Howard Jones (1) (1940–)

My Lai: Vietnam, 1968, and the Descent into Darkness by Howard Jones is a study of one of the darkest moments in American military history. Jones is University Research Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Alabama, where he chaired the Department of History for eight years and received the John F. Burnum Distinguished Faculty Award and the Blackmon-Moody Outstanding Professor Award.

Having served in the Marines we were taught the standards of war and the rules of engagement. We had leadership that was experienced and committed to standards. The Vietnam War was different. Officer's were pulled from the ranks. The ranks were drafted into service. Those in Vietnam simply wanted to do their twelve months and get out alive. Most didn't rush in and volunteer to fight. Some did though and that combination between aggressive and those who just wanted to make it out alive created a dangerous situation. The aggressive leaders wanted a body high body count. Those wanting to live saw it advantageous to shoot first and ask questions later. It was difficult to tell friend from foe so viewing everyone as the enemy was a survival tactic. Soon any native was a "gook." One of my colleague's father was a helicopter door gunner in the war. He remembers asking his father how could you shoot people like that. His father said, "They weren't people."

There has always been a dehumanizing of the enemy. In World War I, it was the Huns. In World War II it was the Japs and later it was the Commies. Vietnam took it extremes. The hidden enemy was frustrating. Not being able to retaliate against an enemy killing your friends was a heavy burden on many fighting the war. There was a lashing out at what is to be known as My Lai massacre.

Unclear orders, incompetent leadership (Calley was called Lt Shithead by his company commander), built up aggression and contributed to the atrocity. Through the chain of command, it came down to the people remaining in the village were enemy combatants. At the end, 347 Vietnamese were dead this included old men, women, and children. There were no American deaths and three weapons were captured. Although, there was much firing and artillery fire it was coming from the American forces. My Lai was not armed. The 48th Battalion of the National Liberation Front (Viet Cong) was reported to be in My Lai; they were not. Calley's Charlie Company was responsible for much of the massacre. What makes My Lai so horrible is more than the killing of civilians of all ages, is the rape at gunpoint that took place. This was not a military operation. This is something invading hoards did in the middle ages.

Howard goes into graphic detail of the search and destroy mission and the atrocities committed. He goes into the cover up, trial, and eventual freedom for Lt Calley. This book has to be one of the most disturbing books I have read and ranks with WWII atrocities by the Axis powers. The Abu Ghraib torture incident in Iraq caused quite a stir in 2003. This was a drop in a bucket compared to My Lai and the cover up. Howard does include those who refused orders to kill civilians and those who worked to stop the massacre. A frightful history and a very dark chapter in the history of the US military.… (plus d'informations)

Howard Jones's textbook is an example of how diplomatic history should not be written. His blunt praise for realism and derision of idealism in American foreign policy suffers from a deadly imprecision of language. Nowhere does he offer definitions of these two terms. 2 Theodore Roosevelt's foreign policy receives high marks as realistic because it was based on "a primary concern for American interests" (p. 242), yet Jones fails to address the fundamental tension which has historically existed over defining that very concept. In like manner, he refers repeatedly to the Monroe Doctrine and the Open Door as catchall explanations for American actions.

The malevolent effects of this imprecision of language are compounded by Jones's refusal to use standard footnotes. When addressing areas of controversy, he refers to anonymous "critics" of American policy. Such nameless straw men criticize the approach taken by Harry Truman toward the Soviets as having brought on the Cold War. There is "considerable evidence" (p. 296), according to Jones, that Franklin Roosevelt would not have been able to avoid the Cold War, yet the reader interested in following up on this aspect of the debate over Cold War origins has no notes to refer to.

This absence of footnotes (or references to the viewpoints of other historians) highlights the second reason that this text is a poor example of history writing. It is difficult to uncover Howard Jones's perspective. As far as one can ascertain, he is stuck in a realist-idealist dichotomy reminiscent of George Kennan's writing in the early Cold War years as displayed in American Diplomacy 1900-1950 (to his credit Jones explains that Kennan's ideas have gone through many mutations throughout the course of the Cold War). The poverty of his textbook is attested to by the difficulty of applying the new conceptual approaches from Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations to his narrative.

The only conceptualization which is even remotely reconcilable with Jones's implicit framework is Melvin Leffler's discussion of national security. Yet, in order to follow Leffler in the integration of an externally-driven policy-making system marked by the realist's balance of powers vIi the internally-driven policy-making system marked by the revisionist's political economy, ideology must be addressed as a consistent source of "core values" rather than an aberration (p. 204). Absent a serious consideration of American ideology, Jones's account is not up to this task.… (plus d'informations)

My wife bought me this book for my birthday on the solid knowledge that I enjoy reading about American Civil War history. And while this book certainly looks fascinating, it sadly falls well short of that mark. One major problem is that the issues in the war, in regards to foreign diplomacy, never changed, at least according to Jones. The South was desperate for international recognition and the Federal government continued to insist that there was no Confederate government, only a bunch of traitors rebelling against their lawful government, and that the Union was willing to spread the war to take on any foreign power who did recognize the South. Many relatively powerful British politicians were in favor of some sort of intervention, even if only to offer mediation, in order to re-open the flow of cotton to English mills, and due to a genuine horror at the slaughter going on, but those within the government who did not want to risk war against the Federals retained the upper hand throughout. The French emperor, Napolean III, constantly held out the carrot of diplomatic recognition and even more substantial aide to the South, but mostly because he thought that would help his own imperialist goals in Mexico. In the end, he would not act in the South's favor without England going along as well. And European diplomats never were able to grasp what the two sides were really fighting about, nor that any suggestions for compromise were doomed to failure from the start. The British, in particular, never thought the North would be able to defeat the South and for two years or more considered the eventual separation of the two sides essentially unavoidable.

Unfortunately, these few points get repeated over and over and over again. In the case of the English, each fresh development in the war, each major Union or Confederate victory, brings one side or the other in the debate into greater ascendency, and each time, we get the entire case described anew, time after time. Eventually it becomes safe to skip paragraphs and even pages.

Another problem is that, as Jones seems more a professional historian than a professional writer, he at times errantly assumes certain knowledge on the reader's part. For example, early in the war, the North announced a blockade of all Southern ports and declared that defying the blockade would constitute an act of war. The complaints, both by the South and by the European trading powers, was that the North had implemented only a Paper Blockade, considered illegal under international law. What is a Paper Blockade? Jones never describes it. And though one can easily enough, eventually, figure it out (it's a blockade declared but not enforced by a sufficient naval force to make it effective), but a more thoughtful writer, or careful editor, would have taken the 30 seconds and 20 words or so to make this explicit. Another example: early in the war an international incident occurred when a Union naval captain acted on is own to stop a British ship and forcibly remove two Southern diplomats on their way to Europe. The complaint from the English was that they had only taken the diplomats and let the ship continue on its way rather than claiming the entire ship and crew as a prize of war. Why was that considered such a faux pas? Jones never tells us.

Finally, a huge portion of the book is taken up, as I've indicated above, not by any information about "Blue & Gray Diplomacy," but by the interminable debates within the British government on the subject.

So while I did gain some interesting knowledge through reading this book, I wish it had been half as long as it's 324 pages, and I can't say I recommend it.… (plus d'informations)