The Unfinished War

On many levels and in many different ways, the process of coming to terms with the Vietnam War continues to unfold. As Morley Safer writes, each witness to that conflict is “still imprisoned, to one extent or another, by that place and that time.” ¹ Memories of the conflict remain vivid among many Americans, who are still trying to understand why we fought so long and so hard in such a distant place, and why, in the end, we and our allies in Saigon suffered such a humiliating defeat. Recent literature has given us a better sense of the evolution of American policy, of how decisions were made within the American government, and of how these decisions were carried out in the field. Many aspects of American policy, however, remain obscure, while we have only begun to learn about the calculations of communist revolutionaries in Vietnam. These six books, written by scholars, journalists, and participants, are only a small part of what is a fascinating effort to fit together all of the pieces of the Vietnamese puzzle.

Sam Adams was one of those witnesses to the war, a young CIA analyst whose study of the Vietcong became first a great adventure, then a compelling cause until his untimely death in 1988. In August 1965 Adams was transferred to the Southeast Asian Branch of the CIA’s Deputy Directorate of Intelligence, where he was given the task of studying Vietcong morale. He was the first person in Washington to give the enemy in South Vietnam his undivided attention. Poring over captured enemy documents, POW interrogations, and interviews with defectors, Adams concluded that the war was far larger than the Military Assistant Command Vietnam realized and that all the calculations of the American government about the numbers of troops needed and the time it would take to win were inaccurate. One captured document, on Vietcong strength in Binh Dinh province, listed 50,255 enemy soldiers, while MACV’s figure was only 4,668. Adams gradually realized that the Vietcong consisted of a vast, intricate organization, most of which was hidden from view. General William Westmoreland’s command was concerned with Vietcong main force units, but it failed to realize that these well-armed soldiers were only the tip of a large funnel that ran all the way down to the village level, and that main force units were augmented by many specialized units, such as sappers, secret police, service troops, and political cadre. The result was a resilient organization that could replace its losses quickly.

Adams’s passionate curiosity about the Vietcong resulted in a series of superb, detailed studies, but it also brought an unwillingness to appreciate the dilemma CIA Director Richard Helms eventually confronted. Burdened with a White House that wanted only good news, and challenging the military’s figures in the middle of a major war, Helms felt that he could only push so far. Or as he explained to Adams, “You don’t know what it’s like in this town. I could have told the White House there were a million more Vietcong out there, and it wouldn’t have made the slightest difference in our policy...