Backfire: A History of How American Culture Led Us into Vietnam and Made Us Fight the Way We Did

by Loren Baritz

Book Overview

In a probing look at the myths of American culture that led us into the Vietnam quagmire, Loren Baritz exposes our national illusions: the conviction of our moral supremacy, our assumption that... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 068804185X
• ISBN13: 9780688041854
• Release Date: January 1985
• Publisher: William Morrow & Co
• Length: 393 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Review of Vietnam, Preview of Iraq

I read this book before the US invasion of Iraq after reading an article in 2002 by Philip Gold, a Seattle-area conservative, who spoke highly of it. He believed the US was going to end up repeating its mistakes in Vietnam, for similar reasons. He was right. I'll list just one example: the myth that technology is a panacea, and a substitute for troops on the ground. Donald Rumsfeld appeared to believe that he had discovered a revolutionary breakthrough that would allow for an easy victory in Iraq, one no one had ever thought of before. In fact, he'd just fallen for the same exact myth as the planners of the Vietnam War, for the same reasons. Numerous other comparisons can be made reading this book. It's not a moral critique of the war, but rather a chronicle of bureaucratic disaster, and a blueprint for what was to come.

Plus ca change . . . .Americans just don't get it

Every politician should read Loren Baritz's analysis of the delusional thinking that got us into the Vietnam quaqmire. It bears directly on how we got ourselves into the Iraq War. Loren Baritz describes the complete ignorance of foreign cultures, the complete inability to predict consequences, of the presidents, politicians, and military commanders who dragged us into a no-win war with "north" Vietnam. In his preface Baritz says: "The war presidents beieved in what they were doing. I have no doubt they were sincere. Victims of Cold War jitters, they meant to curtail the spread of communism. With deep-seated American idealism, they intended to engineer a more sanitary and more democratic Vietnam. LBJ desperately wanted to "win their hearts and minds," and Nixon described the war as a "noble cause." They wanted to save the Vietnamese, sometimes from themselves, always from their ideologically crazed brothers. Our sense of moral superiority to the rest of the world, our missionary compulsion, is a story as old as the settlement of America. . . Our commanders lusted for a massive conventional battle . . . [but] There was never a front line -- never any line at all -- and no territory to be won and held. The Vietcong looked exactly like our allies in South Vietnam, never appearing in uniform and easily blending into the village life of the countryside. . . . For the GI grunts in the field, it was a grisly nightmare. Think of the soldier "lucky" enough to have his laundry done by a sweet old woman who, after dark, changed into a Vietcong guerrilla, laying mines on the path to the mess hall." Nothing has changed. We are still putting our GI's at unnecessary risk due to presidential delusions. We are still labeling our real enemies (Iraqi's, Saudi's, Pakistani's) as friends -- just to keep that oil flowing. And soon we will be importing thousands of so-called Green Zone Iraqi "friends" into the US when we cut and run. It's fifty years after the Vietnam debacle, and Repubs and Dems are just as clueless as they ever were about the dangers implicit in anti-Western, anti-rule-of-law, cultures and value systems. Now our democracy-sloganeering president has put our soldiers into Iraq, as Nixon said about Vietnam, to "win their hearts and minds." But for the GI grunts, it's a nightmare even more surreal than Vietnam was: This time our clueless military commanders are not only inviting the enemy Shia into the Green Zone to do the GI's laundry and translation, this time they are forcing the naive, young GI's go on patrol with Shia gunmen, who could easily shoot them -- the infidels -- in the back at any moment and in good Islamic conscience. This time the oil-blinded leadership is TRAINING the enemy.

Read it and weep

It won't be fun. And even less fun is the fact that someone will rewrite the whole book a few years from now--not about VietNam but about South Asia. Oh, yes, and after you're finished give it to someone who thinks that if the Army--or the Marines--could have won that war if only they could have done what they wanted to.

Too bad it didn't get read by our leaders

I can't add to the description of the book, except to say that it's too bad more people haven't read it. Especially our leadership. It's horrendously important to recognize the failures that we're repeating in Iraq.

Powerful and provocative analysis of the U.S. role in Vietna

The subtitle of "Backfire" - "A History of How American Culture Led Us into Vietnam and Made Us Fight the Way We did" - sums up the contents well. But it fails to suggest the great evil and ignorance which Baritz's scholarly analysis reveals. Example: G.I.s spent a full year in Vietnam; officers were rotated in and out every six months. Reason: Officers needed to "punch their tickets" (i.e. serve in Vietnam) if they wanted to rise up the ladder of promotion. So military policy was formulated based on that priority, not on the obvious fact that just as officers were becoming really experienced combat leaders, they were sent home and replaced by inexperienced officers. The resulting cost of American lives amounts to a war crime on the part of senior military leaders who put the policy into effect, a war crime against their own men! Another example: U.S. soldiers derided Vietnamese men as "fags" because they saw them holding hands. They were ignorant of Vietnamese culture in which such conduct has nothing to do with sexual preference. Thus, "why fight for a bunch of fags" became a prevalent attitude. Baritz's book is different than almost any other on Vietnam - and more thoughtful and thought-provoking.