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Title: Why Viet Nam?: Prelude to America's Albatross by Archimedes L. A. Patti ISBN: 0-520-04783-4 Publisher: Univ of California Pr Pub. Date: 01 October, 1982 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $16.95

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Average Customer Rating: 4.25 (4 reviews)

Rating: 5
Summary: Having Just Returned From Vietnam...
Comment: I have just returned from Vietnam with a group of Marines I served with in the 1st Bn. 5th Marine Regiment in 1969-70. We spent a couple of days in Hanoi and were fortunate to have an hour and a half with Ambassador Peterson at the U.S. Embassy there. It is a shame our decision makers in Washington did not listen to Mr. Patti during the months of 1945 that he was assigned to Vietnam primarily to oversee the orderly release of allied POW's after the surrender of the Japanese forces who were still very much in control of Vietnam. During that time he became close to Ho Chi Minh. I was fortunate to have known Mr. Patti and had several discussions with him about that time in his life. He made no bones about the fact that Ho was wanting help from anywhere he could get it, but he (Ho) felt that the United States was the most appropriate source for help in his country's move toward independence. Ho Chi Minh told Patti at their last meeting on Sept. 30, 1945, that "he owed only his training to Moscow and for that he had repaid Moscow with fifteen years of party work. He had no other commitment. He considered himself a free agent." Mr. Patti felt that our commitment to a ten year war in Vietnam began not with our many "advisors" in the early 60's or the landing of the Marines at Red Beach in 1965, but rather our decision to support the French Colonial rule rather than an independent Vietnam in 1945.

Ambassador Peterson acknowledges that what Vietnam has today would be more accurately labeled a Labor Party, rather than Communist. Free enterprise is alive and well in Vietnam today. No one can rewrite or project history, but who can say that if we had been the source of help to Ho Chi Minh's band of nationalists in the early days of their revolution, as OSS Maj. Patti repeatedly suggested, the country would be years ahead of where they are now, economically, and hundreds of thousands of lives would not have been lost in the process.

Archimedes Patti wrote an article that was published in the Far Eastern Economic Review on Jan. 5, 1983 immediately after his own return to Hanoi earlier that year. In that article he recounts being shown a beautiful house the Vietnamese had reserved for an American Embassy. That was 14 years before we established diplomatic relations with them! Mr. Patti ended that article with: "I found the people, the cities, the countryside still there, still the same, waiting, waiting for a better tomorrow. For Vietnam, time has stood still." From my view, and in the view of Ambassador Peterson, time in Vietnam is finally beginning to move. I think Mr. Patti was correct in his 1945 assessment. I think after reading his book you will agree.

Rating: 2
Summary: Patti Was One of Many "Conned" By a Clever Ho Chi Minh
Comment: This is a useful book, because it shows how effective Ho Chi Minh was in deceiving the OSS. In fact, we now know (from various biographies published in Hanoi) that Ho Chi Minh was a dedicated Leninist who had been a co-founder of the French Communist Party in 1920, was trained in Moscow, and then spent decades as an agent of the Communist (Third) International promoting Leninist aims. True, he did talk like a true Nationalist when he met with the OSS, and he even quoted Thomas Jefferson and praised America. As the PENTAGON PAPERS (Gravel ed., vol. I, p. 261) note, "Ho . . . was an old Stalinist, trained in Russia in the early '20s, Comintern colleague of Borodin in Canton, and for three decades leading exponent of the Marxist-Leninist canon of anti-colonial war." Similarly, the PENTAGON PAPERS (vol. I, p. 50) note that in the late 1940s Ho assured various people he was "not a communist" and that Vietnam under his leadership "could remain neutral 'like Switzerland,'" but they conclude: "But these and other such statements could have come either from a proper Leninist or a dedicated nationalist. Ho's statements and actions after 1949, and his eventual close alignment with the Sino-Societ Bloc, support the Leninist construction." If anyone wants more evidence of Ho's nearly 50-year commitment to Leninism, see my VIETNAMESE COMMUNISM: ITS ORIGINS AND DEVELOPMENT (Stanford: Hoover Press, 1975), which relies heavily on communist party sources including Ho's own early writings. There is no question in my mind that Maj. Patti was a decent, honorable, and intelligent man. But Ho was a brilliant political warrior, and Major Patti and his OSS colleagues were simply out of their league in trying to figure him out. This book is useful in understanding Ho's cleverness, but not very helpful in understanding what the United States should have done in Indochina.

Rating: 5
Summary: Patti has been slandered, should have been listened to.
Comment: The view from Vietnam and South China at the end of WW2(best conveyed by General Stillwell, Bernard Fall and Patti) was overwhelmed by the paranoia and arrogance of JF and Allen Dulles and their heirs (JFK, LBJ, RMN, Henry the K). Patti may have been a tad naive, but he was also perceptive- the descriptions of Ho and his gang and what they wanted, and how they were going about it- are painful to read, because many, many people died needlessly after these encounters. We need to look very hard at this and other documentation of the actual situation in Viet Nam at the beginning of the US involvement- and during that involvement- before reaching what I believe to be highly suspect and unwarranted conclusions (e.g., Moyar's "Phoenix and the Birds of Prey"). For example, "Devil's Brigade," the story of some of the ex-SS and other German troops who avoided war crime trials in Europe by signing on with the French Foreign Legion for ten years of continued exploits up to and after Dien Bien Phu. Then there were the adventures of the Republic of Korea "Tigers" in central Vietnam- but who has written anything about them, or the Thai battalions? See- what the heck am I talking about?, right? Well, folks- we paid the bill for all those mercenaries, and a lot more (Nungs, etc.), and we're still paying debt that LBJ built up to buy those services, and the bombs, bullets, jets and aircraft carriers we wore out over there.