One person can make a difference.
Whether that is for good or bad depends on much that is outside the control of
that significant mover and shaker. In the cinema version of Charlie Wilson’s War, Gust Avrakotos
tells the parable of the Zen master who at each turn of events deflects the
popular wisdom with “We shall see.”
In other words, external events can bring unintended consequences to
your choices. That is the truth brought forward by these two books. Charlie Wilson’s War is about
Afghanistan, and Bright Shining Lie
is about Vietnam.
- Book Review: Charlie Wilson’s War: the Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History by George Crile, Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003.
- Book Review: Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam by Neil Sheehan, Vintage Books, 1988. (Material here is from a review first published as a class paper for HIST 586: The U.S. in World Politics, Dr. Kathleen Chamberlain, Eastern Michigan University, Fall 2009.)
The foundation of each narrative is the nature of the
complex person whose work was unperceived at the time. Not all of the damaged
souls in our social world are capable of great feats. Not all of those who move
the world or shake it wrestle with internal demons. Often they do. Perhaps that
internal energy is the secret motor that powers achievement, certainly for
them, forcing other people to give way or to follow, but always to succumb to
the irresistible force of highly motivated charisma.
Charlie Wilson (1933-2010) was a Congressman from East Texas
whose conservative and Baptist constituents repeatedly re-elected an alcoholic
womanizing liberal. Fired up by a story about the mujahidin who fought against
the USSR’s invasion of Afghanistan, Wilson made their fight his crusade,
turning a $5 million dollar stream of 100-year old rifles into a $500 billion Noahtic
flood that included Stinger missiles, cryptologic radios, satellite
reconnaissance, Tennessee mules, and the uniting of Israel and Saudi Arabia in
a common cause under the control of Pakistan.
The phrase “bright shining lie” comes from Vann’s own
description of the press conferences for which he coached Gen. Huynh Van Cao to
give optimistic projections for victory. While working for the RAND Corporation,
Vann’s close friend, Daniel Ellsberg, discovered that for the first fifteen
years of the Cold War, the USSR lacked the hardware for significant
intercontinental strikes, raising questions about the origins of the Cold War. Another
lie was that Vann’s military career was thwarted by his outspoken advocacy of
his own cogent analyses, when, in truth, it was blocked by a charge of
statutory rape, the outcome of just one of many infidelities. Thus, John Paul
Vann is a symbol for America, outwardly heroic, but factually corrupt, nicely
navigating the gray shades of ethics to maintain a towering jackstraw jumble of
lies. Vann’s eight years “in country” were so important to the effort in
Vietnam that he eventually was given immense military latitude, technically a
civilian but with the trappings of a major general, another living lie,
reflective of America’s ambiguous status in the war.
Like America, John
Paul Vann was self-made. Illegitimate and poor, the son of an alcoholic floozy,
Vann took the family name of the man who was his actual father years ahead of
the formal adoption.
The author admits
early on that Vann had a detachment of mind that let him criticize his own
assumptions. This gave him an intellectual edge over men too easily convinced
by their own wishes. However, later Sheehan shows Vann caught in his own web –
calling for air strikes, propping up corrupt officials, excusing the very
policies he earlier opposed – but Sheehan never shows the transition, if there
was one.
In fact, Sheehan
says very little about the direct work that Vann did which Vann himself
considered fundamental to the war effort. We never see Vann meeting with
villagers, meeting with frontline military. We do know of his arguments with
the top brass, but we never see the dialectic within his own mind. In Charlie Wilson’s War, we do.
A producer for Sixty
Minutes, Crile invested years of continuous effort, interviewing the people
in the story, constructing a coherent narrative of external events and internal
thoughts. The author takes us with
Wilson into the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands, first to see the problem,
soon to donate his own blood to the medical efforts (several times), and
eventually to travel into Afghanistan on horseback, dressed as a local, to
receive the thanks and praise of the mujahidin. We also hear the private
reflections of the Congressman, the CIA chiefs (and their “Indians”), the
Congressional leaders, even the President of Pakistan and the Crown Prince of
Saudi Arabia, among very many others.
As books go, I found Charlie
Wilson’s War to be a pleasure to read. Whether Crile is a true master of
good English or had good editors or both, I found none of the many little
annoyances that plague modern literature. Better than the lack of negatives,
Crile’s history is positively compelling, hard to set aside, always to be
anticipated as a reward. I do have a quibble: he refers to the USSR and its
soldiers as “the Soviets.” It is common and convenient, but wrong. I learned to
avoid that mistake in 2008 from Dr. Pamela Graves (a good Marxist) when taking HIST
456: Modern Europe 1945-Present.
Ultimately, both Vann and Wilson failed. The government of
South Vietnam was incapable of prosecuting the war because it was incapable of
earning the trust of its populace. Just as bad for us was
the victory we brought to the mujahidin, and our consequential involvement
there and in Iraq, and now in Syria.
Ayn Rand pointed out repeatedly that US foreign policy in
opposition to the USSR was doomed to fail as long as our government failed (refused)
to acknowledge that America’s moral superiority is built on reason,
individualism, and capitalism. All through those decades, our government
yielded the moral high ground to the USSR, which claimed scientific history,
altruism, and collectivism, all of which our own government did not contradict,
but in fact endorsed. Therefore,
we failed in Vietnam. And the successful defeat of the USSR in Afghanistan only
brought us Abrahamic co-religionists who destroyed the World Trade Center – and
who now carry out acts of horror in offices, shopping malls, and airports.
In the 1960s and 70s, the USA and the USSR competed in
Afghanistan by building roads, hospitals, and schools. Modernism never was strong in
Afghanistan. Its reformist monarch Amanullah Khan and the liberal nationalist
intellectual Marmud Tarzi had their zenith in the 1920s. Yet, whatever its many flaws, the one
thing that Russian socialism had to offer was modernism founded on public
education for everyone. But the
USSR abandoned that path in Afghanistan, resorting to brute force against an
enemy that lived for it – and believed that brutality toward one’s Earthly
enemy is the path to heaven. That
the USSR pushed an officially atheistic secular humanism only guaranteed an
irreconcilable conflict. If the USA had kept to its earlier course in Afghanistan,
investing in infrastructure and education, rather than arming the resistance, it
is difficult to imagine an alternate history worse than the real one.
Previously on Necessary Facts
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