The Perfect War: The War We Couldn’t Lose and How We Did

Description

“Powerfully and persuasively . . . Gibson tells us why we were in Vietnam . . . a work of daring brilliance—an eye-opening chronicle of waste and self-delusion.” —Robert Olen Butler In this groundbreaking book, James William Gibson shatters the misled assumptions behind both liberal and conservative explanations for America’s failure in Vietnam. Gibson shows how American government and military officials developed a disturbingly limited concept of war—what he calls “technowar”—in which all efforts were focused on maximizing the enemy’s body count, regardless of the means. Consumed by a blind faith in the technology of destruction, American leaders failed to take into account their enemy’s highly effective guerrilla tactics. Indeed, technowar proved woefully inapplicable to the actual political and military strategies used by the Vietnamese, and Gibson reveals how US officials consistently falsified military records to preserve the illusion that their approach would prevail. Gibson was one of the first historians to question the fundamental assumptions behind American policy, and The Perfect War is a brilliant reassessment of the war—now republished with a new introduction by the author. “This book towers above all that has been written to date on Vietnam.” —LA Weekly The Perfect War......Page 3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data......Page 6 Preface......Page 9 Contents......Page 11 Tables......Page 13 PART I In Search of War......Page 15 CHAPTER 1 Trailing the Beast......Page 17 CHAPTER 2 Legacies of Resistance: Vietnamese Nationalism against the Chinese and French......Page 42 CHAPTER 3 The Permanent War Begins: 1940-1954......Page 58 The Military Situation in May 1954......Page 79 CHAPTER 4 America Comes to Vietnam: Installing the Mechanisms, 1954-1964......Page 83 PART II The Green Machine......Page 105 CHAPTER 5 Technowar at Ground Level: Search-and-Destroy as Assembly Line......Page 107 CHAPTER 6 The Tet Offensive and the Production of a Double Reality......Page 169 CHAPTER 7 Forced Draft: Urbanization and the Consumer Society Come to Vietnam......Page 239 CHAPTER 8 Pacification War in the Countryside......Page 284 PART III Death from Above......Page 331 CHAPTER 9 Air War over North Vietnam: Bombing as Communication......Page 333 CHAPTER 10 Structural Dynamics of Escalation in Theory and Practice, 1966-1967......Page 349 CHAPTER 11 The Structure of Air Operations......Page 371 Air Force and Navy Bombing Route Packages......Page 373 CHAPTER 12 The Redistribution of Air War: Laos, 1968-1973......Page 397 CHAPTER 13 Closing Out the War: Cambodia and North Vietnam, 1969-1973......Page 417 PART IV The Perfect War......Page 433 CHAPTER 14 Finding the Light at the End of the Tunnel......Page 435 CHAPTER 15 Surveying the Wreckage: The Limits of Conventional Criticism and the Reproduction of Technowar......Page 447 APPENDIX The Warriors Knowledge: Social Stratification and the Book Corpus of Vietnam......Page 475 Notes......Page 491 Index......Page 523 About the Author......Page 539