Free American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity by Christian G. Appy Page A

Truman endorsed the effort to drive the Communists all the way back to the Chinese border. The rapid achievement of that objective led to premature gloating. As soon as U.S. troops approached the border, in October 1950, 300,000 Chinese troops poured across in support of North Korea. Chinese intervention drove the forces under General Douglas MacArthur all the way back to the 38th parallel. The war stalemated there for two and a half more years until an armistice was finally agreed upon.
    General MacArthur claimed that Truman’s timidity prevented complete victory. Had the United States been willing to drop atomic bombs on North Korea and China, Communism might have been defeated throughout Korea and perhaps even in China. Not all officers shared MacArthur’s eagerness to go nuclear, but a large number did share his angry faith that victory had been denied them by their civilian bosses, that there was something fundamentally flawed about the very idea of limited warfare. Although the U.S. air attacks against North Korea were among the most ruthless and indiscriminate in military history, they had been “limited” to nonnuclear bombs and napalm, and did not target China. For many career officers, Korea left a profound resentment of how “politics” could inhibit their ability to do their job, a grievance that would deepen and fester during the Vietnam War and remain alive in institutional memory to the very present.
    However, the Korean experience, like the Vietnam War that followed, produced conflicting impulses within the military—a resentment of political “restraints”
and
a reluctance to go to war. Over drinks at the officers’ club there might be a lot of hostile invective aimed at spineless politicians, but when it came down to whether or not American troops should be sent to fight in Indochina, all but a few were opposed. In fact, the Pentagon was soon said to house an unofficial organization called the Never Again Club. This “never again” lesson was remarkably different from the World War II lesson (never again another Munich or another Hitler). The Korean War lesson was “ Never again should we fight a land war in Asia.”
    The Never Again Club easily checked off the numerous reasons why war in Asia might fail, particularly if the United States was not committed to an all-out nuclear attack: hostile and unfamiliar terrain, radically different languages and cultures, long transoceanic supply lines, and enemies with reservoirs of dedicated, even “fanatical,” troops willing to fight to the last man, en masse, wave after wave. Given those obstacles, many officers wanted assurances that they could use nuclear weapons in any future Asian war.
    Eisenhower understood the broad reluctance to fight another war after Korea. That’s one of the reasons he was so attracted to the use of secret operations to assert U.S. power. There would be few, if any, American casualties and no public knowledge or debate. In the summer of 1954, after the French defeat in Indochina, American agents under the CIA’s Edward Lansdale were already in Saigon plotting to build and bolster a permanent, non-Communist South Vietnam under Ngo Dinh Diem. Few could have predicted that these were the first steps in the creation of an unpopular police state and a major war. When Americans did begin to hear more about American involvement in Vietnam, the news was generally upbeat. The stories told by Dr. Tom Dooley and the American Friends of Vietnam made it sound as if the United States was involved in nothing more than an idealistic, humanitarian campaign to help a struggling young nation.
    Nor did Americans know about that summer’s other covert operation—the one in Guatemala. In June 1954, Eisenhower ordered the CIA to launch its secret plan to overthrow the democratically elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz . The Eisenhower administration considered Arbenz a Communist sympathizer, if not a full-fledged Red, because in