Uncle Sam Rag The Road From War?

368 pp.; $7.95

A FEW WEEKS ago, I interviewed a young American scientist just back from a lecture tour of Indochina. The conversation got around to the role of American journalists in the Vietnam war, and one name came to his mind immediately. "Robert Shaplen," he said, "is the greatest apologist for American aggression alive today."

If any journalist has made his name in Souhteast Asia, Robert Shaplen has. His reporting has been the clearest, the most insightful, the most informative to come out of Saigon over the past decade. Yet, while he has continually discovered corruption, inhumanity, and brutality everywhere, he has been strangely reticent to criticize the war itself. Indeed, he has been the foremost representative of the "victory is just around the corner" school of journalism.

This volume, although it is a collection of his dispatches for The New Yorker from 1965 to 1970, reads more like a continuous story than a set of unconnected columns. From before the great escalation in 1965, Shaplen traces the tragic and tortuous path this war has taken to the present. Early on, he realized how little the military aspects of the war really mean. His columns on the persecution of Buddhists by the Catholic Directory, the ruling junta of generals, informed America of the scandalous political repression within South Vietnam. He also seems to have realized from the beginning the counterproductiveness of American military measures. On April 24, 1965, he wrote, "The conflict in South Vietnam is as much a political and a social one as a military one, and the effect of certain military measures may be just the opposite of the effect desired, and may be far from making people love us, even if for the moment, out of fear of being killed, some of them renounce the Vietcong come over to our side."

Yet, for all of his perception of the blunders of the American policy, Shaplen is steadfast. To the very end, the book is a tale of "our side" against "the Communists," struggling "to win the hearts and minds of the people." If he disagrees with the American military commitment, it is in scale, not in philosophy. As he makes clear in his introduction:

I disapprove of the extent of (the military) commitment, including its belated expansion in the spring of 1970 to Cambodia; but I believe that Vietnam did initially concern us politically, and still does, and that our justified political concern warranted an advisory and even a limited military involvement, though one that should have been confined to low-level counter-insurgency action with some air support, and to economic aid.

Shaplen the observer occasionally becomes Shaplen the prophet, and his track record here is mixed. In 1965 he foresees two or three more years of war, just when the government was foreseeing two or three more months of war. In October 1966, he predicts that the only way the Vietcong can win the war is to engage the United States in lengthy negotiations while reducing the level of fighting, this at a time when Washington was refusing to negotiate. But, if his capacity as a prophet is unstable, his capacity as a reporter is unchallenged. Through it all, he documents the political maneuverings of the South Vietnamese generals, their struggles for power, the way the American troop buildup despoils the country, the economy, the people. At times, he seems to forget that there is a war going on at all, so deeply is he involved in watching the political maneuvering. All of his dispatches come from Saigon, away from the fighting, with the exception of two from the Paris talks and one from the DMZ. He is, it seems, a political columnist by trade, a war correspondent only incidentally.

THE CONCLUSIONS Shaplen reaches are the expected ones. The problem with Vietnam, he says, the real tragedy of American involvement, is that the United States government neglected to think out a game plan in advance Vietnam is a valuable lesson, for, when the new Vietnams arise, America will be able to handle them:

What seems more than ever necessary is a total re-evaluation of the manner and method in which American foreign policy is conducted.... The misbegotten Vietnam adventure, the result mainly of abysmal political miscalculation, has clearly demonstrated the need to define the confused and often contradictory roles played by numerous American agencies in formulating and executing foreign policy.... Whatever happens in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, and whatever course we chart in Asia in the years ahead, it remains axiomatic that we are going to have to deal with similar situations in the future, not only in Asia but elsewhere.

It seems strange, somehow, to hear Vietnam talked about as a political problem, to hear Shaplen like a sportscaster criticizing the quarterback for the plays he calls without ever questioning the rules of the game itself. This book asks no questions, raises no doubts, about the morality of the war, about the right of the Vietnamese to be left alone, about what business the United States has in Asia anyway. This is all taken as given, as natural for what Shaplen calls "the strongest nation in the world." Nixon uses that phrase, too. And Shaplen and Nixon share essentially the same beliefs. The difference is that Shaplen has spent his life in Southeast Asia, has seen it all, has even reported it all, yet he still maintains his belief in America's right to protect her interests anywhere in the world, when it feels that it has something at stake.

I cannot comment on this book, because I cannot understand this book. It is a statement of everything that is wrong with this country, is leaders, its politics. When war is reduced to a giant football game, it becomes much easier to accept the deaths, the destruction, and all the other unpleasant things. The only object is to play to win. This book, like American policy, is madness.