Transcript

EP6 On The Vietnam War with Sir Max

From Dan Carlin · Episode page · Watch on YouTube

· 1 h 24 min · 15,654 words · 90 timestamped sections

This is the full, timestamped transcript of "EP6 On The Vietnam War with Sir Max", an episode of Dan Carlin published October 30, 2018 (1 h 24 min, about 15,654 words). It mentions 18 people, works and ideas, including Vietnam, Vietnam War, Sir Max Hastings, Dan Carlin, Lyndon Johnson.

What this episode is about

The discussion focuses on the Vietnam War, featuring insights from renowned military historian Sir Max Hastings, who has authored a comprehensive new book on the subject. Hastings, a former war correspondent with extensive experience in military journalism, evaluates the complexities of the Vietnam conflict and reflects on his personal connections to the war, providing a deep dive into its historical significance.

Key takeaways

  • History often spins on inspiration, not design; expect waves of focus as trends shift in storytelling.
  • War correspondents bridge the soldier and civilian worlds, translating chaos into narratives we can stomach—sometimes painfully.
  • Max Hastings’ Vietnam tome is indispensable; it transforms hauntings of the past into invaluable historical perspectives.
  • Personal experiences of war, like Hastings’, unveil gritty truths often lost in sanitized historical accounts.
  • Good military history isn't merely battles; it’s about the palpable smell of the battlefield and the lives left behind.

Who speaks in this episode?

What is discussed, and when

  1. – 10:00: Vietnam, Sir Max Hastings, Dan Carlin, Inferno
  2. – 20:00: Vietnam, Vietnam War, Sir Max Hastings, John F. Kennedy
  3. – 30:00: Vietnam, Vietnam War, Sir Max Hastings, Tet Offensive
  4. – 40:00: Vietnam, Sir Max Hastings, Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam War
  5. – 50:00: Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh, Saigon, Eugene McCarthy
  6. – 1:00:00: Vietnam, Vietnam War, Ho Chi Minh, John F. Kennedy
  7. – 1:10:00: Vietnam, Vietnam War, Lyndon Johnson, Saigon
  8. – 1:20:00: Vietnam, Vietnam War
  9. – 1:24:30: Vietnam, Saigon, Dan Carlin, Sir Max Hastings

Notable quotes from "EP6 On The Vietnam War with Sir Max"

  • It's hardcore history attendant I've always said some of the best things we do around here are apologies and so I want to apologize if it seems as though our subject matter and the stuff.
    about Dan Carlin · at
  • About it and to sort of you know integrate it into his overall world you the result is this new book and it's worth picking up if you have interest or you know a lot of you I…
    about Vietnam · at
  • Transition period in US history so this is what I want this introduction to max Hastings sir max hastings interview to be let me sort of cover the bases again for those who…
    about Sir Max Hastings · at
  • Feeding you and Hollywood's feeding you and all that so the culture really changed Vietnam is an important point in that it was also an era of extreme disillusion with the…
    about Vietnam War · at
  • The next president Americans could have had their faith in the honesty of government restored but then you had Richard Nixon after Lyndon Johnson so I mean that's like being hit with a left and a right Lyndon Johnson would probably you know.
    about Richard Nixon · at
  • The bigger the encounter the more likely the United States won and won Bay one of the most famous most Americans that know anything about this war have heard the words Tet…
    about Tet Offensive · at
  • Eugene McCarthy's and I went the White House and listened to Lyndon Johnson who rang a group of US foreign journalists about why he was so passionately committed to the war and this was in January 1968 and of course we were.
    about Lyndon Johnson · at
  • Thought that really North Vietnam and South Vietnam I've come to believe were two rival tyrannies and the idea that Ho Chi Minh was a good guy any more than Mao Zedong was or J…
    about Ho Chi Minh · at

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

  • Sir Max Hastings — Person · Main guest · 11 mentions · first at
    Primary interview subject; a British historian and former war correspondent discussing his new Vietnam War book and broader lessons about war, media, and policy.
  • Dan Carlin — Person · Host / interviewer · 3 mentions · first at
    Host of Hardcore History; frames the episode’s themes (credibility gap, media, culture shift) and interviews Hastings about Vietnam and historical interpretation.
  • Lyndon Johnson — Person · Referenced political leader / decision-maker · 3 mentions · first at
    Central to discussion of escalation, the credibility gap, and leadership psychology; Hastings recounts meeting Johnson and his arguments for commitment to Vietnam.
  • Richard Nixon — Person · Referenced political leader / decision-maker · 1 mention · first at
    Discussed as compounding public distrust after Johnson; Hastings criticizes Nixon/Kissinger for prolonging a war they knew was unwinnable for political reasons.
  • Ho Chi Minh — Person · Referenced revolutionary leader / symbol of Vietnamese nationalism · 5 mentions · first at
    Discussed as a key figure for North Vietnam’s legitimacy and nationalist appeal; Hastings argues against romanticizing him as a “good guy,” portraying him as a ruthless revolutionary.
  • John F. Kennedy — Person · Referenced political leader / historical figure · 3 mentions · first at
    Invoked as a symbol of early-1960s American idealism and Cold War resolve; discussed as shaping motivations of Americans who served in Vietnam.
    Groundswell of public opinion bearing them on end quote this was the era where John F Kennedy was saying you know we will bear any burden for the success of Liberty the…
  • Philip Caputo — Person · Referenced author / Vietnam veteran voice · 2 mentions · first at
    Quoted (via Hastings) to illustrate early-war American self-image and idealism (“Camelot,” crusade framing) and how that worldview collided with Vietnam’s realities.
    Whatnot it's hard to describe how lone ranger' ish we felt at the time period how you know philip caputo in well he was the veteran who wrote a rumor of war but he's quoted in…
  • Eugene McCarthy — Person · Referenced political figure / anti-war critic · 2 mentions · first at
    Cited as an early critic emphasizing proportionality and the moral arithmetic of repeated battles over villages; also mentioned as someone Hastings met while reporting in 1968.
    Jim Gavin whom I also knew who was a world war two paratroop hero Jim Gavin and Eugene McCarthy both said at a pretty early stage they said whatever the virtue of your cause if…

Books & papers

  • Vietnam — Book · Primary recommendation · 64 mentions · first at
    Main subject of the podcast, discussed extensively as a comprehensive account of the Vietnam War.
  • Inferno — Book · Referenced work · 3 mentions · first at
    Mentioned as another significant work by Sir Max Hastings, contributing to his reputation in military history.
    Correspondent author prolific author all-around interesting person and he's written a new book on Vietnam and 800 pages by the way I mean it's a tome at the same time you know…

Companies & orgs

  • BBC — Company · Affiliation · 1 mention · first at
    Mentioned as part of Sir Max Hastings' background as a war correspondent.
    Thought but that was a reflection of how vulnerable Johnson felt that and then of course couple years later I went to Vietnam for a BBC television and I did quite a lot of…
  • The Daily Telegraph — Company · Affiliation · 1 mention · first at
    Mentioned as part of Sir Max Hastings' professional background.
    Resumes long as hack I mean foreign correspondent for the BBC editor-in-chief of The Daily Telegraph editor of the Evening Standard war correspondent author prolific author all-around interesting person and he's written a.

Concepts & topics

  • Vietnam War — Concept · Core topic · 12 mentions · first at
    Central theme of the episode, discussing the impact and legacy of the Vietnam War.

Places & events

  • Tet Offensive — Event · Key argument · 1 mention · first at
    Discussed as a pivotal event in the Vietnam War that influenced public perception and the course of the war.
  • Saigon — Place · Setting · 4 mentions · first at
    Mentioned as a key location during the Vietnam War, especially in the context of the war's end.
    Help these people we can't take over their countries and of course the United States was effectively over 64 65 everybody knew that the South Vietnamese who was supposed to be running the country couldn't get out of bed in the morning.
  • Korea — Event · Referenced event · 1 mention · first at
    Mentioned in comparison to the Vietnam War, highlighting the context of Cold War conflicts.
    Weapons and because the Soviet Union and the Chinese were on the other side and because we had just fought a sort of an undeclared well really undeclared war that started…
  • Algeria — Place · Referenced location · 2 mentions · first at
    Mentioned in comparison to the Vietnam War, highlighting similar colonial and post-colonial conflicts.
    Place and what ended up happening in a nutshell is something that you see happen in a lot of other places you saw it with the French in their war in North Africa right in…
  • Cambodia — Place · Referenced location · 1 mention · first at
    Mentioned in the context of the Vietnam War's broader impact on Southeast Asia.
    Second World War was over and you know the anti-colonialism wave was unleashed across the world Vietnam fell into a pattern of a lot of other places that were trying to throw…

Full transcript with timestamps

it's hardcore history attendant I've always said some of the best things we do around here are apologies and so I want to apologize if it seems as though our subject matter and and the stuff we're talking about lately all kind of falls into a narrow sort of subject matter or a you know historical period it's mostly been 20th century stuff it's not by design but I don't work by design I work on inspiration and sometimes opportunity for example the opportunity to get a guest like the one we have today so things don't always work out in a balanced sort of way what will probably happen is that we'll end up flipping at a certain point and then I'll start getting emails from people saying why do you never talk about you know 20th century stuff so we're just probably balancing things out in the other direction I'm gonna talk to Sir Max Hastings today those of you who like military history have certainly read his

work he's fantastic he wrote Inferno he wrote a lot of other books if you look at his resume as it exists now well if you had shown that to me when I was 21 years old I would have said oh that's the guy I want to be his resumes long as hack I mean foreign correspondent for the BBC editor-in-chief of The Daily Telegraph editor of the Evening Standard war correspondent um author prolific author all-around interesting person and he's written a new book on Vietnam and 800 pages by the way I mean it's a tome at the same time you know if your library is like mine and you like having certain subjects covered this is a necessary thing on my Vietnam section for any number of reasons Hastings has a connection to the war he was a war correspondent in it and was sort of where he made his bones as a young guy go google him and look at the images of him when he was there my wife thought he looked like the Beatle war

correspondents are an interesting species they don't make them like they used to I should say but at the same time there are still some good ones they sort of have a foot in both worlds the soldier world and the civilian world here of people that maybe don't know war at all and so somehow you need to be able to translate things into a language where you can you know reliably convey information so that they can understand it there's no way to reliably transmit information on what it's like to see a disemboweled village chief who's had his stomach cut out in front of the villagers by the Vietcong as a lesson not to cooperate with the Americans or the South Vietnamese how do you I didn't even relate that in a way that people can understand and in a way where they just don't not read about it at a certain point if you get graphic and if people won't read about it but then you haven't done what you're supposed to do

as a war correspondent now just so you know it's only personal weakness that probably kept me from doing something like that I started reading because I was enamored with it all this stuff written and sometimes written about their own lives that these war correspondents um had put into print and at a certain point you start to realize wait a minute do you really want to live with the memories these guys have and they're sort of warning you sometimes and you read their books I mean they're telling you what they're dreaming about at night you deliberately over and over and over again go to places where awful awful things have happened things soldiers see by the way although they don't often want to be there when it happens the war correspondent you know to them that's like the story all right let's go to the bad place now most of the soldiers are of the opinion that they don't want to go to the bad place they don't want to

be there so max hastings did this job which always for me makes an interesting read because he's filtering in real personal experiences tastes smells the lifestyle the culture at the time that you just can't get researching secondhand sources it would have been a very different book if Dan Carlin had written it from other people's stuff than to have a guy who was there who participated in the activities who interacted with all the people and then has had decades and decades to see how history played out sense and to think about it and to sort of you know integrate it into his overall world you the result is this new book and it's worth picking up if you have interest or you know a lot of you I know have a Vietnam section on your shelf if you wanted to say what the focus of the book is I think it's rightly put where it should be although it covers everything that's the hardcore history books I mean

you know the godlike view the hindsight view the leadership view the mid-level view the hamlet view the what it's like to be the guy in the ground view which is why you get 800 pages or 26 hour of hardcore history series in the first world war either way it's it's explainable you know understandable the most interesting part to me since I already know the battle stuff although if you're into the battle stuff he's awesome historically he's awesome the most interesting thing for me though is to see how he can synthesize all this stuff that's happened in the decades since that era I was born in 1965 1960 was born by the way on on the one of the worst battles of the war the one they made the movie about that's my birthday November 14 1965 battle of the I drank Valley but when I was a kid just starting to become aware you know it's all the older brothers and those people who were the ones being drafted who were living

through all this stuff so in the 1970s it was it's hard to explain this was a transition period in US history so this is what I want this introduction to max Hastings sir max hastings interview to be let me sort of cover the bases again for those who weren't there and try to set up a little of this and and and let you know why it's important to you and why it matters in history in this case there is a before and after in US history and we all know there's several right you've got before and after the civil wars classic one for people to use before and after the Vietnam era go look at a photograph of Americans will just choose a big city because there was a lot of continuity in some of the less big cities where people look the same over the decades right they they are more conservative change less slowly less flashy more down-to-earth people but you get some photos from an LA Chicago Miami New York some of the hip

places supposedly and you show a photo from 1963 and you compare those same people in a photo in 1973 and you don't even have to say another word to know that the culture has totally changed the Vietnam War is one of the major factor points the account for this and there's several and there much talked about you know birth control pill the sexual revolution music I mean just there's a number of major factors but without the Vietnam War you might not have any of those things it's one of the prime movers and as a friend of mine who was at the protest back in the day pointed out and the prime mover was the fact that many people might have to go and suffer in a war that they really didn't want to be a part of that tends to concentrate the mind in a way that just some ideological cause wouldn't that prime mover pushed forward a lot of the era's change in the zeitgeist for lack of a better phrase I

know it's kind of strange changing the zeitgeist but I mean the really the culture flipped now once again not in some places the American heartland was remarkably consistent but in many places and in terms of what Madison Avenue is feeding you and Hollywood's feeding you and all that so the culture really changed Vietnam is an important point in that it was also an era of extreme disillusion with the government it's hard to explain once again how different Americans were before Vietnam and after if I just said we believed our government that right there is hard to square it's so far beyond what most people today are raised with and it wasn't just you believed the person in your party in general Democrats and Republicans believed the president it didn't matter who the president was you didn't think your government lied to you now that's naive of course but maybe if you look at US history as equivalent to

a person growing up maybe you're still in your dumb teens in that era as a country and learning some of these hard lessons like you know in power politics people lie the problem is though is that you ended up with something called a credibility gap where the president had lied so many times that the American people weren't buying it at all maybe if you had returned to some level of perceived because it was always happening some perceived normalcy with the next president Americans could have had their faith in the honesty of government restored but then you had Richard Nixon after Lyndon Johnson so I mean that's like being hit with a left and a right Lyndon Johnson would probably you know hookie and then uppercut you and Richard Nixon would hit you below the belt whatever worked but as a country the 70s was about sort of reevaluating a lot of the things Americans had taken for granted in terms of our self-image and

whatnot it's hard to describe how lone ranger' ish we felt at the time period how you know philip caputo in well he was the veteran who wrote a rumor of war but he's quoted in sir max hastings new book to let me read it to you he sort of describes the way Americans felt about themselves and remember this is in the post Second World War era where the u.s. is just in our own minds we saved Europe twice than we rebuilt it with our own tax dollars then we protected it from the Soviet Union and communism in the Cold War I mean we were the good guys of history Hastings writes about Phil Caputo quote lieutenant Caputo like general Westmoreland saw himself fulfilling the vision of John F Kennedy Caputo then says quote if he was the king of Camelot than we were his Knights in Vietnam our crusade there was nothing we could not do because we were Americans and for the same reason whatever we did was right end quote

their communist foes were quote the new barbarians who menaced the far-flung interests of the new Rome end quote but it's hard to describe how the United States saw itself as and the the people especially in the marketing materials as this force of good around the world and with this dominance in the second world war gave the United States a dominance that lasted for 15-20 years in terms of of a head start over a broken world and the power that that gave you made you feel almost a responsibility to do something good with it in his book sir max hastings writes quote there was in the u.s. an enormous self-confidence and pride not unlike that of the germans before 1914 a consciousness of national greatness seeking an outlet a searching for an appropriate challenge to their powers a refusal to believe that in problem was beyond their capacity to solve statesmen who might themselves have doubts were conscious of a great

groundswell of public opinion bearing them on end quote this was the era where John F Kennedy was saying you know we will bear any burden for the success of Liberty the sacrificing that the country was willing to make it was the era where young people were motivated by a sense of idealism that in some cases led people to go to other countries and build you know farms and chicken coops and work in the Peace Corps to others who saw a similar sort of mission to you know help people especially poor people in undeveloped countries who needed it by giving them a government that was free so you see this idealism amongst you know all these young people across a wide spectrum of of types now as far as background in the war so we have some context here I didn't go into this with cermak's because you know let's not deal with the stuff we can all find out beforehand but the Vietnam War as many of you know is something that grows out

of colonialism it was one of those territories that a colonial power from Europe in this case the French controlled it was French Indochina they treated it the way that colonial powers usually treat these places puppets they were bringing a civilization was the line but truthfully I mean it was a bunch of French people in nice hotels with Vietnamese waiters and whatnot that doesn't mean that there weren't people that liked it in Vietnam but when the Second World War was over and you know the anti-colonialism wave was unleashed across the world Vietnam fell into a pattern of a lot of other places that were trying to throw off the yoke of their colonial masters and in the case of Vietnam there was a war before the American version of the Vietnam War for a long time a very bloody nasty dirty war between the French and what were called the Viet Minh it was sometime during this period where the ideas of

fighting from Vietnam nationalism you know the the nation-state a free Vietnam for Vietnamese by vietnamese at some point there are communists who become part of that movement or were always part of it and so there's this connection between these these militant nationalists vietnamese movements and communism and this will be a poison pill for countries like the united states throughout the later part of this conflict because when the vietnamese eventually after some nasty nasty battles are able to win their independence from the french the United States has already gotten their toe in the water in that region not because they really want the French to be the colonial masters anymore but because of that worry over communism and that's another thing that's hard to describe to people today is the role that the fear of communism played in all the decision-making and all the calculations Vietnam was just one of the many

countries that was supposedly part of the domino effect where you might say to yourself as many Americans did they didn't know what Vietnam was they couldn't pronounce it they couldn't find it on a map so why do we have to send our boys on our money to go fight and die there well here's what happens and remember this isn't malarkey the people who are spouting it generally believe it but that this is just another country that will be toppled by the Communists and then that country will be consolidated and start to try to topple the person next door the French had a different analogy they didn't use dominoes that they used bowling pins but the idea and the image is the same right it's it's a toppling from one to another to another and eventually you'll have the Soviet Union in Mexico there were a lot of problems it turns out in Hastings his book is good at pointing this out there were a lot of problems in

the decision makers understanding of all this which in hindsight seems crazy because when you look at how many people would die in all these wars and how many would be killed Hastings book focuses on the civilians more than anything and rightly so I think but when you see all of that you you yearn for a reason and you yearn for just wanting to believe that the people who are making the decisions are at least well-informed that they've gotten the experts that they they've got people to them well let me explain the difference between Soviet Communism and Chinese communism and the relationship of Vietnam to either of those I mean it that that was already in some cases below where the threshold where anybody was paying attention and for much of this conflict and for others during this time period there's this belief that Moscow controls everything in the communist world and that just wasn't

true but if that's something you're basing all your decision-making on well it's no wonder that things worked out the way they did sometimes I mean there were occasions where our government just thought the other side was being stubborn when in reality we were talking to the people who had no control over the events we wanted the influence and we didn't even know it it's hard to believe you could have such momentous decisions regularly made with such either bad intelligence or lack of understanding but let's be honest this is one of the things that waiting a couple of decades or in this case five decades after the events so that makes clear you have a chance and another thing Hastings book is very good at you have a chance to get the other side's point of view to interview those people considering that we're starting to lose that generation just like the Second World War generation Hastings his book

might turn out to be one of those really important things on a shelf for a very long time because you can't replicate those discussions he had with the principles nevertheless if you remember this period you remember that part of the problem you know in terms of our good guy image to ourselves was some of the news that was coming out of this place and what ended up happening in a nutshell is something that you see happen in a lot of other places you saw it with the French in their war in North Africa right in places like Algeria in the 1950s where it becomes a dirty war when you have civilians carrying bombs and kids throwing grenades into restaurants and people hiding that I mean it's difficult after a while to keep your troops from doing the sorts of things that the folks back home imagine that their troops don't do in the case of the United States things happen in the Vietnam War that if you had gone

back a mere 15 16 17 years before and asked the American public whether anything like this was ever possible from American soldiers they would have denied it to high heaven the meal I massacre for example but there was regular bad stuff going on I mean if you're gonna proclaim something like a free fire zone which of course in Vietnam was famous which means that anyone you see in this area is considered a bad person by default well it's not going to be a good tally at the end of the year when you start trying to figure out how many actual enemy you killed versus how many you know people who just got in the way wrong place at the wrong time and that became another problem with the war the war had very I mean there were constraints on the war and the constraints are things that we still talk about today because it was the Cold War and because people had nuclear weapons and because the Soviet Union and

the Chinese were on the other side and because we had just fought a sort of an undeclared well really undeclared war that started against Korea but ended up being American troops and Chinese troops killing each other the last thing that anybody wanted was another one of those so there was always an attempt to keep the war confined to certain parameters imagine you've got this fire burning and you just want to make sure that the fire doesn't spread but at all times any conflict especially one going on as long as the Vietnam War did is a potential flashpoint in World War 3 and let's remember as bad as Vietnam was imagine how bad something like that could have been if it became the equivalent of you know gavrilov princeps shooting an Archduke in Sarajevo in 1914 we wouldn't be talking about two or three million Vietnamese civilians dying in this war we would be talking about a hundred two hundred million people and I still you

know clearing out the ashes today so let's try to remember the the the big picture that the leaders in this story are trying to juggle at all times so you have lack of good information with nuclear weapons as your punishment if you screw up no pressure there right but then 1970s were about coming to some sort of emotional terms with this and and there's those of us who lived through it it's it's almost not worth talking about because we remember it so well and it was so I mean he was beaten to death by the end let's be honest but new generations coming up don't remember any of this it was a very different post-war world for the veterans who came back from Vietnam because this was a war we lost and Americans I can again say from experience we used to be very proud of the fact that you could say we never lost a war you Canadians do not need to write me about the war of 1812 I realized that that's a I have the

beholder issue a little bit and I don't want to get into a couple of others with you but you know you know what I mean theoretically kind of sort of you know in our own minds we never lost a war Vietnam was hard to deny Vietnam also broke the army for a while and this is a point that's well understood if you read about this kind of stuff it's not talked about a lot what it did to the US Army between let's just say 65 and 70 was amazing again something you wouldn't have thought could happen to an American army but then it hadn't been put in that kind of situation before as we said look at the French and Algeria you find yourselves in these kinds of situations and all of a sudden it's a little bit different you had drug abuse um you add the short tour of duty there were a lot of things the army really looked at a lot of things after the war to try to figure out what had happened and if you're interested in that subject by the

way Andrew J bass [ __ ] has written several books um describing the rebuilding of the US military after Vietnam and what was required and the safeguards that the military brass tried to put into place to keep the civilians from ever putting them in that situation again didn't work but there were safeguards put into a Colin Powell's written about this too and he was involved in some of this stuff but people don't talk about that very much for the you know you could look at the American army in 1973 who and that's from the Vietnam War and it wasn't just you know the the morale and whatnot I mean there was a real I mean fragging was something that was talked about a lot you know what fragging is right the shooting of your own officers or the you throw a grenade at them when no one's looking we were fragging our officers sometimes you don't find a lot of that from the Second World War but in the

Second World War we had a very different kind of US image and the thing about the image is you kind of live up to that where you try to write so just and Americans don't do this it became hard to say Americans don't do this after Vietnam it was it was the the war that proved that we were human right we were we were as good guys as we tried to be but we were human anybody who goes back and dives deep into things like the Philippine insurrection or you know some of the Native American wars certainly we've proven this point before in US history nonetheless you kind of need to relearn at every generation or two it seems one of the other things Hastings focuses on and I think it's it's a excellent point is how bad the other side was there is as he said a little self flagellation on the part of Americans but it was a hard thing for us to absorb I mean it's a huge deal the country was was wrestling

with huge issues in the 1970's and early 1980s about this I was um I was in a one of the early courses and 60 minutes did a whole big thing on this because it was groundbreaking at the time that undergraduates were taking at universities where the Vietnam War was on the curriculum and one of the things that they would do is bring in these veterans to talk to you you know in every class so I took one at the University of Colorado and we had a veteran who sat in the back of the class and we didn't know he was a veteran cuz these guys were like 32 33 years old when they were talking to our class sat in the back of the classroom the whole time and then like after eight weeks or something stood up and said I've been watching this whole class as part of my recovery I'm trying to come to grips with all this we actually showed a movie in the class that showed a helicopter door gunner and he said that movie

showed me I was the helicopter door gunner you saw in that film boom but we were all wrestling with things back back then and it's hard to describe to a generation now who grows up in an era where no one ever believes their government and that's just the right way to be by the way and the United States is fully seen as basically a good guy but fully fallible the the follow ball part was not something people thought of say in the early 1960s we were a force for good only in our minds and so it was this huge mental rearrangement and the seventies if you look at the material I mean it there was a lot of introspection and it wasn't just introspection amongst the general population but the military also and the political class when we eventually I believe was it Panama like 1989 or something when that happened I think President Bush the first had said something like you know we finally kicked the Vietnam syndrome or whatnot

and the Vietnam syndrome was the the after effect where all of a sudden the United States didn't want to go and mess with other countries for a while we'd had enough of that for a while it wasn't just the the soldiers who had died and were wounded or the veterans who were increasingly showing signs of being badly affected by what happened to them in the war but the cost and the blowback and there was just this feeling for a while no more but again time passes and people change and and you forget just how bad it can be when things go wrong and make no mistake about it things went wrong in Vietnam the idea that the United States of America after the Second World War we're still at this pinnacle of industrial might and military power the idea that a bunch of backward guerrillas in what we called a third world country with no money and I mean they've got no air there's there's nothing that they could beat us that

right there was a hard pill to swallow but it reminded military and political leaders once again that war is not disconnected from politics as Clausewitz so famously said and what you're really after in any of these situations is a political settlement or a political change if your enemy or your adversary or your opponent does not give in when you beat the hell out of them and give you what you want politically you don't win the United States did not lose a major encounter in the Vietnam War and the bigger the encounter the more likely the United States won and won Bay one of the most famous most Americans that know anything about this war have heard the words Tet Offensive before it was a famous Vietnamese northern Vietnamese attack in many places at once that was a disaster for them but it was not portrayed that way at the time I remember one veteran explaining to me just how unbelievable the casualties

were that the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong suffered in that offensive but it wasn't about body counts they weren't fighting a war for body counts they were fighting a war for a political settlement and because the United States had lied to its people so often about how the war was going what the other side did by sacrificing a ton of their people and materiel was say hey Wars not over and at the same time basically demonstrate to everyone that what they've been told was false which turned the people once more against the political regime if you're in if you're if you think about this I hate to do this because it's it's um there's no respect I mean it just it seems wrong but if you think about it like a game and you're playing one side or the other it's fascinating to see how if you get to be the North Vietnamese communist side in this how how little you have to play with in terms of real

pieces that have any power the other side's got all the good pieces and yet there's ways to win without them and that's what I mean the guy we when I was going up is guys in black pajamas beat the US military incomprehensible but an entire generation of military personnel who were mostly junior officers in that war would grow up to influence the way the US military developed 10 15 20 25 years and now all the way to now in the footprints of Vietnam are all over this military it's back mostly and while it would be sort of outside the norms of human history to expect us not to make the same mistakes they certainly changed a bunch of things so that well this war will never be lost in America's living rooms again as the old saying was it's astounding and I'll wrap it up here when you when you listen to sir max Hastings as a war correspondent the kind of freedom that they had to cover that war and it was a weird situation because

if you look at press coverage in the Second World War and Korea it's highly regulated and censored so then the next big war after Korea Korea ends in 150 152 the next big war starts ramping up 63-64 in vietnam with a lot of advisers I mean sixteen thousand five hundred at one point before the real troops came in the media all of a sudden doesn't have those constraints for really the first time in modern American history certainly and they seem to get less and less constrained as the war goes on and when you see some of these there's one famous firefight where the reporter is well I think it's during tent where the reporter walks up to US troops that are at a wall I think maybe Marines that are at a wall and they're fighting something right on the other side of the wall and they are reloading their weapons and then standing up and shooting at the other side of the wall and the reporter walks right up and starts interviewing

the guy as he's reloading his gun during the firefight now two things stand out at you right there number one is that's a ballsy reporter right that's a war correspondent of the sort that are just there amazing right I've always had an admiration for their willingness to go get the story when they go get the story like that I mean Ernie Pyle was killed by a sniper machine gun I think actually um you know covering the Second World War but the other thing you realize is that that is absolutely uncensored war content coming right back to America's living rooms and if I recall going from memory here when the reporter asked the soldier something like you know what did he want to reach I want to get out of here you know I mean it was one of these I just want to get out of here I just want to get I mean it was not a pro war rah-rah-rah thing it was something that the folks at home would go oh my

goodness now here's two sides to this side number one is that's reality and please put me firmly in the camp of you know if you're going to go to these wars and you can expect people to support them they have to know what it is and they have to know what it is in living color just like that so I'm on that side but let's understand that the other side as Max Hastings points out in this book didn't show their people that kind of coverage right so they're rigidly controlling what the communist people see they don't get to see all their death all their suffering all their atrocities and the other side's got it in living color and our friends who don't like us so much there were some countries that you know love-hate relationship so they played this stuff up huge and you'll notice we didn't have Americans doing much protesting during the Second World War we were bombing Germany and Japan and we haven't had by

Vietnam standards much in the way of those things since Vietnam we had a few big ones but you know nothing sustained Vietnam this sustained pressure with lots and lots of people protesting for a long time um haven't had that sense either could you suggest that maybe it's because they aren't being exposed to the same sort of video and photos and stories that the American people saw in the 1960's and 1970's well if so and you can call that one of the I guess successful reforms that the Army and Navy and Marine Corps leaders the Air Force leaders learned from that era if they believed that the war was lost in the living room well don't do that again and we don't but back in sir max hastings day we did so I'm pleased to introduce if you've never heard him oh my goodness if you never read his books if you're a military history fan well then you have a whole bunch to pick up I mean inferno go get inferno that's a

good one but this latest one of Vietnam also fantastic so without further ado I'm honored to talk to sir max Hastings today about his new book Vietnam hello is this sir max yeah sure is hello down hello and listen thank you so much I'm sure they've got you on the book publicity a factory assembler line tumor will try to make this as painless and fun as possible I'm sure it'll be it'll be completely painless is very nice for you to have me on the show oh I'm a big fan actually um I will admit though I haven't gotten through the latest book I didn't get it in time I'm enjoying it immensely though and it's a subject near and dear to my heart as all Americans and in my generation probably had no way to avoid what generation how about you I was born during the Battle of the the I drank Valley so November 14th 1965 I'm 52 oh well that makes you a generation younger than me so well listen I want and I want to talk about

that a little bit um it's fascinating to read something from a 21st century perspective that I actually grew up in the in the wake or the wash of and I was wondering um how different is this book from something you would have written much more closer to the time you were in country now for example the audience doesn't know this let me make sure that they do this is a book from a British perspective which we don't normally get with Vietnam War books it's also it's also able to as I said give us a 21st century look back at something that many of the books I was reading were written in the 1980s for example and you were actually there so so give me a perspective a little bit on how writing this book now was different than than how they the 25 or 28 year old sir max Hastings would have written it it this is a very very different book from the one that I would have written if I've been stupid enough to write it

back in the 1960s that although I'm British and America and its history has been deeply etched into my own experience because I lived here in 67 68 ah and I witnessed the huge demonstrations I met a lot of the key players of the Robert Kennedy is the Eugene McCarthy's and I went the White House and and listened to Lyndon Johnson who rang a group of US foreign journalists about about why he was so passionately committed to the war and this was in January 1968 and of course we were hugely impressed it's been meeting the president there was me 22 years old sitting in the Cabinet Room and Johnson he behaved in many ways quite like his caricature in that he started out by saying saying uh some of you may like blonds and some of you may like redheads and some of you may not like women at all but I'm here this morning to tell you what kind I like he said I'm prepared to sit down with Ho Chi Minh and nice hotel with nice food

sit down talk to settle this thing and he spoke for 40 minutes and then he got up and he didn't take questions she said right very nice to meet you all he went out of the room but then suddenly just as we were gathering together our notes and we've been hugely impressed was how could we not be I mean I was by far the youngest of the group but nonetheless we were all quite a young group and meeting the pros the United States but suddenly he put his head round the door again I'm a little bit sheepishly and he came back in and he said before you all go I'd like to ask you all one question meeting me have any of you changed your minds about anything you read or heard about me before you came and we were absolutely stunned into silence by the spectacle of the president United States I'm carrying six months what a load of kids like us thought but that was a reflection of how vulnerable Johnson felt that and then of

course couple years later I went to Vietnam for a BBC television and I did quite a lot of reporting there right through until 75 when I came out of the embassy compound in the final evacuation so this was all edge deep in my experience but the key thing that has changed meanwhile is that I very much bought into the idea that not only was this a disastrous war which indeed it was but because the United States was tied up with a bad cause but therefore the other side's must be good cause and I've now come to believe I'm coming studied a huge amount of material from North Vietnam and from the common his side and thought that really North Vietnam and South Vietnam I've come to believe were two rival tyrannies and the idea that Ho Chi Minh was a good guy any more than Mao Zedong was or J Guevara these were absolutely ruthless revolutionaries and they did terrible stuff whereas everybody has seen the pictures of the

South Vietnamese police chief executing the Vietcong prisoner in 1968 on the naked kid running away after a South Vietnamese napalm strike the communist made very sure that there were no photographs of many of the dreadful things that their side did the Terrorism that I mean for instance of was a entirely reliable resource story of one among many village chiefs who was being buried alive in the Mekong Delta in the early 1960s by the local communists in front of all these fellow villagers to demonstrate that the price of all rejecting the revolution was much worse than mere death and he pleaded for a merciful bullet and the communist cadres just said that they saved their bullets for them for the imperialists and in the tip Offensive of 1968 when thousands are perfectly innocent people whose worst crime was to support the South Vietnamese government were executed in cold blood by the communists

again no pictures and we didn't see all this stuff and I've come to believe that although I don't believe for a moment that the war was winnable that we work we did allow ourselves all those of us who were correspondents there and all those of us who are reporting the war all we could see and most of the stuff we were writing about was well a terrible mess the United States and the South Vietnamese were making of it and yet we saw in 1975 that when the Communists gained power the ruthlessness and the incompetence with which they behaved starvation descended on that Vietnamese people in the 1980s and any idea that the other side were the good guys now it seems to me out of order and I've come very strongly to believe what is true of most events in history that I'm neither side had a monopoly of virtue or vice so that's one thing the second thing I think is hugely important is that we were overwhelmingly impressed

with the fact we were with the Americans and with the US Army and the US Marine Corps and so on and we saw this through an American prism and yet this was overwhelmingly of Vietnamese tragedy that while 58,000 Americans died in Vietnam something over two million two million Vietnamese died at least 40 for every American not to mention countless la Ronn Cambodians as well so I spent a huge amount of time researching Vietnamese sources and interviewing via mieze and so a lot of Americans in my story because the Americans made the big decisions but I've also tried to put the Vietnamese of where they belong which is at the center of the stage of this huge tragedy well I think you bring up an interesting quandary that people today can understand because we're confronted with it not that uncommon Lee even in the modern world which is with the Communists as bad as they were in doing all these things you were talking about

without knowing how the war was gonna turn out does that legitimize the involvement of of one of the two great superpowers at the time in other words can you make a moral case that the right thing was done because this sort of thing was happening and it was understood that if the Communists took over South Vietnam there'd be a bloodbath and all these other things and yet all of the things that you talk about in the later part of your book after the u.s. get involved shows exactly how nasty it is for the Vietnamese people as you pointed out when we did get involved for all the right reasons how should you know 50 years of thinking about this and seeing how things play out in the region how do you square the difference between it might be morally right to go in there and try to save these people from a terrible fate and yet while doing so inflict an even worse fate on them I mean how do you skill how does it how

does it go in your head these days you're touching an absolutely essential point which i think is very important that I've quoted in my book I'm two people I great respect senator Eugene McCarthy whom I got to know a bit when I was a young reporter covering his campaign in 68 and general didn't get Jim Gavin whom I also knew who was a world war two paratroop hero Jim Gavin and Eugene McCarthy both said at a pretty early stage they said whatever the virtue of your cause if you fight over a village of five or six times an awful lot of people are going to die and you find yourself thinking at some point there's got to be some proportionality now even if what you want to achieve in a place and especially in Vietnam is is are something that is worthwhile and decent that in the end you find yourself in danger of destroying the very thing that you're trying to try to save has to be proportionality and one point

which is that the core of my own book is that I think a mistake we've made in the past and we go on making and remember the British have been very much associated in the United States in Iraq and in Afghanistan and so on is that although there has to be a military dimension if you're going to do these interventions the key thing is always cultural and social and economic and if you can't have some sort of cultural engagement with these societies in which you intervene then you're completely wasting a time winning firefight and to me and I've said this in the last chapter in my book you go on winning firefights in these places and killing bad guys til the cows come home but unless you've got some linkage with the local people and I was always very struck by somebody who's become a friend HR McMaster who more recently was a Donald Trump's national security adviser that HR McMaster who's a outstanding

American army officer up one day about 2006 we were having lunch together and he was telling me about all the great things that his Armored Cavalry Regiment had done in Iraq and then he ended up by saying the trouble was there was nothing to join up to now um what he meant was that there was no sole local government there local community to be able to fill in after they'd finished winning the battles and exactly the same Neil Sheehan a very famous American correspondent in Vietnam when I was telling him that story a couple of years ago and we were discussing he said it was the same problem in Vietnam there was nothing to join up to and I've said in my book but I think the main reason that the Communists ended up winning in in Vietnam was not because they were particularly better soldiers but because they were Vietnamese and always this problem and it's I one sees it in Iraq and Afghanistan again but a lot of the

time the locals don't like foreigners whether they're British or American or whatever and um I talked to a Vietnamese who's now become a very successful businessman in California and um he was saying to me that when he was living in and Vietnam as a young man he said the Communists were constantly reminding us how humiliating it was to be occupied by the Americans they had the monopoly of patriotism what we have to find ways of doing in these interventions is how to while trying to help these people we can't take over their countries and of course the United States was effectively over 64 65 everybody knew that the South Vietnamese who was supposed to be running the country couldn't get out of bed in the morning without asking the Americans which side to get out and the Communists were able to exploit that so although I mean any idea that as all the kids thought in the 60s that Ho Chi Minh was a sort of

saintly figure hmm as a ruthless revolutionary but he had achieved a state of status of stature as the victor in the colonial war against the French which armed the United States and me that what the United States called I've still got my old press card from Vietnam free world forces we're never able to find anybody who looked like the Patriots and the hero and the Nationalists and Ho Chi Minh died on the southern side but I don't know the longer I write history books and the more you come to learn that that very often you can't say it's good be evil and the black be white these things are always very complicated and I felt even when I was a young reporter in Vietnam I never thought the United States look like winning this war but even then I never felt the other side deserved to either you know you bring up some very interesting points in the book um that there are there are the sort of things

that make you feel like the government is inept and then you realize but we do it over and over again so maybe it's built into the to the cake as we say for example and to piggyback off the point you just made about the South Vietnamese government trying to appear as though you know that they're there they're fighting as much of a nationalist war as the north is and yet when we first put Marines on shore in 1965 as you put pointed out in your book we didn't even tell the South Vietnamese we were going to do it those are the kind of things where you would have loved to have been a fly on the wall in the in the meetings about this did somebody bring that up and say this is going to look really bad if we spring this on them or was it or was the tenor of the times such that worrying about what a puppet government I guess maybe some people would have called it thought about this was was not on their top-10

list of concerns well you're absolutely right I mean one of the things that always struck me and I also said in the book was between the nineteen fifties the nineteen seventies all the hotshot meetings in Washington about Vietnam policy no Vietnamese ever attended any of them it was always Americans who are held the meetings to decide what was going to be done in Saigon and you find and again I have quoted all the examples with several times when they discuss in Washington whether they should change the Vietnamese government that um when President to in nineteen seventy seventy four our sorry seventy-three um look like refusing to sign the peace deal that Henry Kissinger had stitched up in Paris with the North Vietnamese that there was a serious discussion in Washington about whether to just get rid of President to you and put in another Vietnamese president well it's not too surprising that the Vietnamese feel

humiliated I mean all human relations about who makes you feel great and Americans did not make Vietnamese feel good and I say this is not unique to Americans I mean I've seen it myself in Afghanistan with British troops and so on but unless you can although identically like that phrase hearts of mine unless you can make in help other nations to have self-respect and to feel good about themselves well it's always going to be a really tough road at home but one thing I do want to say which I've also tried to get into my book um I do think that Americans today are sometimes almost flags on a tree and their approach the war oh god oh god we were so wicked well although there's no doubt the war was a disaster a lot of Americans some of whom I've interview for the book went to Vietnam were the highest ideals of service both some soldiers and some civilians and I've been hugely moved by some of the

Americans I interviewed for the book they really cared some of the civilians especially they're not the language they completely threw themselves into art the whole thing and um they weren't sort of wicked imperialists who wanted to do terrible things that there were people who really wanted to do good deeds in a wicked world and I think um but a lot of the histories of the war don't pay sufficient tribute to some of these people I mean one guy who made an enormous impression on me I was down on the west coast interviewing Vietnamese and I heard about a guy called Doug Ramsey who might heard about but I never didn't had no idea he was still alive and I was told he was still alive and living in Boulder City Nevada and I looked at the mountain it was more than 300 miles driving my Ava's car over from the west coast to Boulder City but I just thought I maybe ought to go and see this guy and I got the car and it's

a hell of a long drive across the desert and I got to build a city and there was Doug Ramsey and I spent four hours with him and it was an amazing business because diagrams he was a foreign service officer a really outstanding American who are in 1962 I made up his mind he wanted to go on and serve in Vietnam and um was involved in pacification programs assistant for time to John Paul van but the very famous American advisor out there and Doug Ramsey passionately cared about the Vietnamese he loved he learned Vietnamese um he he wrote a lot of stuff for some of his letters home which he gave me were hugely moving but then beginning of 66 he was driving a truck with a load of rice up to some village and he got ambushed by the Vietcong and captured and he spent the next seven years not in the Hanoi Hilton but in a bamboo cage in the jungle seven years he had malaria 123 times he had every kind

of other tropical disease how he survived god only knows and yet he came out of this experience his health absolutely destroyed I mean when I saw him he could hardly move his body at all but his mind was still right on and he talked so movingly because even though he'd suffered so terribly at the hands of the Communists arm that he was completely even-handed in seeing the good stuff and the bad stuff about and he knew the Vietcong having been their prisoner for seven years better than almost anybody else and I mean he told me some very funny stories I mean one of them that always stuck in my mind he said one day when he was in being interviewed by his interrogators and um he told them that he thought that um the Americans were in Vietnam 10 percent to help the Vietnamese people a 90 percent to hold back the Chinese and marchi tongue and he said the Comedie interrogator applied in that case why do

you not go and fight him in China we do not like the Chinese either and another story he told which was sort of somehow the subject of Tom Hayden came into conversation Jane Fonda's husband who are of course fallen in love with og Menon Cohen spent half his time in up in North Vietnam telling you that all Vietnamese I wonderful they were and um when Tom Hanus name was mentioned uh that Doug Ramsey asked his interrogators east he said well what do you think of Tom Hayden and they said we think his ideology is excellent but as a man we despise him how could you respect a man who betrays his own country like house let me ask you about the attitude of the times because you just alluded to it with the as you said these soldiers who went in here for such idealistic reasons I mean you quoted a man named Harry Williams who had mentioned you know we were doing good we were making a real contribution we were making things

better um right it reminds me you know because I was sort of the younger brother of that baby boom generation that gets so much heat these days and so much flak and yet at the same time it's hard to not notice that that generation is a bunch of younger people were extremely idealistic and motivated by their idealism some went into the Peace Corps a lot of this as you point out was in response to john f kennedy's fame sacrifice speech but some of these people did a similar sort of approach in trying to make the world a better place by doing what you mentioned parachuting you know into Laos and trying to cut off the Ho Chi Minh Trail so that the people in the South could I mean it's it's fascinating to you know the word watershed moment the phrase watershed moment is overused but it's hard to not notice the difference between 1963 United States of America and 1973 United States of America and not attribute a

large part of the disillusionment and the change in attitudes to that war does that slow of course you're of course you're right I mean I think two points that also to go back to your question about why I thought there's a book to be written two things that I what I always don't do I think a lot of people make mistake when they look back at historical events that they look at them through a 20-18 prism and to me the only way to ride history is to close your eyes and try and remember how things look to people then and the first thing to be said about the 1950s and 1960s there really was a communist threat that worldwide um the the Soviet Union and the Chinese did represent deeply unpleasant totalitarian forces and history I'm quite confident will show that the United States was absolutely right to lead the Western nations in resisting we were the good guys in the Cold War and I have no doubt

about that so sometimes when people say oh well never really was a communist threat but most certainly was a communist threat they were very nasty people however they did not they did get a terrible tangle in Indochina because there weren't enough people in Washington who really understood the nuances and understood the nuances the nationalism and one of the things I discovered in the course of researching the book which I had no idea about the Chinese and the Russians far from being enthusiastic about the Vietnam War hated the whole business because they were having to throw said loads of money and resources and weapons I mean the Russians were giving the North Vietnamese half a billion dollars a year which they could be ill-afford but they felt because they the Chinese the Russians would eating for leadership of the socialist world they had to go on backing this war but our intelligence Western

intelligence was so bad that nobody had the inkling of this so that right through to Nixon and Kissinger they still believed in the early 70s that all the Russians had to do was pick up a phone to Tibet to Hanoi and um the North Vietnamese that make a deal and it wasn't like that at all that I've quoted Brezhnev when he was leader Russia saying to the Russian ambassador in Washington I have no desire to drown in the swamps of Vietnam and he felt himself almost as much a prisoner of all this stuff as um as the Americans did he hated it but they were all stuck in this situation the other thing to which I saw the tail end when I was living here in the sixties was that America after the Second World War had achieved such awesome success and was so powerful and so rich that it seemed to that generation of Americans that nothing was impossible and no president and this very much applied to rbj but also the

Kennedy none of them wanted to be the ones to tell the American people that the full might of the United States couldn't see off a load of raggedy-ass communist guerrillas and there's a very good phrase of Kennedy's that made a great impression on me I mean I often hear people saying I don't believe it but if Kennedy had lived he did God AmeriCorps out of Vietnam Kennedy told JK Galbraith is he an economic adviser a few weeks for he was killed he said there are only just so many concessions I can make to the Communists in any one year and ask the American people to re-elect me and American expectations the belief among the American people and certainly in American government that if America wanted something it must be doable this was very strong but of course as you just so rightly said Vietnam went far to destroying this and one of my heroes in this book Boomer a Marine officer whom I spent a lot of time with

and admire normally a Walt boomer arm said I said to me he said nothing he said in my lifetime has changed America more than Vietnam he said it created a mistrust and a suspicion of government and of the people in charge that we've never been able to undo and I he's right about that don't you yes I think that's maybe one of the most persistent things in the war the the credibility gap and it's hard to describe to Americans now how as you pointed out in your book Americans would believe their president most of the time regardless of which part even was and never been the same the other thing as you point out and as everyone knows but it's not talked about enough that it changed is it sort of because it was the second major time it sort of codified they change the unspoken change in the u.s.

constitutional system where we no longer declared war you could describe Korea as an outlier if it was once upon a time but Vietnam becomes the time where we sort of codify this and I was interested very much in in how you pointed out that the legal adviser to the president was explaining you know how you could get around having to declare war I was also very interested in the in the Munich question it was fascinating to me how the specter of appeasement and Munich was sort of hanging over the decision-making process and how it played into the domestic politics and how it could almost be used if you if you compare it to a schoolyard brawl one side calling the other a coward and demanding they move even if moving wasn't the right political choice um we still have the whole Munich appeasement cudgel at work in today's modern American politics can you talk about that and the credibility gap a little

bit what was a great fear being seen to be weak but it's very difficult I mean I think one of the things I find as I get older and I hope that one is a different person from what I was when I was a young reporter I mean to tell you a terrible story I grew up in a household in which all the men in the house including my father banged on and on about what a wonderful time they'd had in World War two and I grew up believing with extraordinary naivety that wars were great adventures and um I started out that way and I did love them I parachute it with our own air when people and all the rest of it when I was 17 and I really thought that this was all terrific romantic stuff and really my whole life as a writer has been a sort of journey of discovering that wars are like that that up wars are very serious stuff and there's a great phrase which I saw - quote - obscured audiences but um I suppose the lesson

it's taken me 50 years to learn was quoted by a Norwegian resistance hero called Knut Hansen I'm Knut Hansen after doing wonderful things in world war two heroes memoirs in 1948 and in his book he wrote although wars bring adventures that stir the heart the true nature of war is composed of innumerable personal tragedies and sacrifices holy evil are not redeemed by glory now he I think he's absolutely right about that and I find in my books these days I write far more about victims and I do about soldiers but I think one of the things that there are many things that you do learn to have a sort of respect for the dilemmas facing governments but it's very difficult for all governments in all times to decide when to be strong and when to give way and it's it used to seem so easy to just send one hundred and first Airborne or the US Marine Corps to sort out your problem well now we know it's not that simple but in the

end if you can't sort out the cultural issues in these countries 101st airborne or the US Marine Corps can't solve them for you any more than our own army camp and up but I think if one looks at history one can see moments I mean we can also we all see now that Kennedy was both courageous and bold at the time of the of the Cuban Missile Crisis which could have gone horribly wrong but sometimes when presidents I mean Lyndon Johnson terribly wanted to be seen to be courageous and to be doing the right thing as the leader of the United States by sending in troops to Vietnam but of course he got it wrong but I know what I'd like to feel is that through my own narratives one is all the time trying to realize that governments are trying to do very difficult things I don't just mean the United States government the context of Vietnam but most governments most of the time and the same way for military

commanders I mean I've seen enough Wars myself as a reporter and one seen enough terrible things on the battlefield but it is very difficult to to fight wars it is not as my father and his friends used to say or it's all the great wrong it's very tough out there on the battlefield and and I find that at the age of 72 I have a huge sympathy with the people who make the decisions that I didn't have when I was a stupid young kid I was interested when you had pointed out that everyone involved in the decision-making process of moving from a more passive adviser role to putting troops on the ground I'm going to quote you here you wrote quote none doubted that the war would be long and the cost immense quite unlike for instance to 2002 decision to invade Iraq in 1965 every hazard was anticipated I not only found that an interesting line I found that to be a new piece of information for me and I've

read quite a few books on Vietnam but it's been a while and and that was something that I think changed my paradigm a little um can you explain that because it is interesting to think you would commit eventually half a million troops and and yet understand how it might not even be winnable and understand how tough it's going to be and not understand as you said the difference between Asian communism and Soviet Communism um can you talk about that a little bit what if you find I mean here's the impressive figure and the Johnson will know Johnson Whitehouse US State Department the Undersecretary of State George Ball his memoranda and the things he said in conversations the White House or the president he warned all along as indeed did some of the generals are that they didn't think that a jungle war in a in a in swamps of on the mountains of Vietnam was going to be the kind of suit in the US Army and I'm one of the

problems I'm afraid we're all very prone to is that we could be terribly impressed by how mighty our own forces look that if you see a US carrier group but see and if you see are always terrific on jets taking off from the flight decks and if you see your mother your Marines storming through the surf and so on they all look so impressive that you can't believe that anything can stand up to them but the world people are smart people in positions of influence in the sixties who did clearly identify the fact that this was going to be very tough and that that kind of war I'm in the jungle against gorillas might well not suit Americans I'm part of it one of the things a lot of people George bull said very smartly he said mr.

president if I thought this could be done in a year he said I would back you all the way but he said I think it's going to take much longer and I do not believe that the American people will have the patience for a long war and one of the key things is democracy's light was to be over quick and I always say I mean it's sort of half amuses me that might the last job I did as a as a war correspondent I've reported the British Falklands War in 1982 and the British loved the Falklands War because we had an incredibly incompetent enemy in the Argentine army and it was all over very quickly and we won and that's the sort of war everybody wants but unfortunately it's not the kind of war you with get but now I am impressed by the number of smart people some of them in uniform who clearly saw but but one of the problems facing Chiefs of Staff and that was true now and then if you're a political leader you're president or prime

minister says can you do this well senior generals and admirals and an Airmen they know they've got to justify the stupendous cost of the Armed Forces and you've got to be quite a brave man to tell your head of state or your your chief executive um that your forces can't do this all that I mean I remember being amused at 2002 just before the invasion of Iran and I was friendly with out there and head of the army and I met him one day when he'd just come back from from Washington we've been at a planning meeting for the invasion of Iraq and I said well what do you make of it and he said well he said getting to Baghdad is going to be dead easy but he said they had the slightest idea what they're going to do they get there but at that time that to the the people making the decisions in Washington didn't seem too much of a problem but the were smart people back in 64 65 who did see that this was going

to be a very tough row to hoe but but the people are meant to be I didn't know again I was always mixed up between horror at some of the stupid people who did bad things both in uniform and out of it and also admiration again I mean some of the soldiers and some of the Marines and some of the airmen and so on within the framework of a disaster they did very fine things and I find myself still admiring usually what they achieved at all right you may say you can be a cynic you say well it was all for nothing but I mind you I have to say one story that sticks very much in my mind one of the most impressive people I interviewed was a former corpsman a medic with the infantry guy called David Rogers and David Rogers described to me very movingly his experiences with his platoon of whom he said about a third were killed or wounded up north of Saigon in about 69 70 and he said I mean he was very emotionally affected by the

war and remained so but he said um um in 1993 he was one of those who the Vietnamese invited back as a guest to come and visit the country again and he went as a reporter and he said they took him to the area where he'd fought with his unit and he said all the Vietcong embraced him because they were all under strict orders to be incredibly nice to Americans because they wanted Congress to pass a trade deal and David Rogers said to me when I hit you two a couple years ago he said I couldn't help thinking in all these guys what it was the McDowell's couldn't we have sorted this out a long time ago it's like you said Johnson was offering a billion dollar damn thing if they if they would just stop infiltrating the South let me ask you something that's a little close to home maybe I want to talk about the coverage because this yeah proverbially the war that was lost in America's living rooms and all that kind of stuff

um I found some of the things you said very interesting I mean for example you brought up a point that had never occurred to me quoting here I think are close to it that um the Vietnam War era reporters enjoyed a notable advantage over most of their successors in the 21st century because they themselves had often served in uniform and were familiar with weapons and military ways allowed us to and and the other thing that I found interesting was when you talked about the line that some Americans went to their graves believing that reporters betrayed their country while winning plaudits from the media counterparts around the world can you talk a little bit about media coverage I mean for example I don't think we've seen because before that war that the war coverage was very censored World War two type stuff and yet somehow after that war they've toned down I mean now we have embedded reporters who are

essentially working with the governments I don't think we've ever seen the kind of freedom to show news the way they did in that war and do you think that was a good thing or a bad thing and do you think the reporters at the time did a good enough job pointing out what you mentioned the other side's transgressions and atrocities and everything so that things would be equal a little bit well I've said in the introduction to my book that I think that um many of the reporters who served in Vietnam didn't outstanding job a reporting entirely accurately what they themselves saw and knew but where they failed was because was so much going on on the other side that they had no access to but all the incredibly bad stuff that the other side was doing never got any sort of show and I quite understand in a very small way I was party to it myself because you know when I was reporting there from BBC and

newspapers in the early seventies and all the time you were seeing shocking stuff being out going on all around you and you were witness to the corruption and the incompetence of South Vietnamese government but we just didn't pay enough attention to stuff we couldn't see and the United States whereas it was absolutely true that there was a huge credibility gap because a lot of the stuff that was we were told at briefings and saw with absolute garbage but the numbers always start but body counts and so on the frightful lies were told in fact Walt boomer the general Marine Corps general he said to me that one of the lessons he brought home from three tours in Vietnam was telling the truth but the curious thing that the sort of contradiction that on the one hand a lot of senior Americans did not tell the truth to the world about what was happening up but on the other hand America did preserve a commitment that

was very honorable to let us see for ourselves so that in a way that's never been repeated in any war sense but if any of us are sort of didn't believe what we were being told about some peril going off in the middle of nowhere we could get access and me as a British journalist as much as anybody on fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters to go out there and look for ourselves and the Communists would never let anybody but Jane Fonda go up and see what the hell was going on in their neck of the woods and I do not believe that the business that the media lost the war but I certainly do believe that up up the the way that the war was covered up made it more difficult for the United States but I mean the point my father was a war correspondent in World War two and I once said to him that having been reading some of these wartime dispatches they seem to be a pretty gung-ho and he said what we were doing was part of the

war effort now of course nearly all the senior officers who were in Vietnam American senior officers they'd been in World War two and they were accustomed to dealing with the media that would play the game in what was seen to be the national interest they wouldn't break ranks and now suddenly in Vietnam they find that you've got a whole lot of reporters refused to accept that I'm telling the story the way that Mac V is they've always known of wanted he told was was not going to happen and they found it very difficult to adjust to this um and I think what is also fair but some journalists I think a bit dishonest about I mean I was taking part of the television discussion euros ago with a group of former war correspondent including some Americans and I said they were talking about their commitment to tell the truth and tell the world what was going on and I said shouldn't we also admit that when you're when

you're as young as we all were and so on it was a great adventure and we had the time of our lives in many ways we were our irresponsible kids well none of the others would have admit that at all that they got very angry with me for saying that but I'm afraid um there were in Vietnam how long the journalists were frankly what I would call war tourists there was some brilliant serious-minded superb people like Nielsen and David Halberstam and so on so the worst and very fine correspondent but I mean it was a great life there were unlimited girls drugs delicious food beautiful country and all the rest of it and although some of the media had their finest are in Vietnam I would also say that some of the media had their unfunny style like the television crew that provided a knife for a soldier to cut the ears off some dead Vietcong on camera and that sort of stuff so um the media's record in Vietnam was pretty

mixed um and there was some stuff to be proud of and some stuff frankly to be ashamed of let's talk because I know time is short a little bit about the anti-war reaction in terms of protests and everything else because it's interesting as a kid growing up in the post-vietnam era I just thought that was the new reality that would be expected in future conflicts and yet now looking 50 years back on things if you if really if you started in the Second World War there's very little of that large spike in anti-war activity I mean not only were there no protesters protesting the bombing of Germany in Japan but there really by 1960 standards weren't that much after the Vietnam War for any of the conflicts what do you think accounts for that being such an outlier situation well I I've suggested in my book I mean remember I was living here in this in the late 60s so I saw it all firsthand I saw the demonstrations and the whole

thing but all sorts of stuff got tangled up together it was the worldwide youth movement against the established order and the revolt against the old sexual morality and in 2000 uh the and this stuff got rolled up with Vietnam and you've got to remember kids in those days we're putting posters on their college walls of market um who anybody who knows anything knows was one of the great mass murderers of the 20th century up there with with Hitler so um there was incredible naivety among the kids the kids were right about one thing the war was a disaster but of course one of the things that drove the protest movement was the fact that a lot of them were terrified of being drafted that they were afraid they were going to have to waste two years of their lives in uniform and maybe lose their lives altogether so I mixed up with their principled objections to the war a mixed up with the whole youth revolt um was

they felt they had skin in the game about about the danger to themselves and um they were I mean it was the extraordinary time to be here I mean some of the stuff that I saw myself was you actually felt America was falling apart in 1968 and in fact the fact he didn't fall apart I've never gone of a bear of America ever since once always I always believed passionately this day in America's capacity of a reinvention because I saw what a mess you could get itself into in 68 and come out the other side but no subsequent war the other thing we must remember the whole thing was much smaller and we've hardly talked too much in this conversation about all the battlefield stuff and um if you look at casualties I mean I've written about one battle in one chapter of my book called dido that absolutely nobody's ever heard of and this was a three day battle in May 1968 in which a marine battalion was more or less wiped out up

near the Demilitarized Zone in three days of battle in which they lost eighty one kill and I forget about 250 wounded and they ended up with one unwanted officer and about 150 men still fit for combat and nothing remotely like that happened in Iraq course or in Afghanistan I mean the scale this was a really murderous bloody business in some of the stuff people did and some of the start people experienced I mean it was it was it was on about as world war 2 or career at times I mean um that I don't think I don't buy the line that Vietnam is the worst war that ever was I mean all the walls are pretty ghastly but it was a hell of a lot worse um in the scale of the bloodbath and um anything remotely in Afghanistan or Iraq and these are volunteer they've been fought by volunteer soldiers well you remember very well that they used to publish photos in timer or Life magazine of everyone killed that week and sometimes the

casualty levels could get high enough hundreds a week and then I would see hundred awake and I was trying to figure out how we would react today in the United States two casualties were about well and those did that brings me back to something you had talked about the war being a disaster and then we had talked about the protesters in the media and everything it does make me wonder though what is the responsibility if your government seems on a course to continue doubling down on something that everyone knows is a disaster in a democratic or republican system what is the role of the population in terms of checking a government that as you said didn't know what they were getting into or didn't know what they were getting into but found no way out of where they were going I mean could one make the case that it was better to have that kind of pressure on the part of the electorate versus what might have

happened if that pressure had not been there when I was living there in the United States in the late 60s I could see a lot of Americans especially in middle America and I got to know Middle America very well in that era and I spent a lot of time in places like Minnesota and Wisconsin and so and you saw very patriotic Americans wrestling with the dilemma of where loyalty lay did you just blindly go on supporting your president or or did you not they weren't that kind to go out and protest in the streets but it's a very difficult issue and um I think it is right to speak out but it's never easy to decide where the patriotic route lies and I remember one of the most moving things that happened to me when I was there in 71 and I've been up reporting for BBC a battle of place called far base six up in the in the near the lower border element murderous business and we it's the ride back psyche

on a c-130 that was only one other camera crew all hues so we're in the cargo hold of this huge aircraft and down at the end of the plane are the opposite end from us was the body bag containing an American Sergeant and an adviser who've been killed in the battle and there's his body bag with all his stuff around him his guitar and his sound system and all his kit and so on we had an hour and a half or two hours on the plane down to Saigon looking I was sort of looking at this up at that poor bastard and he's and his body bag and so on and I thought we're now in a situation where nobody wants to be the last American to die in a war that's obviously lost and I think one of the things that one does bitterly reproach Nixon and Kissinger for from the moment they assumed office in 69 they knew there was no hope of winning the war but they were desperate for purely political reasons to conceal from the American

people the fact the war was lost and twenty-two thousand Americans died under the Nixon presidency and I'm countless Vietnamese and it was in many ways the worst period because you've got the whole black power thing you've got the Army in Vietnam falling apart a huge drug problems and so on and so forth and all this they knew all the way down the street that there was no way they were going to win this but they were just desperate to avoid anybody finding out about this and to me one of the grisliest bits the White House tapes that were relatively recently released in 2015 is that Kissinger coming back from the secret Paris peace talks in October 72 and he rushes into the the Oval Office and he says to Nixon he says mr.

president we have got a better deal than you have ever dreamed on and remember this is a month before Nixon faces George McGovern in the presidential election and Kissinger doesn't say this is going to bring peace this is going to save countless lives he said this will absolutely totally screw McGovern and the cynicism of these guys at this stage arm and it was all about politics and that's a pretty it's it's hard if six you crawl you know but actually one thing I would say which I think is important as a sort of closing note on this to me the supreme irony of the war if you go to Vietnam today if you said to an American and about 66 how would you like Saigon to look in 2018 well actually pretty much where it looks now and although it's still a very unpleasant totalitarian state Viet now they do now have license to make money they don't want to be Americans they're incredibly nice to Americans because

they realize that the American system is worth this countless more valuable and countless more valid than that their own wretched government but they're all completely hooked on American culture and on making money and I've suggested in the last chapter of my book that while the United States failed in Vietnam with b-52s and spooky gunships and defoliation that the United States triumphs with Johnny Depp on YouTube but um what we've learnt is that is that economic forces can be at least as important if not more so than the soldiers in deciding how history plays out my stepfather always said just drop blue jeans rock and roll and Playboy magazine on them and they'll become Americans you said it the way sir max we've hardly touched upon all the good things in this book though and I would like to encourage anyone who would love to get an updated really interesting view of Vietnam from somebody who wasn't

just there but has had a chance to think and talk and do research about it ever since sir max Hastings and the book is Vietnam sir max thank you so much for coming on the program it was my pleasure down thank you for having a great time hey come on the next book okay all the very best take care wrath of the cons Punic Nightmares Apache tears and of course ghosts of the Austin just a few of the classic hardcore history titles available from den Carlin com every true fan has heard these favorites Hey they make great gifts too if you think the show you just heard is worth a dollar dan and Ben would love to have it Bukka show it's all we ask go to Dan Carlin comm for information on how to donate to the show

Questions about this episode

Who speaks in "EP6 On The Vietnam War with Sir Max"?

Dan Carlin (Host), Sir Max Hastings (Guest).

What is "EP6 On The Vietnam War with Sir Max" about?

The discussion focuses on the Vietnam War, featuring insights from renowned military historian Sir Max Hastings, who has authored a comprehensive new book on the subject. Hastings, a former war correspondent with extensive experience in military journalism, evaluates the complexities of the Vietnam conflict and reflects on his personal connections to the war, providing a deep dive into its…

What is mentioned in this Dan Carlin episode?

18 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Vietnam, Vietnam War, Sir Max Hastings, Dan Carlin, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "EP6 On The Vietnam War with Sir Max"?

The episode runs 1 h 24 min; the transcript is about 15,654 words in 90 timestamped sections.

More from Dan Carlin

About this transcript: the episode's spoken words as captioned on YouTube, split into timestamped sections. Reclip.Me locates every person, work and idea in the text, keeps the time it is first named, and quotes the words around it verbatim. Last updated January 26, 2026.