Book Review: Huế 1968

Huế 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam
Mark Bowden
History

I've been watching Ken Burns's series The Vietnam War, which is excellent, but (necessarily) synoptic. Huế 1968 makes a good companion piece: it's written almost exclusively from a ground-level view. There's virtually nothing about Vietnamese high-level actors, either north or south. American leaders are spotlighted periodically only to emphasize how little they had to do with what was going on.

Which is part of the point.

This is not a book for the squeamish, fans of General William Westmoreland, or anyone who chooses to believe that war is somehow "glorious." It's gut-wrenching. Bowden doesn't flinch from the sheer awfulness of urban warfare. He's not an obtrusive stylist; he uses good, solid, journalistic prose, mostly showing what the men (and a few women) on the ground are seeing, hearing, smelling, thinking, and feeling.

It's a visceral combination. Every time Bowden introduced a new character into the narrative, I found myself worrying about what would happen to him; one of Huế 1968's major themes is how random and chaotic death is in war, and how little control the average grunt had. The fighters weren't all alike--Bowden's viewpoint characters have different backgrounds, different characters, different motivations, different views on the war--but they had this in common: they were raw material. Over the course of the book, they're fed into the hopper.Where and how any one of them comes out of the machine is beyond anyone's control.

Bowden empathizes with the Marines. He doesn't venerate them. War turns people ugly, and Vietnam was ugly to begin with. If there are any heroes in Huế 1968, they're the journalists, who risked their lives under horrible conditions to do the best job they could.

Huế 1968 has its limitations. It isn't about arrows on maps; Bowden gives just enough strategic and operational information to follow the overall shape of things. He never strays long or far from the individual view. This eventually starts to get fragmented--there are a very large number of viewpoint characters, and it's sometimes hard to remember who's who. It doesn't help that there are many different units involved, in multiple places, across a period of weeks. I wouldn't have minded reading more of the Vietnamese soldiers' side of things, either, but I suppose that the practicalities of interviewing veterans (not to mention the book's likely readership) tilted things towards the U.S. side.

 Nor, to be for, does the book pretend to be particularly objective. Bowden believes (as do I, for what that's worth) that the Vietnam war wasn't winnable--that it was a gargantuan American blunder, conflating Communism with nationalism, that put the Marines in Huế in the first place. If you're among those people whose response is "But from a strictly military point of view it was an American victory!", consider this: the South Vietnamese people, as a generalization, never embraced their government. (Why should they have?) They merely accepted it. It was a fact. Huế and the Tet offensive showed them that it didn't have to be a fact. "Winning" a battle doesn't count for much if there's nobody in particular whom you're winning it for.