Facing the Phoenix
New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1991. First Edition. First Printing. Hardcover. 24 cm, 395, {5] pages. Illustrations. Map. Foreword. Source Notes. Index. Erasure residue on front endpaper. Zalin Grant is a journalist, author, editor and publisher. Zalin Grant is a journalist, author, editor and publisher. Although he is an American, he has lived for many years in France, in the ancestral village of his wife, Claude. Mr. Grant joined the U.S. Army after college, and after training as both an infantry and intelligence officer, was sent to South Viet Nam. After his military service, he worked as a war correspondent for Time magazine, and later for The New Republic. He spent a total of five years in Indo-China during the war, and has written four non-fiction books and one novel about that conflict. One of those books, 'Facing The Phoenix: The CIA and the Political Defeat of the United States in Vietnam', is widely considered to be one of the best works ever written on the wars in Indo-China. Zalin Grant is a co-founder, and serves as Editorial Director, of Pythia Press. The Phoenix Program was a program designed and coordinated by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during the Vietnam War, involving cooperation between American, South Vietnamese and Australian militaries. The program was designed to identify and destroy the Viet Cong (VC) via infiltration, torture, capture, counter-terrorism, interrogation, and assassination. The Phoenix Program was premised on the idea that infiltration had required local support from non-combat civilian populations. Criticisms arose regarding the Phoenix Program, including the use of torture and its being exploited for personal politics. This book is a bold analysis of the defeat of the United States in Vietnam that unlocks the great puzzle of why the U.S. won the battles and lost the war.
Derived from a review by Terry Maitland in the New York Times: The library of significant works about the war in Vietnam grows more slowly now -- evidence that publishers, and the reading public, may have wearied of that divisive conflict. Yet an event that brought about the foreshortening of the American century, as did the Vietnam War, deserves no end of study -- for its inherent interest as well as for what it reveals about United States policy. One policy in Vietnam shoved into the background by the American military buildup was pacification -- the inelegant French cognate for attracting the allegiance of the populace (winning hearts and minds) to the South Vietnamese Government and away from the Communist Vietcong. Pacification didn't play to the cameras, but it may have carried more potential for winning the war than a military confrontation did.
John Paul Vann, the American military adviser to the South Vietnamese, recognized the political nature of the war and believed strongly in pacification. As to the Vietcong guerrillas, he advocated pursuing them with knives and carbines instead of with gunships and air strikes. Vann, with his traditional military background, did not originate these concepts. They derived from another maverick bureaucrat, Tran Ngoc Chau, the central figure in Zalin Grant's "Facing the Phoenix." The phoenix of the title refers to Mr. Chau and his remarkable survival as soldier, official, betrayed prisoner of the South Vietnamese Government, re-education camp inmate after the victory of the North Vietnamese, boat person and immigrant to the United States, as well as to his role as unfortunate godfather of the C.I.A.'s dreaded, but highly successful, Phoenix program.
Mr. Chau defected to the French side in 1949 when the Communists consolidated their control of the supposedly nationalist rebellion. By 1962, the same year John Paul Vann arrived in the Mekong Delta, Mr. Chau had risen to the post of chief of South Vietnam's Kien Hoa province, a Vietcong stronghold in the northern delta. A former comrade-in-arms of the Communists, Mr. Chau understood that the enemy's strength consisted of regular troops, guerrillas and a politically organized base. "To Chau," Mr. Grant writes, "the key to winning the war lay in defeating the communists' political organization. . . . Chau did not want to kill the Viet Cong guerrillas. He wanted to win them over to the government side." To achieve this, Mr. Chau used three approaches. He created so-called census-grievance teams to interview villagers, who made up the Vietcong's political base, and learn their complaints; using his authority, he heeded the complaints and instituted change. Second, he would offer an unconditional amnesty to all Vietcong guerrillas. If these first two approaches failed to win over the enemy, Mr. Chau had ready a third: three-man counter-terror teams to track down and capture or kill recalcitrant Vietcong officials.
Operating on the peculiarly American assumption that no idea is so good that it cannot be expanded beyond usefulness, the Central Intelligence Agency gradually adapted Mr. Chau's counter-terror teams into the controversial campaign known as Operation Phoenix. The counter-terrorism that had been a last resort for Mr. Chau, however, metamorphosed into the program itself. Phoenix officials identified suspected Vietcong operatives, and then dispatched patrols after them. The process of identification, of course, carried great potential for abuse, since any informer with a grudge might settle an outstanding debt by reporting his enemy to the C.I.A. Phoenix defenders minimize the number of actual abuses, however.
"Facing the Phoenix" presents a history of pacification far less dry or academic than that may sound. Zalin Grant, who is a former Time magazine and New Republic correspondent fluent in Vietnamese, and the editor of "Survivors," a 1975 oral history of prisoners of war in South Vietnam, mines extensive postwar interviews he conducted with a host of soldiers and C.I.A. men, rogues and role players, victims and visionaries. Dominating a large part of the book is Edward G. Lansdale, perhaps the most public undercover operative the intelligence service has ever sent into the field. Lansdale, who died in 1987, is vindicated here as a man whose ideas on the political nature of the war ought to have held sway. His history of political action in Laos makes the critical point that much was accomplished in Laos without the introduction of combat troops. "Facing the Phoenix" is a prodigious work of interviewing and research that earns a place on the shelf of important books about America in Vietnam. Condition: Very good / Very good.
Keywords: CIA, Vietnam War, Ellsworth Bunker, Lucien Conein, William Colby, Daniel Ellsberg, Edward Lansdale, Terrorism. Phoenix Program, Tran Ngoc Chau, David Halberstam, Henry Cabot Lodge, Pacification
ISBN: 0393029255
[Book #26678]
Price: $37.50