A Remorseless Apology for the Horrors of Vietnam

by Andrew Lam

Published on Monday, February 2, 2004 by the San Francisco Chronicle

Living in Vietnam during the war as a child, I witnessed enough of
American military power to know that no ideology or rationale can
justify killing more than 3 million civilians. So it is gratifying to
hear Robert S. McNamara, ex-secretary of defense under the Kennedy and
Johnson administrations and one of the principal architects of that war,
finally confess onscreen that he, too, thought it was a mistake for
Americans to go into Vietnam.

Yet as I watched "The Fog of War," the documentary by Errol Morris about
McNamara, I felt disappointed. McNamara is a highly intelligent man
living a kind of self-deception. While readily confessing that the war
was wrong, and that he knew it was wrong all along, he somehow absolves
himself just as quickly. Arrogantly, the ex-secretary of defense
suggests on camera that he did the best he could under the circumstances
and that, if he hadn’t been at the helm micromanaging the war’s first
half, things might have been far worse. Never mind that under his watch
the war widened and escalated.

I had hoped for an honest, gut-wrenching mea culpa. Instead, McNamara’s
elaborate explanation sounds like an excuse. Not once did he say "I’m
sorry" to the victims. His well-argued confessions seemed rehearsed and
disconnected from the emotional honesty one associates with remorse. It
is as if the head acknowledged that mistakes were made, but the heart
refused to feel the horrors that were unleashed.

Near the end of the film, McNamara talks about what he calls the fog of
war. "What the fog of war means," he says, "is that war is so complex
it’s beyond the ability of the human mind to comprehend all the
variables. Our judgment, our understanding are not adequate, and we kill
people unnecessarily. "

Errol Morris, known for his films "The Thin Blue Line" and "A Brief
History of Time," uses that statement to give the movie its title. In a
recent interview, Morris says, "I look at the McNamara story as ’the fog
of war ate my homework’ excuse." He adds: "After all, if war is so
complex, then no one is responsible."

While the Vietnamese are not free of blame for killing each other in
Vietnam’s bloody civil war, McNamara and his bosses, Presidents Kennedy
and Johnson, are clearly responsible for escalating it. McNamara kept
sending American troops to Vietnam while knowing deep in his heart that
the war was not winnable, and encouraged the South to continue fighting.

It is no wonder that South Vietnamese tell the story of their
relationship with America as one of spectacular betrayal. The United
States abandoned the South Vietnamese government in the middle of a war.
Many South Vietnamese officials died in communist gulags after the war’s
end, and more than 2 million Vietnamese fled overseas as boat people,
many ending up at the bottom of the sea. McNamara never made references
to the suffering of the South Vietnamese people as a direct cause of his
administration of the war, as if somehow an entire people have
conveniently ceased to exist.

Survivors of the Vietnam War now waiting for an apology from McNamara or
the U.S. government should not hold their breaths. McNamara left the
Johnson administration in 1967. Despite what he knew about the war, he
refused to speak out against it, and watched in silence as more body
bags came home.

Foggy or not, someone as smart as McNamara should know right from wrong.
If the secretary of defense knew it was wrong to continue the war, why
did he keep his silence until now, more than three decades later? Morris
asks him precisely that. "I’m not going to say any more than I have,"
McNamara responds. "These are the kinds of questions that get me in
trouble. You don’t know what I know about how inflammatory my words can
appear."

The documentary has a subtitle: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert
S. McNamara. One of them is "Believing and seeing are both often wrong."
What that means to McNamara is that doing the right thing turned out to
be an enormous error. To me, that means I can’t trust the man’s
confessions. It seems the fog hasn’t lifted at all for McNamara — it
has only thickened with the years.

Andrew Lam is a freelance writer and editor for Pacific News Service,
where this piece originated. He is the subject of a PBS documentary on
returning to Vietnam, "My Journey Home," to be aired April 7.