Quagmire: Nation-Building and Nature in the Mekong Delta

Foreword

ix I n 1962, a relatively unknown reporter named David Halberstam arrived in South Vietnam. For the next two years, he wrote a series of articles for the New York Times depicting the failings and corruptions of a regime that the United States was seeking to defend, using aid and advisors, from what Washington perceived as a growing Communist threat. President John F. Kennedy was angry enough about Halberstam’s coverage to urge the Times to send its young reporter home. The paper’s publisher refused, and when Halberstam finally left Southeast Asia two years later, his work was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. Although he is today best known for what many regard as the finest book ever written about the American debacle in Vietnam—The Best and the Brightest, published in 1972—Halberstam also published a remarkably prescient volume seven years earlier that more or less predicted the military and political disaster that had yet to unfold. That book is not much remembered today, but its title, The Making of a by William Cronon Foreword Nation-Making in the Mekong Mire x for e wor d Quagmire, has ever since provided the single most influential metaphor for the war it depicted. Quagmire. It is a curious word in English, and its use in this unexpected context suggests Halberstam’s special gifts as a writer. Quag was used in sixteenth-century England to describe marshy or boggy ground, especially if covered with a layer of turf that shakes or quakes when one walks across it (quag and quake are in fact nearly the same word). Mire (derived in Middle English from an Old Norse word for bog) conveys a nearly identical meaning—wet spongy earth, as in a bog or marsh, or heavy water-saturated mud. When the two combine into a single word, the result almost seems redundant, multiplying the muckiness of the marshy, swampy, watery ground. All these boggy associations led in turn to the symbolic meaning the word acquired within a couple centuries of first entering the language: a circumstance one sinks into from which it proves ever more difficult to extricate oneself. This was the meaning Halberstam had most in mind when he chose quagmire to label the American situation in Vietnam: a difficult, confusing, engulfing position that despite the best efforts of seemingly competent people only became worse the more they struggled to slog on. Halberstam’s quagmire was military, political, and above all moral. Without comprehending the consequences of their own actions, the best and brightest of the nation’s leaders found themselves mired in the jungles of Southeast Asia—bogged down, rudderless , entangled, entrapped. The marshy metaphors pile up to convey the sense of confused hopelessness that eventually became a dominant American interpretation of Vietnam and all that it stood for. As compelling as such language might seem as a way to understand Vietnam in the 1960s, it nonetheless lays a few traps of its own for unwary readers. This is especially true in the United States, where the symbolic quagmire can all too easily tempt Americans to turn a blind eye toward the lived realities of the Vietnam War. Failure to notice the realities of Vietnam’s places and people, let alone understand them, was among the most important reasons the war happened as it did. This is in fact one of Halberstam’s chief insights. By accepting the Cold War conflict with the Soviet Union as their chief interpretive framework, American leaders overlooked the extent to which they were projecting onto Vietnam an imagined geography that resided far more in their own minds than in the actual landscapes of Southeast Asia. This could be just as true for those who opposed the war as for those who supported it. When in his inaugural address John Kennedy called on his fellow Americans to “bear xi for e wor d the burden of a long twilight struggle,” he was unwittingly framing the narrative that pointed toward the war ahead. And when Francis Ford Coppola borrowed the central character and story from Joseph Conrad’s most famous novella for his film Apocalypse Now, he recast Kennedy’s symbolism as the heart of darkness for a nation that had lost its soul. Although such images say a great deal about the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, neither Kennedy’s twilight struggle nor Coppola’s heart of darkness is of much use...