The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam (review)

216 the minnesota review once undertook the wholesale extermination of no less than ten per cent of its population, and that this merciless slaughter not only failed to remove the spark of revolution from the land, it actually hardened many of the survivors and left an indelible memory of the absolute necessity for sustained, tactically controlled armed struggle. Roque Dalton's Miguel Marmol, based on extensive interviews conducted in Prague in 1966, is a classic of revolutionary Uterature. Marmol's unwavering commitment to the struggle in his native El Salvador and throughout Central America reveals better than any book I know the qualities required of a Ufe-long militant. Toughness, both physical and mental, are apparent in his every word. The harrowing tale of how he survived La Matanza in 1932 — "executed" by a firing squad, playing dead, then crawling to safety — reminds one of the famous episode of the banana company massacre in Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. Marmol would be captured again two years later by the dictator Martinez 's police, and subjected to the worst indignities of physical neglect and mental torture, although for mysterious reasons he alone among the communists arrested and imprisoned was not physically tortured. It is nothing short of miraculous — as Marmol himself frequently confesses, despite all his sincere atheism — that he survives to this day, living in Havana where the translators of Dalton's book interviewed him in October 1986. (The interview is included as an appendix.) What sustains him? Dalton's rendering of Marmol's own words speaks quite simply yet eloquently of the passion and the faith that exemplify a lifetime of revolutionary struggle: Reflecting on my Ufe, especially the part of it that I've examined in the most general terms; looking back and contemplating my youth, my political activity, my joys and miseries, a kind of strange feeUng of dissatisfaction and happiness at the same time fills my head. Dissatisfaction, for the things our limited strength and capacity did not permit me to do in furthering the popular struggle, for my being partly to blame for the defeats caused by the enemy who still gets fat on the blood and sweat of our workers; happiness, because in spite of the weaknesses of each individiual, our group of ignorant amateurs fought the battle of the working class in El Salvador and outside El Salvador; we were the pioneers of the revolution that will inevitably come to transform our countries once and for all. (pp. 464-5) Marmol's faith retains something of the millenarian strain that one senses in the final words of Viaor Montejo quoted above. Revolutionary triumphalism? Scarcely. Marmol's assessments of past errors and present possibilities are sober and honest. One might even risk calling them wise. In the current conjuncture in Central America, where the revolutionary success of the Sandinistas is counterposed to the stalemate in El Salvador, the objective weakness of the guerillas in Guatemala, and the signal absence of any viable resistance in Honduras or Costa Rica, Marmol's sentiments strike just that balance between pessimism and optimism, captured in Gramsci's famous aphorism, which is required if, as we must surely hope, Ia lucha continua. MICHAEL SPRINKER 7"Ae Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam by William James Gibson. Boston: The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986. pp. 523. (No price listed). From the large number of books, films, and television shows about Vietnam, it appears that the U.S. public is finally able to confront one of the darkest chapters in its history. But for all this attention, there has been little elucidation of why the United States involved itself in this debacle, how it lost the war, and what lessons should be drawn. Reviews 217 For conservatives, the war was lost, if at all, due to a failure of will. For liberals, the loss was due to an error of judgment made by weU-intentioned men representing a fundamentally sound social system. In a new book, The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam, James William Gibson counters these dominant conceptions. He offers a much needed left-wing interpretation of the war which argues that U.S. defeat was a necessary failure...