Vietnam: Mirage and Fitful Dream
Spence W. Perry
The experience of war can never be fully communicated. War has a broken, furtive character that prevents a full expression of its reality. Beyond the difficulty with reporting its objective manifestations, battles won and lost, planes shot down, towns seized and farms ransacked, ground lost or advanced upon, there is a subjective dimension having to do with the perceptions, emotions, and feelings of those involved that is often totally uncapturable, or if captured, which can only be indicated or given scant notation. Relating the objective and the subjective dimensions to each other is difficult if not impossible at the time the events occur and emotions are felt. For this reason, our understanding of armed conflict usually becomes better over time. As war recedes, its reality comes clearer.
In all the American experience with war, the Vietnam conflict offers the most horrible example of gross misperception, contemporaneous with the event. The blurred vision, the cataracts of various hues from rose to gray, were not monopolized by any one party to the conflict. The American vision was, of course, badly flawed. But the South Vietnamese, the North Vietnamese, and the insurgents all possessed astigmatisms of their own.
The only perceptions for which we are ultimately responsible before the face of history, however, are our own, and at this point, ten years after the fall of Saigon, American misperceptions are the only ones that are relevant for us as we hastily attempt to understand history to avoid its repetition. Misperceptions in armed conflict lead to what Von Clausewitz
