous, oppressive male rulers in the culture of the Middle East. David Kilcullen, a former Australian Army officer, reprises from previous lectures and essays his theory about benign counterinsurgency in support of nation building.
Valley of Death: The Tragedy at Dien Bien Phu That Led America into the Vietnam War
THE THIRTEEN thousand defenders at Dien Bien Phu, 185 miles west of the main French garrison in Hanoi, were supplied only by parachute drops. Their mission was to await the assault of the Vietminh and then destroy General Giap’s forces by overwhelming defensive firepower. It was the Valley of Death. Morgan limns the colossal ineptitude of the French generals and colonels who deluded themselves while Giap methodically whittled down the defenders using barrages from Chinese-supplied artillery combined with wave attacks by fifty thousand soldiers.
Morgan fought in the French Army in Algiers in 1960 and later became an American citizen. In this book, he applies his skills as a soldier, linguist, reporter and historian to depict in riveting detail the doomed heroics of French, Algerian, Moroccan, Vietnamese and Foreign Legion soldiers slowly squeezed into submission by six months of shelling and trenches that slithered forward, night after night, like giant tentacles.
In 1941, the Vietminh under Ho Chi Minh (later backed by the Soviet Union and the young People’s Republic of China) had begun to push for liberation from colonial France and from Japanese occupation forces that had invaded Indochina. After Japan’s defeat, Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnam independent and set up a provisional government. France made clear its intention to restore its sovereignty over the country. Indochina quickly became embroiled in battle after bloody battle between French forces and the revolutionaries.
Morgan cleverly shifts his narrative back and forth between the exhaustive fighting on the front lines and the political machinations among the Soviets, Chinese, French, English and Americans at the Geneva Conference that opened on May 8, 1954, when they tried to restore peace in Indochina. Presidents Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower shared a deep belief that France should not recolonize Vietnam after World War II. Only grudgingly did they permit some partial military aid to bolster the French effort. And the Geneva agreements, instead of unifying the Southeast Asian region, split the country into a Communist North and a French-supporting South. While Eisenhower was proud that he had kept American ground troops out of Indochina, dividing the peninsula in two guaranteed a second war. (It was the Chinese fear of more active American involvement on the side of the French that led to the partition of Vietnam at Geneva, the only way to ensure each party had its own sphere of influence.) Geneva was, Eisenhower said, a “terrible agreement,” but there was “no better plan.” And it was fear of Communism and Chinese influence—the domino theory—that led to the disastrous American military involvement in the South thereafter.
Giap and Ho Chi Minh never forgave China for preventing a full victory after the fall of Dien Bien Phu. The grisly fighting and harsh conditions in captivity claimed the lives of ten thousand defenders.
A half century later, forty-one Americans died in an Afghanistan enclave in the Korengal Valley. Vanity Fair magazine dubbed this too “The Valley of Death.” The title, devoid of historical context, was a solipsistic parody. In Vietnam, egotistic French leaders threw away thousands of lives in a tactically stupid and strategically doomed mission to resurrect colonialism; in Afghanistan, the scale of the battle was far smaller and American military leaders went to extraordinary lengths to protect their soldiers. The consequences of abandoning the outpost in the Korengal were not strategic.
The French in Vietnam were colonialists fighting nationalists. The American-led coalition in Afghanistan is aiding the moderates in a civil war against tribal Islamic extremists. Yet in both cases, foreign forces cannot prevail; the indigenous people must determine their own form of government.
