Far Outliers

From Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam, by Fredrik Logevall (Random House, 2012), Kindle pp. 462-463:

THE KOREAN ARMISTICE, SIGNED ON JULY 27, HAD A DEVASTATING effect on French thinking, causing a further slackening of the will to continue the fight. Marc Jacquet, the minister for the Associated States, told British officials a few days later that his compatriots were nonplussed: They saw the United States securing a truce in Korea and Britain trading with China and could not understand why their allies should expect them to continue a war in Indochina in which there was no longer a direct French interest. France, he said, wanted the future Korea peace conference extended to cover also Indochina and sought Britain’s help in that regard. He added that American aid for the French war effort was insufficient and speculated that Laniel’s government was the last that would continue the struggle.

Bernard B. Fall, a French-raised World War II veteran who would in time become one of the most astute analysts of both the French and American wars, and who would be killed while accompanying U.S. Marines on a mission near Hue in early 1967, saw firsthand the effect of the Korean truce as he toured Vietnam in 1953 in order to conduct field research for his Syracuse University doctoral dissertation. Born into a Jewish merchant family in Vienna in 1926, Fall lost both parents at the hands of the Nazis and joined the French underground in November 1942, at age sixteen. As a maquisard he soon got a taste of what it meant to fight a guerrilla war against an occupying force. Later, he saw action in the First French Army under de Lattre before being shifted—thanks to his fluency in German—to the French Army’s intelligence service. A stint as a researcher for the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal followed, whereupon Fall resumed his studies, first at the University of Paris and then in Munich. In 1951 he arrived in the United States, the recipient of a Fulbright fellowship to pursue graduate work at Syracuse. During a summer seminar in Washington in 1952, Fall’s instructor encouraged him to pursue research on the Indochina struggle, about which little scholarship had as yet been produced.

Fall took up the challenge with zest. He recalled in an interview in 1966: “By pure accident, one sunny day in Washington, D.C., of all places, in 1952, I got interested in Viet-Nam and it’s been sort of a bad love affair ever since.”

On May 16, 1953, Fall arrived in Hanoi, carrying a military-style duffel bag and with his precious Leica camera and a new shortwave radio slung over his shoulder. Granted special access as a former French army officer, Fall accompanied units on combat operations, attended lunches and dinners with officers, and kept his eyes and ears open. The signing of the Korean armistice, he later wrote, “brought a wave of exasperation and hopelessness to the senior commanders that—though hidden to outsiders—was nevertheless obvious.” For no longer could it be said that France was fighting one front of a two-front war, necessary for the defense of the West. Washington had broken the deal: It had agreed to a separate peace in Asia. And now the Chinese, being no longer preoccupied in Korea, could turn their focus southward. About Navarre, meanwhile, Fall heard mostly complaints—he was timid and uncommunicative, many in the officer corps said, disliked even by his own staff—and few commanders had much good to say about the fighting abilities of Bao Dai’s Vietnamese Nationalist Army.

From Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam, by Fredrik Logevall (Random House, 2012), Kindle pp. 405-408:

The possibility of a French withdrawal seemingly grew more real that January, as Paris lawmakers prepared to begin a full-dress debate on Indochina in the National Assembly. De Lattre’s death on January 11, just a few days before the start of the debate, set a somber mood for the proceedings, and it was soon clear that a broad cross section of delegates questioned France’s continued commitment to the war. Views that a year earlier would have been labeled “defeatist,” or “unpatriotic,” were openly expressed, and not merely by the left. How could France afford, many delegates asked, to continue a struggle that in 1952 would consume between one-seventh and one-sixth of the entire budget? Answer: She could not, certainly not if she was also to build up a large army in Europe, which alone would enable her to pull her own weight in the organization of Western defense. “I am asking for a change of policy in Indo-China,” declared Pierre Mendès France of the Radical Party.

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Influential voices in the French press said in essence the same thing; Le Monde and Le Figaro both noted that, absent dramatically increased U.S. aid, France would soon have to choose between fulfilling her European responsibilities and seeking a rapid diplomatic solution in Vietnam. At the U.S. embassy in Paris, a despondent David Bruce saw French hopes for victory dashed and the public eager for peace. “A snowball has started to form,” the ambassador warned Washington. Absent greater American assistance for the war effort or some kind of “internationalization”—meaning U.S. and British guarantees to defend Indochina militarily—public sentiment for withdrawal would continue to build. The CIA, for its part, said that a full-fledged French reappraisal of Vietnam policy was at hand, with potentially major implications for the United States.

Ultimately, the Pleven government prevailed in the debate, and the Assembly approved by a wide margin the appropriation of 326 billion francs for land forces in Indochina during 1952. This sum, however, did not cover the air force or navy, and as in previous years a supplemental allocation would be required before long. Pleven declared that the government had secured a fresh mandate for the vigorous prosecution of the war, and he lauded French forces for their “magnificent” performance in the field; a year or eighteen months hence, he predicted, France could secure a negotiated settlement “from positions of strength.” His words rang hollow. The dominant mood in the Assembly after the vote, observed one journalist, was that “it couldn’t go on like this.” If the appropriation passed, “it was only because the French army in Indo-China could not be left high and dry without money or equipment.”

Two other factors no doubt shaped the outcome of the vote. One was the growing nationalist restiveness in North Africa, particularly in Morocco and Tunisia. In Rabat, the French faced growing pressure from the sultan, Mohammad Ben Youssef, to grant independence, while in Tunis negotiations had broken down just a few weeks earlier over nationalist demands for home rule. For some Paris officials, the North African tensions were an added reason for withdrawal from Indochina—in the words of Radical leader Édouard Daladier, so long as 7,000 French officers, 32,000 NCOs, and 134,000 soldiers were “marooned” in Vietnam, France would be hopelessly outnumbered in her North African possessions. The alternative view, and the one that won out in the end, was that early disengagement from Vietnam would only intensify nationalist fervor in the Maghreb. (If the Vietnamese can win independence, why can’t we?) For the sake of the empire, then, France had to stay the course in Vietnam. Second, Premier Pleven won political points for his announcement, timed perfectly in advance of the Assembly vote, that he had secured agreement for a three-power conference on Indochina, involving Britain, the United States, and France, to take place in Washington later in the month. Pleven assured delegates that France would press for a joint Western policy toward the Far East and direct Anglo-American support in the event of a Chinese Communist move into Indochina.

The prospect of a Chinese military intervention dominated the discussion of Indochina at the tripartite meetings, though there was a divergence of views on the seriousness of the threat. At the start of 1952, the PRC had about two hundred and fifty thousand troops in the provinces bordering Indochina, many of them ready to cross the frontier on short notice. Both the CIA and the Joint Intelligence Committee of the Joint Chiefs of Staff rejected the likelihood of an invasion, and so did British intelligence. With the Korean War still ongoing and claiming vast Chinese resources, and with the Viet Minh holding their own against the French, these analysts thought Beijing would almost certainly be content to maintain its current level of support—arms and ammunition, technicians and political officers, and the training of Viet Minh NCOs and officers in military centers in southern China.8 The French, however, insisted on the very real possibility of direct, large-scale Chinese intervention and requested a U.S. commitment to provide air and naval support in that event. The Joint Chiefs of Staff and the National Security Council agreed it was important to decide on a course of action should the Chinese move. But which course?

Many of the French troops in Indochina came from France's African colonies, some of the best from Morocco and Senegal. By 1952 "the fighting had killed 3 generals, 8 colonels, 18 lieutenant colonels, 69 majors, 341 captains, 1,140 lieutenants, 3,683 NCOs, and 6,008 soldiers of French nationality; 12,019 legionnaires and Africans; and 14,093 Indochinese troops. These numbers did not include the missing or wounded—about 20,000 and 100,000 respectively." (p. 458)

From Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam, by Fredrik Logevall (Random House, 2012), Kindle pp. 391-393:

MORE THAN ANY OTHER OF GREENE’S NOVELS, THE QUIET AMERICAN contains firsthand reportage, much of it done on this three-and-a-half-month stay in 1951–52. A comparison of the book with his letters home, his journal, and his articles makes this clear. Much of the time he was in Saigon or Hanoi, but occasionally he accompanied French troops into the field. Tall and unarmed, he was an easy target, but he showed complete disregard for his own physical safety, even when at Phat Diem he found himself in the midst of heavy fighting. (This action too features in the novel.) Greene was not at this point pro-Communist, but the talent and fierce dedication of the Viet Minh impressed him. In his article for Life, he acknowledged that many of Ho Chi Minh’s supporters were motivated by idealism and were not part of any monolithic Stalinist movement. Even worse from the editors’ perspective, Greene saw little chance of stopping Communism in Indochina. The article urged France to prepare herself for retreat from the region and warned Washington that not all social-political problems could be overcome with force. Hughes and Luce, aghast at this message, rejected the piece, despite the fact that Greene also offered up a crude articulation of the domino theory of the type that Fowler ridicules in the novel. (“If Indo-China falls,” Greene wrote, “Korea will be isolated, Siam can be invaded in twenty-four hours and Malaya may have to be abandoned.”) Thus rebuffed, Greene offered the article to the right-wing Paris Match, which published it in July 1952.

Greene concluded the article with a jarringly sentimental tribute to the courage and skill of French soldiers. Maybe he was trying to soften the blow of the impending defeat. But it’s also the case that he retained in 1952 a good measure of sympathy for the French cause, and for European colonialism more generally. He had himself been born into the British Empire’s administrative class, and its worldview and mores continued to imbue him. He could write movingly of Saigon as the “Paris of the East,” and he much enjoyed spending time in the cafés along the rue Catinat in the company of French colons and officials. He was indeed in this period something of a Frenchman manqué. Castigating the Americans for being “exaggeratedly mistrustful of empires,” Greene said the Old World knew better: “We Europeans retain the memory of what we owe Rome, just as Latin America knows what it owes Spain. When the hour of evacuation sounds there will be many Vietnamese who will regret the loss of the language which put them in contact with the art and faith of the West.”

Little wonder that Greene and the colons got on so well; they spoke in the same terms regarding all that European colonialism had wrought and the damage the Americans could do. It is ironic, therefore, that some leading French officials mistrusted him. General de Lattre, eager to win more American aid and aware that Greene was in Indochina on assignment from an American magazine, initially went out of his way to woo the novelist, inviting him to informal dinners and giving him the use of a military plane. But the general’s opinion changed after Greene visited Phat Diem and showed keen interest in Bishop Le Huu Tu. De Lattre hated the bishop’s seeming double-dealing, blaming him for his son Bernard’s death near Phat Diem the previous year—the bishop, de Lattre believed, had tacitly allowed the Viet Minh to sneak up on the position Bernard’s unit was defending. In the general’s mind, Greene became a kind of accomplice in the treachery.

The elder de Lattre became convinced that Greene and his friend in Hanoi, the British consul Trevor-Wilson, were in fact spies, working for the British secret service. He blurted out to the head of the Sûreté: “All these English, they’re too much! It isn’t sufficient that they have a consul who’s in the Secret Service, they even send me their novelists as agents and Catholic novelists into the bargain.” De Lattre placed both men under Sûreté surveillance and used Vietnamese to assist in the effort. “The French gave us orders to watch Graham Greene very closely,” recalled Pham Xuan An, a self-taught English speaker who was tasked with censoring the Englishman’s dispatches, and who would later lead an extraordinary double life as a Time reporter and Viet Cong spy. “While he was in Asia, smoking opium and pretending to be a journalist, the Deuxième Bureau assured us he was a secret agent in MI6, British Intelligence.”

The title of this chapter is "The Quiet Englishman," referring to Greene as the author of The Quiet American (1955).

From Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam, by Fredrik Logevall (Random House, 2012), Kindle pp. 370-374:

From Truman on down, senior U.S. officials publicly affirmed support for the war effort and pledged to speed up military deliveries. In private sessions, though, they refused to accept that Korea and Vietnam were one war, and they pressed the general for more proof that France was sincerely committed to full independence for Indochina, and for greater efforts to build up the Vietnamese fighting forces. The Washington Post spoke for much of American officialdom when it editorialized, in the middle of the French general’s visit, that “the great problem in increased military aid is to avoid the appearance of propping up colonialism.”

Still, when de Lattre and his wife left New York by air shortly before midnight on September 25, bound for Paris, he took satisfaction in the results of the trip. As well he might. The Americans had unambiguously affirmed the critical importance of the fight against Ho Chi Minh and had pledged to bolster their military assistance and to deliver it with more dispatch. In Congress and in the press, and among the general public, awareness of the French war and of French military needs was now much greater than before. As a laudatory New York Times editorial put it, the Washington talks made two points plain: “First, we are in basic political agreement with the French. Second, our aid to the Associated States of Indochina [French colonies] will be stepped up. Both are vital.”

EVEN BEFORE DE LATTRE’S VISIT, THE AID HAD BEEN SUBSTANTIAL. He had already received upward of a hundred U.S. fighter planes, fifty bombers and transports, and ground arms for thirty battalions, as well as artillery and naval craft. But other promised deliveries, including trucks and tanks, were months behind schedule. Only 444 of a scheduled 968 jeeps and 393 of 906 six-by-six trucks, for example, had been sent in fiscal year 1951. Lovett blamed the slow pace on production problems and a lack of expertise at some plants, but he and other officials also said the French themselves were partly responsible, chiefly because of their inadequate maintenance practices. Distribution of matériel already delivered was another problem: Armed convoys were forced to move slowly—whether by road or water—and were subject to frequent Viet Minh attacks. Nevertheless, Army Chief of Staff J. Lawton Collins pledged to de Lattre that U.S. deliveries would be stepped up, and they were: In the four months following his visit, the French received more than 130,000 tons of equipment, including 53 million rounds of ammunition, 8,000 general-purpose vehicles, 650 combat vehicles, 200 aircraft, 14,000 automatic weapons, and 3,500 radios.

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Another American, who held a starkly different view, called on de Lattre in Saigon that autumn, a young Democratic congressman who in time would stand at the very apex of America’s Vietnam decision making. This was John Fitzgerald Kennedy, whose visit to Indochina in mid-October—accompanied by his brother Robert and sister Patricia, during a tour of Asia and the Middle East—is described at the start of this book. JFK was taken aback by what he saw, it will be recalled—France was engaged in a major colonial war and was plainly losing. The United States, as France’s principal ally in the effort, was guilty by association and risked being forced down the same path as the European colonialists. The French-supported Vietnamese government lacked broad popular support, Kennedy determined, and Ho Chi Minh would win any nationwide election.

It was a remarkable message coming from a man who hitherto had sounded every bit the Cold Warrior, blasting the Truman administration, for example, for allowing China to fall to Communism and bragging to constituents about his ties to the rabidly anti-Communist Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy. But it’s clear that the Asian tour changed JFK’s outlook. It convinced him that the United States must align herself with the emerging nations, and that Communism could never be defeated by relying solely or principally on force of arms. His Indochina experience led him to that conclusion, as did a dinner conversation in New Delhi with Jawaharlal Nehru, who called the French war an example of doomed colonialism and said Communism offered the masses “something to die for” whereas the West promised only the status quo. War would not stop Communism, Nehru warned him; it would only enhance it, “for the devastation of war breeds only more poverty and more want.” Kennedy agreed, but he wondered if U.S. officials grasped these essential truths. Many of “our representatives abroad seem to be a breed of their own,” he said a few weeks later, “moving mainly in their own limited circles not knowing too much of the people to whom they are accredited, unconscious of the fact that their role is not tennis and cocktails, but the interpretation to a foreign country of the meaning of American life and the interpretations to us of that country’s aspirations and aims.”

Other Americans also held these twin convictions—that the United States was becoming too enmeshed in the war, and that the prospects were nevertheless bleak. At the CIA and at the State Department, numerous midlevel officials held them, as did some of Kennedy’s colleagues on Capitol Hill. Indeed, a sizable number of informed Republican and Democratic lawmakers in this period saw the war as resulting primarily from France’s determination to preserve her colonial empire; some spoke in language similar to that of JFK.

From Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam, by Fredrik Logevall (Random House, 2012), Kindle pp. 330-332:

THE FRENCH FACED A STARK NEW REALITY. THE CAO BANG DISASTER, beyond the enormous loss of blood and treasure, beyond the immediate humiliation of having been out-generaled and out-fought by a supposedly inferior enemy, showed that in this war, time was not on France’s side. The strategy of isolating the Viet Bac and of reducing the areas under Viet Minh control had not succeeded; to the contrary, Ho Chi Minh’s government now had firm control over a huge swath of Tonkin and threatened the rest; it also remained a formidable presence in many parts of Annam and Cochin China. French commanders might not wish to admit it, at least not without a few drinks in them, but an outright defeat of the enemy was now almost impossible to imagine. He had solidified his hold on the Viet Bac and had at least tacit support of the mass of the population there, and he had a powerful neighbor to the north, ready and willing to help his cause.

Which is not to say Ho was invincible. The Viet Minh had scored a stunning victory, but their strength in late 1950 should not be overestimated. Giap’s army, now formally named the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN), had long and difficult supply lines, and it still lacked much of the equipment, including airplanes, of a modern army. Its food supplies were, as almost always, a source of concern. Nor were the Viet Minh yet in a position to make a serious play for the big prize, the Red River Delta, and it’s doubtful that Giap at this stage would have been able to rapidly and immediately dispatch from one place to another the troops required to reinforce a success or avert a disaster. French Union forces, meanwhile, were about to be bolstered by an infusion of aircraft and other materials from the United States.

French officials were quick to remind themselves and one another of these points. Maybe too quick. Certainly, there could be no talk of quitting, of seeking a fig-leaf diplomatic settlement with Ho that would allow an exit from the morass. France’s credibility was on the line, as was the personal credibility of her leaders. And one could speak as well of partisan credibility being at stake. France from 1947 to 1951 had a string of coalition governments, each one standing to the ideological right of its predecessor. Indochina was one reason for this rightward drift. Unbending resolve to tackle the Viet Minh became pivotal to the MRP, the dominant party in these coalitions, which feared a disastrous hemorrhage of support to the Gaullist Rassemblement du peuple français (RPF) if it bowed to Socialist and Communist demands for negotiation with Ho Chi Minh. The declining influence of the French left in colonial and defense policy was critical to the French choices in Indochina that resulted in adherence to the [Emperor] Bao Dai solution, refusal to pursue direct negotiation with the Viet Minh leadership, and greater attachment to U.S. Cold War imperatives, as American military aid became fundamental to the continuation of the French war effort from this point on.

Broader public opinion in France played little part in determining this firm posture. The country paid attention to Indochina because of the French troops engaged there, and there was despair at the immense loss of life in the October defeats, but one could still speak in late 1950 of a general indifference to questions affecting Southeast Asia and the Far East. On foreign affairs, most voters were far more concerned about Germany, about France’s eastern frontiers, and about building up the armed forces to resist yet another invasion across the Rhine. Many expressed opposition to the Indochina War on the narrow grounds that the expenditures of manpower and money there took away from this preparation at home. But the unpopularity of the war did not yet translate into mass active opposition, and thus politicians could act with a considerable degree of impunity.

And so, in the fall of 1950, with one notable exception, no new voices were raised in French governmental circles in favor of immediate negotiations leading to withdrawal.

From Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam, by Fredrik Logevall (Random House, 2012), Kindle pp. 295-301:

BY THE START OF 1950, THEN, THE WORLD’S MOST POWERFUL NATION seemed poised to throw her full support behind the French war effort. No official action, however, had yet been taken, and there matters might have rested for some time but for dramatic news out of the east: On January 18, the People’s Republic of China extended formal recognition to Ho Chi Minh’s government, and on January 30 the Soviet Union did likewise. In the weeks thereafter, Moscow’s Eastern European satellites followed suit, as did North Korea. Viet Minh diplomacy, so dismally unsuccessful for so long, had scored a colossal victory (if one with a hefty price tag, as we shall see), one that Ho desperately needed even as he also feared its implications. His efforts had centered initially on the Soviet Union. But he had a tricky path to walk, given his determination (strongly held through much of 1949) to avoid spurring the Americans into full and open support of France and her counterrevolutionary Bao Dai–led state. In 1948, the ICP reminded party functionaries to refrain from criticizing Washington in their pronouncements and to adopt a neutral line:

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Such a posture was unlikely to score points with a Soviet leadership already questioning Ho Chi Minh’s socialist bona fides. Nor was this declaration exceptional for the period—in his interviews in 1945–50, when asked about the broader international situation and the growing rift between East and West, Ho always took care to strike a neutral pose. Even as party leaders took great satisfaction in the successes of Mao’s Communist forces to the north, therefore, they rejoiced quietly; even as they sought to win recognition as well as assistance from Moscow, they also continued to meet with American diplomats in Bangkok, among them Lieutenant William H. Hunter, an assistant naval attaché who had traveled widely in Indochina and knew players on both sides personally. Stalin, at odds with independent-minded Yugoslavian leader Josip Broz Tito since 1948, couldn’t abide Communists who showed anything less than complete fidelity to the Kremlin line.

When French Communist Party leader Maurice Thorez tried to convince Stalin that he could trust Ho’s commitment to the cause, Stalin demurred. Ho had collaborated too much with the Americans in World War II, he replied, and failed to solicit advice from the Kremlin before making key decisions. Case in point: Ho’s decision to dissolve the ICP in 1945. Thorez tried to say that the dissolution had been merely tactical, but the Soviet dictator would not hear it. A Soviet Foreign Ministry memo dated January 14, 1950, spoke of “ambiguity” in Ho Chi Minh’s interviews. “Speaking about the Vietnam government’s attitude towards the U.S., Ho Chi Minh evades the issue of U.S. expansionist policy towards Vietnam.… Until now Ho Chi Minh abstained from the assessment of [the] Imperialist nature of the North Atlantic Pact and of the U.S. attempt to establish a Pacific bloc as a branch of this pact.”

And yet before that month was out, the USSR had taken the important step of extending diplomatic recognition to the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Why? In large part because Stalin felt compelled to follow Mao’s lead. And for the Chinese, the decision was, by all accounts, a relatively easy one. Contacts between Ho’s government and Mao’s forces, for a long time modest because of geographic separation and because the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had been too preoccupied fighting its own war to provide direct and substantial support, increased markedly beginning in late 1948. In January 1949, Truong Chinh told the Sixth Plenum of the ICP that Mao’s army might soon conquer all of China and that “we must be ready to welcome it.” In April, Chiang Kai-shek’s Guomindang forces fled Nanjing and the Red Army crossed the Yangtze, and in midyear the Vietnamese dispatched about a thousand men to southern China to attack Guomindang units in collaboration with local CCP troops. To senior CCP leaders, never as bothered as Stalin had been by Ho’s dissolution of the party in 1945, it was a welcome sign of the Viet Minh’s internationalist commitment.

In mid-1949, as the Chinese Communists publicly proclaimed their determination to “lean to one side” in the Cold War and their rejection of Titoism, Liu Shaoqi, the CCP’s second in command, traveled to Moscow for secret meetings with Kremlin leaders, including Stalin. A key item of discussion was the Vietnamese revolution and how to respond to it. Stalin, showing again his lack of interest in Southeast Asia, expressed his desire to see the CCP take primary responsibility for providing support for the Viet Minh. Liu Shaoqi agreed, and he promised a skeptical Stalin that Ho Chi Minh was a true internationalist at heart. Mao Zedong offered the same assurance when he held talks with Stalin in Moscow on Christmas Eve. That same day Liu Shaoqi, now back in Beijing, chaired a Politburo meeting to discuss Indochina policy. Any decision to assist the Viet Minh would exact a price, he told his colleagues, since the French government had not yet decided whether to grant diplomatic recognition to the new China and would obviously be offended should Beijing opt to recognize the DRV. Nevertheless the Politburo decided to invite a Viet Minh delegation to the Chinese capital for consultations, and to send a senior commander of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), Luo Guibo, to Vietnam as the CCP’s general representative.

The following week Ho Chi Minh set out on foot for the Chinese frontier, dressed in his now-familiar khaki suit. He traveled under the name Ding. For seventeen days he walked, arriving at Guangxi on about January 20, 1950. On January 30, he arrived in Beijing. Mao was still in Moscow, but Liu Shaoqi assured Ho that major assistance would be forthcoming, including diplomatic recognition.

From Beijing, Ho continued on to Moscow, arriving in the Soviet capital by train on February 10. Mao was still there, having himself gotten his fill of both the bitterly cold Russian winter and Stalin’s vast reservoir of distrust. The Kremlin leader had long thought Mao unreliable, an ersatz Communist whose motives were always to be questioned. As early as 1940, Stalin had complained that the CCP was largely a peasant organization that gave far too little role to the working class. He referred to Mao as that “cave-dweller-like Marxist,” whose ideas were primitive and who—like Ho Chi Minh—was probably, underneath it all, much more nationalist than internationalist. It mattered not that the CCP had supported Moscow in excluding Tito from the Cominform in 1948; Stalin still considered Mao and Ho both to be closet Titos. “He mistrusted us,” Mao later complained, speaking of Stalin’s view of the CCP. “He thought our revolution was a fake.”

Of course, Stalin’s own nationalism had something to do with his stance, as did his security priorities emerging out of World War II. For much of the Chinese civil war he adhered to a neutral position, calculating that a divided China served the USSR’s interests. As late as the beginning of 1949, he had urged Mao not to send his forces across the Yangtze but to be content with holding the northern half of the country. This was prudent, he said, to avoid provoking the United States. But as Communist troops continued to advance and victory became assured, Stalin shifted his rhetoric. He now praised Mao as a “true Marxist leader” and during Mao’s visit agreed—though only after a delay of several weeks, during which the Chinese leader was left to seethe, half prisoner, half pampered guest, in Stalin’s personal dacha—to rescind the Sino-Soviet friendship treaty that Stalin had concluded with Chiang Kai-shek in favor of a new one with the PRC.

At Mao’s urging, Stalin agreed to meet with Ho Chi Minh. Still focused on European concerns and still distrustful of Ho, the Soviet leader affirmed his government’s recognition of the DRV but ruled out direct Soviet involvement in the war against the French. “There must be a division of labor between China and the Soviet Union,” Stalin said. As his government had to meet its commitments in Eastern Europe, it would be up to China to give Vietnam what she needed. “China won’t lose in this deal,” the Soviet leader added, “because even if it provides Vietnam with second-hand articles, it will be given new ones by the Soviet Union.” Ho Chi Minh pressed the issue, urging Stalin to sign the same treaty of alliance with the DRV that he had just signed publicly with Mao. Impossible, came the reply; Ho, after all, was in Moscow on a secret mission. Ho responded—perhaps in jest—that he could be flown around Moscow in a helicopter and then land with suitable publicity, to which Stalin replied: “Oh, you orientals. You have such rich imaginations.”

It was hardly the reception Ho had hoped for, but Mao promised him (both there and in Beijing, to which the two leaders returned on March 3) that the PRC would do her best “to offer all the military assistance Vietnam needed in its struggle against France.” He soon set about making good on his word. For Mao, the Vietnamese struggle represented an opportunity to promote the Chinese model for revolution and also served his country’s national security interests. Like so many Chinese rulers before him, he sought to keep neighboring areas from being in hostile hands, and he worried in particular that the United States might become more involved—whether in Indochina, in the Taiwan strait, or in the increasingly tense Korean peninsula.

Personal ties between Ho and senior Chinese Communists may have made a difference too. Already in the early 1920s, while in Paris, Ho had met CCP leaders such as Zhou Enlai, Wang Ruofi, and Li Fuchun; later, it will be recalled, he spent time in Canton (Guangzhou) assisting Mikhail Borodin, the Comintern representative to the new Chinese revolutionary government led by the Nationalist Party. In Canton he had also engaged in various anticolonial activities, including teaching a political training class for Vietnamese youth. Among the guest speakers he invited in: Zhou Enlai and Liu Shaoqi. Fluent in Chinese, Ho later translated Mao’s study “On Protracted War” from Chinese into French.

Now, a quarter of a century later, Ho could board the train for the trip home secure in the knowledge that he had Chinese backing for his cause. But he also must have had feelings of ambivalence as he looked out the window of his train car, contemplating what lay ahead. The Sino-Soviet recognition of his government, however necessary, was certain to alienate a lot of Vietnamese moderates, after all, and limit Vietnam’s room for maneuver with respect to non-Communist Asia. It also would isolate the DRV from the United States, Britain, and Japan and drastically increase the danger of a major American intervention on the side of Bao Dai and the French. A certain degree of independence had been lost. At various points in 1949, Ho had denied publicly that his government was about to identify itself with either the CCP or Stalin’s Russia. In a radio interview with American journalist Harold Isaacs, for example, he ridiculed the notion of the Viet Minh falling under Soviet or Chinese domination and vowed that independence would come through the DRV’s own efforts. For that matter, could the Chinese Communists really be trusted? Notwithstanding the toasts and vows of eternal friendship in Beijing, mutual suspicions remained, including on Ho’s part.

From Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam, by Fredrik Logevall (Random House, 2012), Kindle pp. 290-293:

BROADER INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENTS ALSO SHAPED ACHESON’S thinking on Vietnam in 1949. He began to pay more attention to Southeast Asia’s economic potential, particularly in terms of facilitating Japan’s recovery. Given the instability in China, Washington planners deemed it absolutely essential to secure a stable, prosperous Japan under U.S. control. Southeast Asia, rich in rice, tin, oil, and minerals, and with a population of 170 million (bigger than the United States), could play a principal role in this endeavor. George F. Kennan, head of the Policy Planning Staff, influenced Acheson in this direction, as did the young Dean Rusk, deputy undersecretary of state and a man Acheson asked to take on a larger role in Asian policy. The maintenance of a pro-Western Southeast Asia, they and other government analysts argued, would provide the markets and resources necessary for Japan’s economic revival—and help the recovery of Western Europe (by then well under way, but showing signs of a slowdown) as well. According to Rusk, the importation of rice from Indochina, for example, could be a terrific boon in securing Japan’s revitalization.

Then, in the second half of the year, came two momentous developments: In August, the Soviet Union for the first time detonated an atomic device; and in September, Mao Zedong’s forces completed their rout of Chiang Kai-shek’s Guomindang. Specialists had known that it was only a matter of time before Stalin got the bomb, but most thought the time would be the early or mid-1950s, not August 1949. The implications were huge (if not quite as enormous as some doomsayers in Washington proclaimed). It meant the end of the U.S. atomic monopoly and immediately raised fears that Stalin might embark on an aggressive course to expand his global reach. That worrisome thought only gained more currency the next month, when Mao Zedong consolidated his victory in China. Here neither the event nor the timing was a surprise to specialists—Nanjing had fallen in April, Shanghai in May, and Changsha in August—but for ordinary Americans it was sobering to hear Mao dramatically declare, from the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Beijing, the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Chiang and the remnants of his army fled to Formosa (now Taiwan).

Though some senior U.S. officials, Acheson among them, believed that the USSR and Mao’s government would ultimately experience a rift, in the short term the dangers seemed all too real. Instantly, the number of major Communist foes had doubled. As a report by the National Security Council (NSC) had put it in June, “the extension of Communist authority in China represents a grievous political defeat for us.… If Southeast Asia is also swept by Communism, we shall have suffered a major political rout the repercussions of which will be felt throughout the rest of the world, especially in the Middle East and in a then critically exposed Australia.… The colonial-nationalist conflict provides a fertile field for subversive Communist movements, and it is now clear that Southeast Asia is the target for a coordinated offensive directed by the Kremlin.”

There was in fact no such coordinated offensive. Stalin’s interest in Southeast Asia remained minimal, it was soon clear, and his feelings about the Chinese developments were decidedly mixed. Still, U.S. leaders could be forgiven for thinking that Communism was on the march in the region. In addition to Mao in China and Ho in Vietnam, there were Communist-led rebellions in Indonesia, in newly independent Burma, in Malaya, and in the Philippines. All four rebellions would fail in due course, but in late 1949 their mere existence fueled American fears. Did the historical momentum now lie with the Communists? Even if it didn’t in objective terms, might the perception gain hold that it did, producing a bandwagon effect that could have a pernicious impact on American national security interests? It seemed all too possible.

The NSC report, with its warnings of the far-reaching consequences—the Middle East! Australia!—of a loss of Southeast Asia, was an early version of what would come to be known as the domino theory. Knock over one game piece, and the rest would inevitably topple. For the next twenty-five years, high U.S. officials, on both the civilian and the military sides, in both Republican and Democratic administrations, linked the outcome in Vietnam to a chain reaction of regional and global effects, arguing that defeat in Vietnam would have calamitous consequences not merely for that country but for the rest of Southeast Asia and perhaps beyond. Though the nature and cogency of the domino theory shifted over time, the core claim remained the same: If Vietnam was allowed to “fall,” other countries would inevitably follow suit.

From Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam, by Fredrik Logevall (Random House, 2012), Kindle pp. 222-225:

Whatever date one chooses for the start of the First Vietnam War—September 1945, with the outbreak of fighting in Cochin China, or November–December 1946, with the conflagration in Tonkin—by the start of 1947 there was fighting throughout Vietnam. Both sides had taken the necessary steps toward war, and in hindsight it’s tempting to see the whole thing as inevitable, especially after the failure of the Fontainebleau talks. But wars are never inevitable; they depend on the actions of individual leaders who could have chosen differently, who had, if not a menu of options, then at least an alternative to large-scale violence.

Yet if it takes actions by two sides to make a war, both sides are not always equally culpable. And if it’s true that the Vietnamese fired the first shots on December 19, ultimately France bears primary responsibility for precipitating the conflict. D’Argenlieu, dubbed the “Bloody Monk” by the left-wing press in Paris, had enormous power to formulate policy, often without consulting Paris, and as we have seen, he thwarted the prospects for a negotiated solution at several junctures in 1946; he seemed determined to provoke the Hanoi government into full-scale hostilities. D’Argenlieu, upon returning from a brief visit to France in late December 1946, vowed that France would never relinquish her hold on Indochina. The granting of independence, he declared, “would only be a fiction deeply prejudicial to the interests of the two parties.”

It would be too much, however, to call this “D’Argenlieu’s War.” The high commissioner’s core objective—to keep Indochina French—was broadly shared among officials in Paris as well as colons in Saigon and Hanoi. It is striking, the degree to which all parts of the political spectrum in France in 1945–46 shared the conviction that Indochina ought to remain within the French colonial empire. The left, to be sure, favored bona fide negotiations with Hanoi, but both the SFIO and the PCF were adamant that they did not want to see France reduced to what the Communist newspaper L’Humanité called “her own small metropolitan community.” Both attached importance to reclaiming and maintaining French prestige and saw the preservation of the empire as essential to that task. The Socialists, who dominated French politics in the crucial early postwar years, professed opposition to d’Argenlieu’s efforts to sabotage the March 6 Accords, but in practice they tolerated his actions, just as they tolerated Valluy’s provocations in Haiphong and Hanoi; at the Fontainebleau talks, the Socialist representatives were as intransigent as any on the French side. PCF leaders, meanwhile, despite becoming the largest party in the November 1946 elections (taking 28 percent and 170 deputies), kept a low profile on Indochina in the critical weeks thereafter, anxious as they were to appear a moderate and patriotic force.

Even Léon Blum, a broad-thinking humanist and fundamentally decent man who genuinely despaired at the onset of war, could say at once on December 23, less than a week into the Battle of Hanoi, that the old colonial system was finished and that renewed negotiations were possible only once “order” was restored. Minister of Overseas France Marius Moutet likewise said there could be no talks without an “end to terrorism.”

Most important of all in this constellation of voices on the French political scene was the MRP under Georges Bidault, which opposed not only negotiations with Ho but the granting of independence to any Vietnamese regime. Thrust into the heart of government not long after liberation, the MRP would maintain a tight hold on foreign and colonial policy for years to come and as such would hold extraordinary sway over the speed and complexion of imperial reform. As a group, the party’s leaders lacked experience in colonial affairs, and its senior figures—Bidault, Robert Schuman, and René Pleven—adhered to a rigid and intransigent colonial policy that stood in marked contrast to their often supple and forward-thinking approach to European affairs.

French public opinion, meanwhile, did not register significant opposition to the use of military force in Indochina. Information, for one thing, was hard to come by. In 1946, French newspapers did not have their own correspondents in Indochina, which left journalists dependent on the Associated Press and Agence France-Presse (AFP) for news. D’Argenlieu, deeply suspicious of independent journalism, maintained strict control over the AFP, making it in essence a government propaganda arm. Not surprisingly, therefore, the six main Paris dailies did little in-depth reporting in November and December and generally blamed the Vietnamese for the outbreak of violence. On November 28, after the French bombardment of Haiphong had leveled parts of the city and killed thousands, Le Monde’s Rémy Roure assured readers that, from the French side, “not a single shot had been fired, except in defense.”

Looming large over the entire process was one man: Charles de Gaulle. Though technically absent from the political stage after January 1946, his influence remained enormous, as historian Frédéric Turpin’s careful research makes clear. As leader of the Free French, he had possessed the power in 1944–45 to foil the plans of his country’s colonial lobby; he did not do so. Indeed, the general’s policy during and after World War II had been to reclaim Indochina for France, on the grounds that French grandeur demanded it. The choice of Admiral d’Argenlieu for high commissioner had been his. He, no one else, instructed d’Argenlieu and Leclerc to be uncompromising in their dealings with Vietnamese nationalists and to prepare to use force. During the conference at Fontainebleau, de Gaulle pressed Bidault to resist giving in to Vietnamese demands, and he announced publicly his conviction that France must remain “united with the territories which she opened to civilization,” lest she lose her great power status. Throughout the autumn, he stuck firmly to this position, and in the November-December crisis, he maintained staunch backing for d’Argenlieu’s uncompromising posture. On December 17, de Gaulle hosted the admiral for more than three hours at his home in Colombey-les-Deux-Églises and assured him that as far as Indochina was concerned, it was d’Argenlieu and not the government that represented France.

A week later d’Argenlieu, now back in Saigon, expressed satisfaction with the turn of events. “Personally,” he wrote in his diary, “I have since September 1945 loyally executed the policy of agreement in Indochina. It has borne fruit everywhere, except with the Hanoi government. It’s over.”

It was anything but.

From Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam, by Fredrik Logevall (Random House, 2012), Kindle pp. 158-164:

Although an ICP-dominated “Committee of the South,” led by Tran Van Giau, had seized control of the city and other parts of Cochin China, its control was precarious. Until early September, order was maintained, despite grumbling from the Cao Dai, the Hoa Hao, and the Trotskyites over Tran Van Giau’s decision to negotiate with French representative Jean Cédile (the latter having parachuted into Cochin China on August 22). As the futility of the talks became widely known—the Viet Minh would discuss the country’s future ties to France only on condition that the French first recognize Vietnam’s independence, which Cédile refused to do—the frustration boiled over. French residents, afraid of losing their colonial privileges, braced for a struggle, while political skirmishing among the rival Vietnamese groups increased. In short order, Giau and the committee lost control of events.

Even worse, they did so precisely at the moment when Allied troops were about to arrive in Saigon. The first contingent of British troops, largely comprising Nepalese Gurkhas and Muslims from the Punjab and Hyderabad in the Twentieth Indian Division, entered the city on September 12. On every street hung large banners: “Vive les Alliés,” “Down with French Imperialism,” “Long Live Liberty and Independence.” The troops’ orders were to disarm the Japanese and to maintain law and order. More broadly, though, British officials, in London as well as in Saigon, saw their task as facilitating a French return. Unlike in the Middle East, where France was a rival to British interests, in Southeast Asia she was a de facto ally, a partner in preserving European colonial control in the region.

As ever, London strategists had to tread carefully, so as not to offend anticolonial sentiment in the United States or complicate relations with China. “We should avoid at all costs laying ourselves open to the accusation that we are assisting the West to suppress the East,” one junior official observed. “Such an accusation will rise readily to the lips of the Americans and Chinese and would be likely to create an unfavorable impression throughout Asia.” Other British analysts expressed similar concerns. But the course to be traveled was never in doubt. A failure to bolster the French in Vietnam could cause chaos in the country and also spur dissidence in Britain’s possessions—two very frightening prospects indeed. Hence the fundamental British objective: to get French troops into Indochina as quickly as possible, and then withdraw British forces with dispatch.

The man assigned to this task, Major General Douglas Gracey, commander of the Twentieth, has been described by historians as miscast for his role, in view of his pro-French bias and his paternalistic philosophy that “natives” should not defy Europeans. An unreconstructed colonialist, born in and of the empire, Gracey had spent his whole career with the Indian Army. “The question of the government of Indochina is exclusively French,” he said before leaving for Vietnam. “Civil and military control by the French is only a matter of weeks.” But if Gracey was unusual for his forthrightness, his thinking was fully within the mainstream of British official thinking in the period. Thus Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin could tell the Chinese ambassador in September: “We naturally assumed that Indo-China would return to France.” And thus Anthony Eden could recall that “an Anglo-Indian force under General Gracey occupied the southern half of the country until the French were able to resume control.”

Still, it cannot be denied that Gracey by his initial actions in Saigon exacerbated an already-tense situation. His nickname was “Bruiser,” and it fit. When he arrived at Tan Son Nhut airfield aboard an American C-47 on September 13, he walked straight past the Viet Minh delegation waiting patiently by the tarmac and departed in the company of a group of Japanese soldiers. Gracey refused to meet Viet Minh leaders in the days thereafter, and indeed ordered that they be evicted from the former Governor-General’s Palace. “They came to see me and said ‘welcome’ and all that sort of thing,” he later said. “It was an unpleasant situation and I promptly kicked them out. They were obviously communists.”

On the twenty-first, following more unrest, Gracey proclaimed martial law. He banned public meetings and demonstrations, imposed a curfew, and closed down the Vietnamese press—even as he allowed French newspapers to continue to publish. Looters and saboteurs, he said, would be summarily shot. In effect the nationalist government was being shut down. The next day, encouraged by Cédile, Gracey released and rearmed more than a thousand excitable French soldiers. The soldiers, their ranks swollen by angry French civilians, promptly set about terrorizing any Vietnamese they encountered. Hundreds were beaten and jailed, and some Committee of the South members were hanged. One French woman who sympathized with the Viet Minh had her hair shaved off like those who collaborated with the Germans in metropolitan France. By midmorning on the twenty-third, the French flag was once more flying from most important buildings.

It was, in the words of one Briton on the scene, a coup d’état ....

Another observer, the Paris-based photojournalist Germaine Krull, who had arrived with the first contingent of Gurkhas on September 12, noted with disgust in her diary the sight of “these men, who were supposed to be the soldiers of France, this undisciplined horde whose laughing and singing I could hear from my window, corrupted by too many years in the tropics, too many women, too much opium and too many months of inactivity in the camp,” and who were now wandering through the streets “as if celebrating 14 July, their guns slung over their shoulders, cigarettes dangling from their lips.” On the rue Catinat she observed “soldiers driving before them a group of Annamites bound, slave-fashion to a long rope. Women spat in their faces. They were on the verge of being lynched.” That night Krull “realized only too well what a serious mistake we had made and how grave the consequences would be.… Instead of regaining our prestige we had lost it forever, and, worse still, we had lost the trust of the few remaining Annamites who believe in us. We had showed them that the new France was even more to be feared than the old one.”

...

Gracey, angered by the brutality of these “tough men,” ordered the former detainees back to barracks as punishment, but the damage was done: Viet Minh leaders on the twenty-fourth mobilized a massive general strike that paralyzed Saigon. French civilians barricaded their houses or sought refuge in the old Continental Hotel. Bursts of gunfire and the thuds of mortar rounds could be heard throughout the city, as Viet Minh squads attacked the airport and stormed the local jail to liberate hundreds of Vietnamese prisoners. At dawn on the twenty-fifth, Vietnamese bands of various political stripes slipped past Japanese guards in the Cité Herault section of town and massacred scores of French and Eurasian civilians, among them many women and children.

Thus began, it could be argued, the Vietnamese war of liberation against France. It would take several more months before the struggle would extend to the entire south, and more than a year before it also engulfed Hanoi and the north, which is why historians typically date the start of the war as late 1946. But this date, September 23, 1945, may be as plausible a start date as any.

From Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam, by Fredrik Logevall (Random House, 2012), Kindle pp. 135-137:

When Ho entered the city on August 26, it was for the first time. He had risen from his provincial Nghe An upbringing to travel to the far reaches of the globe—to Paris, to London, to New York City—and to become a nationalist leader, yet only now, at age fifty-five, did he set foot in his country’s cultural and political center. Almost four decades the journey had taken. In the immediate sense, the trip had started four days earlier, when Ho left Tan Trao by foot and by boat, bound for the capital. Still weak from his illness, he had to be carried part of the way on a stretcher, and after crossing the Red River on the twenty-fifth, the entourage halted in the northern suburbs of Hanoi. The next day, accompanied by Party Secretary Truong Chinh in a commandeered car, Ho crossed the Doumer Bridge and made for a three-story row house on Hang Nhang Street, in the Chinese section of town.

It was a heady time for Ho Chi Minh and his comrades, the critical stage of what would become known as the August Revolution. Things had moved rapidly since news reached Tonkin of the atomic bombings and Japan’s collapse. Already on August 11, as rumors circulated that Tokyo was about to surrender, members of the Indochinese Communist Party regional committee began to prepare for an insurrection to seize Hanoi from the Japanese. Two days later Viet Minh leaders from many parts of the country met in Tan Trao to the north for a previously scheduled party conference (to be known in history as the Ninth Plenum) and reached a resolution that a nationwide insurrection should occur immediately to bring about an independent republic under the leadership of the Viet Minh. Using the name Nguyen Ai Quoc for the last time, Ho issued an “appeal to the people.” “Dear fellow countrymen!” he declared. “The decisive hour has struck for the destiny of our people. Let all of us stand up and rely on our own strength to free ourselves. Many oppressed peoples the world over are vying with each other in wresting back independence. We should not lag behind. Forward! Forward! Under the banner of the Viet Minh, let us valiantly march forward!”

Much more than they would later acknowledge, Viet Minh leaders rode to power on the wave of suffering in the north, caused by the famine that had hit earlier in the year and further strengthened by the overthrow of the French and the defeat of the Japanese. In official Vietnamese historiography, this dimension is largely absent; Ho and his colleagues are depicted as the masters of events, directing developments from the top. Their decisions and actions were important, but there is no question that they were beneficiaries of an upswell of protest from below.

Throughout the third week of August, Viet Minh forces took control in towns and villages in various parts of Annam and Tonkin. Resistance was usually minimal, as local authorities simply handed over power to the insurgents and as Japanese forces, now part of a defeated empire, stayed neutral. In Hanoi on August 19, Viet Minh forces seized control of all important public buildings except the Japanese-guarded Bank of Indochina, and announced their seizure of power from a balcony of what was then and remains today the Hanoi Opera House. For the first time since Francis Garnier seized it for France in 1873, the city was in Vietnamese hands. In Hue, Emperor Bao Dai announced he would support a government led by Ho Chi Minh, but a mass rally in Hanoi demanded that he abdicate his throne. He did so on August 25, declaring his support for the Viet Minh regime and handing over the imperial sword to the new national government, with all the legitimacy that that symbolic act conferred.

From Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam, by Fredrik Logevall (Random House, 2012), Kindle pp. 102-103, 105-106:

SHORTLY AFTER SIX P.M. ON MARCH 9, 1945, A VISITOR ARRIVED AT the opulent Saigon offices of the French governor-general, Admiral Jean Decoux. It was Shunichi Matsumoto, Japan’s ambassador to Indochina, there ostensibly for the purpose of signing a previously worked-out agreement concerning rice supplies and French financial support for Japanese troops. As the signing ceremony ended, Matsumoto asked Decoux to linger for a private conversation. Matsumoto appeared nervous, the Frenchman later recalled, “something rare in an Asiatic.” It soon became clear why: Tokyo had ordered the ambassador to present an ultimatum, which required unconditional French acceptance no later than nine o’clock that same evening. The entire colonial administration, including army, navy, police, and banks, were to be placed under Japanese command.

For almost five years, Decoux had dreaded the arrival of this moment. Ever since he took office, in July 1940, his overriding objective had been to preserve French sovereignty over Indochina, at least in a nominal sense, so that after the armistice the colony could still be a jewel in the empire. Now Tokyo had issued a demand that, if agreed to, would abolish French colonial control over Indochina. Decoux played for time, but Matsumoto did not budge—the deadline was firm. The Frenchman consulted with several associates, and at 8:45 sent a letter via messenger urging a continuation of the discussions beyond the nine o’clock deadline. The letter carrier went to the wrong building, and it was not until 9:25 that he could at last present the letter to Matsumoto. By then, reports of fighting in Hanoi and Haiphong had already come in. Matsumoto scanned the document, declared, “This is doubtless a rejection,” and ordered the Japanese military machine into action.

It was a carefully planned campaign, code-named Operation Bright Moon. Ever since October 1944, when U.S. forces began their reconquest of the Philippine Islands, the Japanese Military Command had feared that the Allies would use the islands to invade Indochina in order to cut off Japan from her forces in Southeast Asia. And indeed, South East Asia Command (SEAC), based in Kandy, Ceylon, under British admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, viewed Indochina as an increasingly important theater of operations. Bombers of the U.S. Fourteenth Air Force under Major General Claire L. Chennault operating from South China regularly attacked Japanese targets in Vietnam, sometimes ranging as far south as Saigon to hit ports and rail centers. To add to Tokyo’s concerns, French resistance inside Indochina appeared to be growing, and the Decoux regime seemed clearly to be switching its allegiance from Vichy to de Gaulle’s Free France. The concerns grew in January 1945, when American forces attacked Luzon in the Philippines. In conjunction with this attack, Admiral William F. Halsey, commander of the U.S. Third Fleet, launched a brief but devastating naval raid along the Indochina coast between Cam Ranh Bay and Qui Nhon, in order to deflect Japanese attention from Admiral Nimitz’s advance on Iwo Jima and Okinawa. The Japanese Thirty-eighth Army responded with a major reinforcement of garrisons in Indochina, especially in Tonkin, Annam, and Laos.

...

Viewed in totality, the available evidence—including the MAGIC intercepts—suggests strongly that Tokyo officials, increasingly resigned to the inevitability of defeat in the war, saw a takeover in Indochina as giving them a stronger position either for negotiation or for fanatic resistance. It’s also clear that their task was made easier by the chronic inability of French Resistance forces to keep their activities and plans secret. Many colons openly expressed their support for the Resistance, and French soldiers collected arms dropped in the countryside and deposited them in arsenals in full view of the Japanese. Portraits of de Gaulle even hung in the public offices of the French High Command. On top of all that, the Japanese had cracked the French codes and were reading all the French ciphers. Their surveillance of French activities was child’s play, and on the evening of March 9 they had their troops ready in strategic positions to negate the anticipated French moves.

Certainly the French were taken by surprise, even though they had drawn up plans to counter just this kind of Japanese thrust and even though intelligence reports had warned that an attack might be imminent. One by one that evening their garrisons fell. Almost without exception, the senior French commanders were captured in their homes or in those of Japanese officers with whom they were dining (the meal invitations being part of the ruse). In Saigon, Japanese forces moved immediately on Decoux’s palace and seized him as well as several other high-ranking French ministers. Throughout Indochina, they took over administrative buildings and public utilities and seized radio stations, banks, and industries. Public beatings and executions of colonial officials occurred in numerous locales, and there were widespread reports of French women being raped by Japanese soldiers—including in Bac Giang province, where the province résident’s wife was gang-raped.

From Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam, by Fredrik Logevall (Random House, 2012), Kindle pp. 59-60:

On August 29, Vichy concluded an agreement with Japan that recognized Japan’s “preeminent position” in the Far East and granted Tokyo special economic privileges in Indochina. Japan also received transit facilities in Tonkin, subject to agreement between the military officials on the spot. In exchange, Japan recognized the “permanent French interests in Indochina.” Negotiations continued in Hanoi in September and went slowly, as French negotiator General Maurice Martin held out hope for an American naval intervention that would cause Japan to scale down her demands. Increasingly impatient, the Japanese warned Martin that Japanese troops from the Twenty-second Army, based in Nanning, would enter Indochina at 10 P.M. on September 22, whatever the outcome of the negotiations. At 2:30 P.M. on the twenty-second, the negotiators signed an agreement authorizing the Japanese to station 6,000 troops in Tonkin north of the Red River; to use three Tonkin airfields; and to send up to 25,000 men through Tonkin into Yunnan in southern China.

The agreement stipulated that the first Japanese units would arrive by sea. But the Twenty-second Army was intent on moving its elite Fifth Infantry Division across the Chinese border near Lang Son at precisely 10 P.M. Not long after crossing the frontier, the Japanese units became engaged in a fierce firefight near the French position at Dong Dang. Almost immediately, skirmishing also began at other frontier posts. For two days the battle raged, with the key French position of Lang Son falling on the twenty-fifth. The French forces had suffered a major defeat—two posts were gone, casualties were significant (estimates run to 150 dead on the French side), and hundreds of Indochinese riflemen deserted in the course of the battle. It might have been much worse had not Decoux and Baudouin appealed directly to Tokyo and had not the emperor personally ordered his troops to halt their advance. The Japanese apologized for the incident and termed it a “dreadful mistake,” but they had made their point: Governor-General Decoux and the French might still be the rulers of Indochina, but they operated at the mercy of Japan.

Decoux did his best to pretend otherwise. To anyone who would listen, he claimed that the Japanese were not an occupying force but were merely stationed in the country; that the French administration functioned freely and without impediment; and that the police and security services were solely in French hands. The tricolor, he noted, continued to fly over his headquarters in Hanoi. And indeed, French authority in Indochina remained formidable, as Ho Chi Minh and the Indochinese Communist Party learned firsthand in the fall of 1940. Sensing opportunity with the fall of France in June, the ICP in the autumn launched uprisings in both Tonkin and Cochin China against French authorities, only to be brutally crushed. In Cochin China, the French used their few aircraft as well as armored units and artillery to destroy whole villages, killing hundreds in the process. Up to eight thousand people were detained, and more than one hundred ICP cadres were executed. Not until early 1945 would the party’s southern branch recover from this defeat.

From Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam, by Fredrik Logevall (Random House, 2012), Kindle pp. 15-17:

FEW TOPICS IN CONTEMPORARY HISTORY have been studied and analyzed and debated more than the Vietnam War. The long and bloody struggle, which killed in excess of three million Vietnamese and wreaked destruction on huge portions of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, has inspired a vast outpouring of books, articles, television documentaries, and Hollywood movies, as well as scholarly conferences and college courses. Nor is there any reason to believe the torrent of words will slow anytime soon, given the war’s immense human and material toll and given its deep—and persisting—resonance in American politics and culture. Yet remarkably, we still do not have a full-fledged international account of how the whole saga began, a book that takes us from the end of World War I, when the future of the European colonial empires still seemed secure, through World War II and then the Franco–Viet Minh War and its dramatic climax, to the fateful American decision to build up and defend South Vietnam. Embers of War is an attempt at such a history. It is the story of one Western power’s demise in Indochina and the arrival of another, of a revolutionary army’s stunning victory in 1954 in the face of immense challenges, and of the failure of that victory to bring lasting peace to Vietnam. To put it a different way, it is the story of how [U.S. soldiers] Dale Buis and Chester Ovnand came to be stationed and meet their fates in a far-off land that many of their compatriots barely knew existed.

But it’s not merely as a prelude to America’s Vietnam debacle that the earlier period merits our attention. Straddling as it did the twentieth century’s midpoint, the French Indochina War sat at the intersection of the grand political forces that drove world affairs during the century. Thus Indochina’s experience between 1945 and 1954 is intimately bound up with the transformative effects of the Second World War and the outbreak and escalation of the Cold War, and in particular with the emergence of the United States as the predominant power in Asian and world affairs. And thus the struggle is also part of the story of European colonialism and its encounter with anticolonial nationalists—who drew their inspiration in part from European and American ideas and promises. In this way, the Franco–Viet Minh War was simultaneously an East-West and North-South conflict, pitting European imperialism in its autumn phase against the two main competitors that gained momentum by midcentury—Communist-inspired revolutionary nationalism and U.S.-backed liberal internationalism. If similar processes played out across much of the globe after 1945, Vietnam deserves special study because it was one of the first places where this destructive dynamic could be seen. It was also where the dynamic remained in place, decade after bloody decade.

My goal in this book is to help a new generation of readers relive this extraordinary story: a twentieth-century epic featuring life-and-death decisions made under profound pressure, a vast mobilization of men and resources, and a remarkable cast of larger-than-life characters ranging from Ho Chi Minh to Charles de Gaulle to Dean Acheson to Zhou Enlai, from Bao Dai to Anthony Eden to Edward Lansdale to Ngo Dinh Diem, as well as half a dozen U.S. presidents. Throughout, the focus is on the political and diplomatic dimensions of the struggle, but I also devote considerable space to the military campaigns that, I maintain, were crucial to the outcome. Laos and Cambodia enter the narrative at various points, but I give pride of place to developments in Vietnam, far more populous and politically important than her Indochinese neighbors.

From Sihanoukville: Rise and Fall of a Frontier City, by Ivan Franceschini, with photos by Roun Ry, Global China Pulse, September 2024:

From quiet seaside town known mostly as a backpacker destination, the place turned first into a booming frontier city with aspirations to become the ‘new Macau’ and then into a notorious haven for online scam operations. How did it come to this? How did a city once famous as a destination for low-end tourism turn into a hub for human trafficking and modern slavery linked to cybercrime?

Founded in the mid-1950s around a then new deep-water port funded by France and named after the late Cambodian king and long-term ruler Norodom Sihanouk (1922–2012), the Sihanoukville of old [once known as Kampong Som] is often remembered as an enchanted place. Youk Chhang (2021), director of the Documentation Centre of Cambodia, a nongovernmental organisation (NGO) that played a fundamental role in documenting the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge, has described how, when he was growing up in Cambodia in the 1960s, he used to hear about the city in popular music. Although he had never visited the place, his youthful fascination was also fuelled by the fact that Jacqueline Kennedy had travelled there in 1967 to inaugurate a boulevard named after her late husband, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. As his words in the epigraph to this essay show, his first visit to the city in the early 1990s did not disappoint.

I had a chance to visit Sihanoukville myself in the early 2010s and have some very distinct memories of a somnolent town of low-rise buildings, with seaside resorts beside white-sand beaches where one could lie in a hammock and simply relax. The temptation to nostalgia is strong. Yet, even at that time, it was widely known that, behind the beautiful scenery, the city was an imperfect paradise. Not only were certain areas a haven for sex tourists, including several notorious paedophiles, it was also a favourite haunt of a handful of Russian oligarchs and gangsters, who for years dominated the city with their extravagant behaviour and penchant for violence.

In the early 2010s, Sihanoukville was the long-term home of a growing community of about 200 former Soviet citizens and attracted as many as 5,000 to 6,000 Russian-speaking tourists every year (Plokhii 2011). They had their own Russian-language newspaper, a monthly Russian community meeting, at least six Russian restaurants, street signs in Russian, and a Russian-owned beachside disco. There were also plans to build the first Russian Orthodox church in the city, which came to fruition a few years later (Orthodox Christianity 2014). Money—often of uncertain provenance—was pouring in. Yet, the situation on the ground was quickly shifting as new Chinese investors began to eye the lucrative opportunities in the city.

In fact, China’s presence in Sihanoukville goes way back. Under the Khmer Rouge regime (1975–79), the city was the site of one of the main Chinese aid projects in what was then known as Democratic Kampuchea: the reactivation and expansion of an oil refinery that had been built by a French company in the 1960s and abandoned due to continuous attacks from Cambodian and Vietnamese communist insurgents and US bombing in May 1975.

In Brothers in Arms, Andrew Mertha (2014: Ch. 5) documents in painstaking detail the bureaucratic and personal challenges that Chinese workers faced as they attempted to rebuild the refinery—their long-ago voices resonating with the complaints of some of their successors of today as they bemoan the lack of skills of Cambodian co-workers and the impossibility of understanding who is in charge of what (Franceschini 2020). The refinery would never be completed, the project reaching a premature end due to the onslaught of the internal purges in the Khmer Rouge bureaucracy and then the Vietnamese invasion. As the Vietnamese forces entered Kampong Som, the place ‘became noteworthy’ as a ‘site of the disorganized and panic-ridden retreat of the Chinese’ (Mertha 2014: 117). Convinced by Khmer Rouge propaganda into believing that all was well on the Vietnam front, Chinese technicians and workers took a while to realise the impending danger. It was then too late for them to escape and as many as 200 became de facto prisoners of war.

Fast forward two decades. In the newly pacified Cambodia of the 1990s, Sihanoukville gained renewed importance as the country’s only deep-water port, which made it an important hub for international trade. In the new millennium, Chinese businesses began to gain a foothold in the city and the surrounding Preah Sihanouk Province. An important event in this sense was the establishment of the Sihanoukville Special Economic Zone—a development that would later be branded a landmark project of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in Cambodia (IDI 2021). A priority of both the Chinese and the Cambodian governments since its approval in 2006, the project showcased the alignment of their agendas in that period, with Cambodia prioritising the zone’s development to attract foreign capital to build its export capacities, and China eager to push its well-established manufacturers to head overseas and seek lower-cost production bases and explore access to foreign markets (Loughlin and Grimsditch 2020; Bo and Loughlin 2022).

The transformation of Sihanoukville began abruptly in the mid-2010s, accelerating around 2017, as online gambling operators set up shop in the city. They soon spread rapidly across Cambodia, but Sihanoukville was the perfect ___location: relatively good access to the capital, Phnom Penh, a functioning airport, and plenty of land—much of it already grabbed by local elites—available for purchase or rent; an already thriving in-person gambling industry; and very lax law enforcement. Possibly, it was made even more desirable by the impending construction of China-funded infrastructure, especially a new expressway that would connect the city to Phnom Penh, dramatically cutting travel time between the two cities.

Given these considerations, industry operators began to descend en masse on the city, investing not only in their online activities, but also in a host of new casinos, hotels, and entertainment venues, most of which were targeting the rapidly growing Chinese market. This generated a bubble that, at its peak in 2019, produced annual revenue conservatively estimated between 3.5 and 5 billion USD a year, 90 per cent of which came from online gambling (Turton 2020). The Chinese population in the city grew exponentially, as did the percentage of businesses owned by Chinese nationals, which in mid-2019 was a staggering 90 per cent of the total in the city (Hin 2019).

...

In January 2018, authorities in China launched a three-year campaign known as ‘sweeping away the black and eliminating the evil’ (扫黑除恶), to root out ‘underworld forces’ (Greitens 2020). Destinations like Sihanoukville likely presented an enticing prospect to gangsters trying to avoid the crackdown. It was around this time that reports of kidnappings, human trafficking, and forced labour to fuel the burgeoning online gambling and online scam industry in Sihanoukville started appearing with increasing frequency in Chinese-language media. As the presence of illicit online operations became better known, in July 2018, the Chinese Embassy in Cambodia released a warning about the ‘high-paying traps of online gambling recruitment’—one of the earliest instances of such advisories that we were able to locate (Chinese Embassy in Cambodia 2018). The embassy encouraged Chinese nationals who planned to come to Cambodia, especially young people, to be vigilant about offers of well-paid jobs as ‘typists’, ‘network technicians’, ‘network customer service’, and ‘network promotion’, regardless of whether these were promoted in online advertisements or introductions by friends or relatives.

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The day in 2019 when then prime minister Hun Sen announced the online gambling ban, 18 August, was a watershed moment for Sihanoukville. No-one was more aware of this than the Chinese nationals in Cambodia, who began to refer to the event simply as ‘818’—a supposedly auspicious number transformed into a symbol of doom. If up to that point the city’s economy was soaring, afterwards the edifice showed hints of cracking. Signs began to emerge that many operations had closed and rushed to relocate, dragging with them not only their workforce but also that of ancillary industries. According to some reports, an estimated 10,000 Chinese fled Sihanoukville in the space of a few days after the ban was announced (Inside Asian Gaming 2019). Reports followed of more Chinese leaving the city and Cambodia and, in January 2020, Cambodia’s Immigration Department revealed that about 447,000 Chinese nationals had left the kingdom (Ben 2020). While this is a huge number, there was no breakdown of how many of these departures were residents and how many were short-term visitors. During the same period there were 323,000 inbound Chinese travellers, meaning the net influx of Chinese was down by more than 100,000 people. While it is not possible to isolate any other potential factors that could have caused this drop, it can be assumed that 818 had an impact.

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Many Chinese developers decided to write off their losses and flee. Having lost faith in the future of the city and worried about the contractual obligations that bound them to pay exaggerated rents even in the face of an economy that was collapsing, many chose to evade their legal obligations and return to China. In so doing, they left behind hundreds of buildings at different stages of completion. On one hand, this spelled the ruin of local landowners, many of whom had sought to capitalise on the gambling-fuelled boom. As one of them complained to a journalist from Voice of Democracy (VoD) in July 2022: ‘I borrowed money to buy land worth more than $200,000 because I thought it was a great opportunity … We could earn $7,500 [per month]—why wouldn’t we dare to pay $2,000 per month [in loan repayments]? The banks were happy to lend money between $200,000 and $300,000’ (Mech 2022b). On the other hand, this caused mayhem among the Chinese and Cambodian workers employed on these sites, many of whom were not notified that their bosses had fled and continued to work for weeks or even months without being paid.

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I was in Sihanoukville between December 2019 and January 2020, right before the pandemic hit, and encountered several of these workers. While by that time many Cambodian workers had already returned to their homes in the provinces, having received the back salaries they were owed—which were much lower than those of their Chinese colleagues—or having given up on being paid at all, many of their Chinese counterparts were still stuck in the city. Many were living in conditions of destitution in the half-finished construction sites, unable to go home either because they did not have the money or because they were still clinging to the hope of retrieving the often-significant amounts they were owed. As I recounted at length elsewhere (Franceschini 2020), this was a heartbreaking experience.

... 

Although the online gambling ban had clear immediate impacts, paradoxically, this marked a point when awareness of the scale of the online industries and their associated crimes really came to the fore. Scam operations had existed for years in the city, discreetly hosted within the same operations that were home to ostensibly more legitimate gambling activities. As news emerged of the hardships occurring in Sihanoukville, it became clear that business was still booming in many of the larger hotel and casino-based online scam operations, and in the major compounds that proliferated across the city. Many companies providing real online gambling services (rather than rigged games or scams) likely left, and recently arrived scam operators and smaller players with less well-established connections probably got cold feet. However, at the same time, the compounds became increasingly secretive, and failing casinos converted premises to provide more space for online operations. In both cases, security increased and the movement of workers in and out became tightly restricted.

 From Into Siberia: George Kennan's Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia, by Gregory J. Wallance (St. Martin's Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 35-37:

Kennan never attended college because the Rebellion, as it was called in Norwalk [Ohio], broke out in 1861 and “turned all my thoughts, hopes and ambitions into a new channel.”

He was elated by the martial electricity in the air. “Patriotic by inheritance and training, and naturally adventurous, I was completely carried away by a desire to take part in the momentous struggle.” But he was too young to enlist without his father’s permission, which John Kennan was unwilling to give. He could only watch as friends joined the 55th Ohio Regiment, which mustered out in Norwalk in the early days of the war. In a festive atmosphere the ladies of Norwalk offered coffee, pies, and sweet cakes to the young soldiers of the 55th in their light blue trousers, dark blue jackets, and forage caps. Trains left Norwalk taking boys, who not long ago had been playing two-old-cat, to be cut down on battlefields from Second Bull Run to the Carolinas campaign.

Still anxious to prove his courage, George Kennan sought the equally dangerous position as a field operator in the newly formed United States Military Telegraph Corps. Despite the word “Military,” the Corps was a civilian unit whose superintendent reported to the secretary of war. By the end of the war, the Corps had built fifteen thousand miles of telegraph lines and transmitted over six million telegraph messages, which gave the Union a significant communications advantage over the Confederacy with its more limited telegraphic resources. President Lincoln was among the first to grasp the capacity of the telegraph to give him command and control from Washington over his forces in the field, a power no political leader had previously possessed without being on the battlefield.

Throughout the war Lincoln haunted the War Department’s telegraph office. He personally sent nearly one thousand telegrams to his commanders, some asking about troop dispositions in ongoing battles. “What became of our forces which held the bridge till twenty minutes ago, as you say?” Lincoln telegraphed during one battle. The incoming telegrams filled the telegraph office with blood and gore. “The wounded & killed is immense,” a field operator telegraphed to the War Department, where Lincoln paced anxiously during the Battle of Fredericksburg in 1862. “The battle rages furiously. Can hardly hear my instrument.”

From the War Department a vast network of telegraph wires stretched to every theatre of the war and onto battlefields. Before a battle, field operators weighed down with telegraphs, relays, and sounders; mules loaded with rolls of telegraph wire; and covered wagons crammed with nitric acid batteries, moved into position. They set up their instruments on hard-tack boxes beneath tent flys, and in just hours men had strung five or six miles of wire along poles, fence posts and tree branches, and sometimes over rivers to connect brigades or divisions with the commanding generals. A field operator once held the ends of a severed wire together in his bare hands and read a transmission from his tongue, which felt the shocks of the incoming dots and dashes.

Field operators were shot, blown up by artillery shells, and, when captured by Confederates, at risk of being executed as spies since they wore no military uniforms. Kennan could not entirely convince himself that he had the courage to be a field operator, but his doubts only made him more anxious to put his nerve to a supreme test. “Had I not camped out many a night—or at least many a morning—in the Big Woods?” he asked himself. “And was I not quite as familiar with firearms as most of the volunteers who were then going to the front?” He wrote Anson Stager, the superintendent of the Military Telegraph Corps, whom Kennan had met before the war when Stager was a senior Western Union official, asking to join as a field operator. Stager was too busy to respond and instead Kennan received a letter from another official advising him to defer joining the Corps and “wait and see what would happen.”

From What the Taliban Told Me, by Ian Fritz (Simon & Schuster, 2023), Kindle pp. 222-224:

ACCORDING TO MY OFFICIAL Air Force records, I do not have, and in fact have never had, PTSD. Formally receiving this diagnosis would have required an official admission that what I did and saw and heard was in fact traumatic and that it wasn’t normal, which would only have served to justify my reasons for not wanting to go back. You can see why the powers that be wouldn’t want to admit this. And while this diagnosis wasn’t true when the Air Force made it, it might be now. Time doesn’t heal all wounds—some simply can’t be treated—but eventually your mind can bring the edges together, and while the scar is ugly and imprecise, the gaping hole has, finally, closed. These days I can listen to Pashto without breaking out in a cold sweat, get on a plane without thinking about the guns that ought to be attached to it, and talk about war without wanting to curl up in a ball and die. This, then, is understood as meaning that my PTSD has been cured (never mind that curing something that was never supposed to have existed creates some mild metaphysical stickiness).

In the time since I wasn’t diagnosed, the military has embraced a different terminology to attempt to describe the turmoil that I and so many others experienced: moral injury. The idea of moral injury has been around since at least the 1980s, though the explicit term was coined by Jonathan Shay in the nineties, when his work with Vietnam veterans led to his writing Achilles in Vietnam. Today, Syracuse University’s Moral Injury Project not only defines moral injury but attempts to explain why and when it happens:

Moral injury is the damage done to one’s conscience or moral compass when that person perpetrates, witnesses, or fails to prevent acts that transgress one’s own moral beliefs, values, or ethical codes of conduct.

This is a good definition; it is thorough while simultaneously casting a wide enough net to embrace the myriad reasons any warfighter could suffer such an injury. Being a DSO allowed for perpetration, witnessing, and failure. Certainly, my moral code was violated. But I don’t think moral injury fully encompasses just what happened. It’s not that I, along with almost every other Pashto DSO, wasn’t morally injured. We were. But it’s not entirely accurate to say that there was “damage done to [my] conscience or moral compass.” It’s more like, along with the many men I killed, my consciousness was blown the fuck up.

With the exception of spies mythical and real, most warfighters throughout history have not been tasked with killing people they know. Even in our modern wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, the majority of killing is done by complete strangers. There is, I assume, a feeling of knowing associated with killing someone in close combat, even though you may have no knowledge of anything that defines that person as a unique human. But this is different from understanding what makes that person a person, from killing someone you know. With modernity came the ability to have this knowledge.

The most famous of these warriors are drone operators. These men and women face issues that I can’t begin to understand, as the cognitive dissonance that they experience is so strange as to be something out of science fiction. If anything, it seems that their injury is arguably worsened by the moral contradiction of being so far away from the “threat.”

From What the Taliban Told Me, by Ian Fritz (Simon & Schuster, 2023), Kindle pp. 230-234:

No single individual is held responsible for the people that our planes kill. It’s a crew effort. There is no ammunition without a loadmaster to balance the plane; a FCO [Fire Control Officer] can’t fire that ammunition without gunners loading the weapons; the gunners won’t ready the weapons till the sensor operators find a bad guy; the sensor operators couldn’t find that bad guy without pilots flying the plane; the pilots couldn’t have flown the plane to the ___location where the sensors found that bad guy without a navigator guiding them across the country; the navigator couldn’t have safely gotten across that country without an EWO [Electronic Warfare Officer] making sure no one hit the plane with a rocket; the EWO couldn’t have used his equipment without a flight engineer making sure everything was in working order.

I didn’t mention the role of DSOs because DSOs, while nice to have around, are not remotely necessary for a C-130 to carry out its mission. And so, if I heard something that proved to be the key piece of information that resulted in us shooting, a piece of information, that, if lacking, would have prevented us from shooting, then didn’t I kill someone on my own? Conversely, if I didn’t hear anything that was related to why we shot, then did I kill anyone at all?

The problem with this argument is that according to my official records I have in fact killed 123 people. The actual wording is “123 insurgents EKIA” (EKIA = enemy killed in action, so not quite people, but definitely killed). These records don’t say that I was part of a crew that killed these people, or that I supported other people who did the killing, just that I killed those 123 humans. I can’t know, and will never know, if all of these kills belong to me. I do know, and will always know, that I belong to all of them.

...

These are the things I wish I hadn’t heard.

If I hadn’t heard those things, infinity would have remained, well, infinite. I would have been able to tell myself that the Taliban were not men, were not even human, that they were in fact Enemies, whose only purpose was to be Killed in Action. If I hadn’t heard those things, I wouldn’t have loved the men I was listening to. If I hadn’t loved them, killing them would have been easy. If killing them had been easy, my consciousness would have remained intact.

To say that I loved the Taliban is surely anathema to most anyone who reads this. It doesn’t feel good, or right, for me to say it. But I checked, and of the many definitions that exist for the word love, one of them is the following: “strong affection for another arising out of kinship or personal ties.” I most certainly had personal ties to the men I was listening to; they told me shit they wouldn’t tell their best (non-Talib) friends, their wives, their fathers. And at some point, not because they were Talibs, in fact in spite of that, because they were human, I came to have the strong affection for them that I firmly believe it is impossible not to develop for virtually any other person if you can get past your own bullshit and just accept that they’re people too.

Let me be clear about something here: I in no way support the Taliban, their stated goals, their practices, or really anything about them. Nor do I support the individual men who comprise the greater Taliban. Their movement and many of their beliefs are an affront to modernity in all of its complicated, messy, but ultimately better than the shit that actively and gleefully removes myriad human rights from everyone who isn’t a God-fearing man, splendor. They are not the good guys.

None of these things detract from the fact that they’re still human. They’re still people. I have no desire for you to identify with them or wish for their lives to be spared. What I do ask is that you understand that I did identify with them. I had to. My job required it. All that talking with my teachers in language school, so I could figure out how they think? That’s what made me a good linguist. The translation we did isn’t something that can be done by a computer or a robot, it isn’t the simple transformation of the sounds of one language into another. You have to understand the intent, the tone, the playfulness, the fear, the anger, the confusion, all of the nuances that attach themselves to spoken words and drastically change their meanings.

It was impossible for me to do this without internalizing the speakers’ logic (it’s possible for others, but I don’t understand that process). It was also impossible, despite all this knowing and feeling, for me to wish for their lives to have been spared. To have spared their lives would have been to guarantee that many others would have been taken.