VIETNAM, it is now commonly assumed, is the only war the United States has ever lost. It was, of course, never a declared war, but even the most fastidious historians are now willing to discuss it as a genuine throwdown -- one that lasted 30 years beginning with the French Indochina War in 1945 and concluding with the fall of Saigon in 1975 -- and not as a "conflict." National defeats often register more deeply in the consciousness of a population than great victories. Why, then, do Americans know so little about the specifics of the Vietnam War? Why are we fixated not on the war as a war -- a flawed undertaking whose objectives were worthwhile -- but as an indictment of foolhardy foreign policy? Adults my age were alive for at least the last few years of the war, and most of our parents were either fully aware of being at war for more than 10 years, or actually involved with the fighting. Some were active in the anti-war movement. It isn't, however, the military "defeat" that preoccupies us. It is the cultural failure.

In addition to being the longest war the United States ever fought, Vietnam is also the most widely misunderstood. Unlike World War II -- which was far from a conflict without complications, but which has been mythologized into a war fought according to clear moral principles -- Vietnam is viewed in two primary ways: as a costly defeat, a senseless waste of life in the service of an ambiguous Cold War ideology; or as a surreal marathon of soul-maiming, proto-postmodern horror better suited to the movies than military doctrine. In fact, it's through the movies (and a to a lesser extent, TV) that we have received our Vietnam lessons -- lessons dictated by Boomers in the entertainment industry, who have savored their cultural victory even as we lost the war. And who have substituted their story -- one of blunder and tragedy -- for what actually happened, and why the war was actually fought.

By now, almost everyone believes they can grasp the stone funk into which Vietnam plunged the nation's military culture. Kosovo -- with its rugged, mountainous terrain reminiscent of South Vietnam's Central Highlands -- struck cold fear in the hearts of a generation raised on Platoon and Apocalypse Now. The deserts of Kuwait, on the other hand, provided a redemptive martial template: featureless expanses of sand ideally laid out for the war of dominant maneuver and total destruction that, for a decade, eluded the US Army in Vietnam.

We don't remember Vietnam by studying the siege of Khe Sanh or Operation Rolling Thunder or the Pentagon Papers. We remember it through individual deaths, those of some 58,000 Americans, recorded on the Vietnam Memorial in Washington. The argument that The Wall makes is one of hubris erased through the accumulation of gory detail: the body count.

The Wall, however, and its American body count, only tells half the Vietnam story. Because while the war didn't conclude until the Ford Administration, the victory via sheer numbers strategy endorsed by Lyndon Johnson, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, and field commander Gen. William Westmoreland had ended seven years earlier. In this sense, The Wall is a memorial to the early Vietnam War.

It's the early Vietnam that haunts both our national memory and our national policy. As it stands, all of current US military doctrine is a reaction to the indelible memory of the early war. Unfortunately, we've drawn the wrong lesson from the early Vietnam War. It's the late war that contains all the keys to the conflicts that the US will face in the next century. (The redemptive Gulf War is the exception; Vietnam is the rule.) This is because, while the US lost the early war, it chose not to win the late war.

WEST POINTER AND FORMER CIA man Lewis Sorley has crafted his own memorial to the late war in Vietnam, the recently published A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam. The title of A Better War comes from a comment made by a journalist regarding the war that Gen. Creighton Abrams inherited after Westmoreland stepped aside in 1968. "Abrams is very good," the writer said. "He deserves a better war." Sorley wholeheartedly agrees with this view; a naked (if copiously researched) revisionism drives the book. What emerges from Sorley's documentation is something much more substantial than the well-worn argument that the US, by 1969-70, was close to winning Vietnam's limited war. It is Sorley's allegation that "in the wake of the defeat came untold further misery for the Vietnamese." More than failing itself, the US, in leaving Vietnam behind, failed a people who believed that America was better than the war it was fighting.

Sorley, however, is under no illusion that a victory in Vietnam would have itself been limited; the goal by the end of the '60s, just before the drawdown in forces began, was to prepare the South Vietnamese to take over the fight against the communist National Liberation Front (NLF) and its military arm, the Viet Cong (VC), both of which were supported by the North. Sorley is also no fan of Westmoreland, whose strategy for defeating the Viet Cong he rigorously questions. Westmoreland was determined to destroy the Viet Cong -- as well as the North Vietnamese Army (NVA)-- through massive engagements. The theory was that once the enemy had been fixed in position and his retreat blocked, vastly superior American firepower could be used to obliterate him. This strategy succeeded for a very brief period in the early '60s, when Kennedy authorized the first helicopter deployments. It began to falter soon thereafter, but the name for this tactic is Vietnam's contribution to the American lexicon of military catchphrases: "search and destroy."

When search and destroy worked, it worked with gruesome effectiveness. When the Viet Cong or the NVA attempted to stand and fight US forces, they were usually annihilated, taking thousand of causalities in the process, or forced into retreat toward their refuges in Cambodia and Laos. But once the Viet Cong changed tactics, search and destroy floundered. American casualties from ambushes and booby traps increased. The enemy refused to stand and fight.

Westmoreland stuck to his guns and constantly requested more troops. But by the time Westmoreland had been replaced by Abrams in 1968, however, search and destroy was abandoned in favor of a new set of tactics called "clear and hold." Abrams linked clear and hold with a concept called "one war." He hoped to combine tactics pioneered by US Special Forces earlier in the war -- small night patrols, ambushes, seizure of enemy forward supplies -- with a more "orchestral," or multifaceted, picture of cultural and political issues in Vietnam. His general approach was known as "pacification" (it had been employed, with moderate success, by the Marines in Vietnam prior to 1968). Whereas Westmoreland had actively sought to search out and destroy the Viet Cong and the NVA in large numbers (pledging to crush the NLF's will to fight by exacting horrendous losses), Abrams refocused the entire war as an effort to ensure the security of the South's people. It was not entirely a defensive strategy, but, barring a full-scale invasion of the North, Abrams saw that the situation on the ground in South Vietnam would have to be stabilized if the United States ever wanted to get out of the war.

Sorley's numbers suggest that Abrams' clear-and-hold tactics were yielding results. Crucially, Abrams made the seizure of Viet Cong supplies his highest priority. After the 1968 Tet Offensive -- a massive, countrywide offensive that caught the Americans by surprise but still ended in defeat for the NLF -- subsequent NLF offensives were considerably more difficult for the Viet Cong to mount. In any case, Sorley's take on events is at least more exhaustive that Neil Sheehan's, whose A Bright Shining Lie is the accepted classic of the "bad war" school. The success of Sheehan's book is testament to how poorly represented Vietnam has been, even by those who reported on it. The war went on from 1960 until 1975, and it consisted of many, many battles. Sheehan, however, devotes an entire chapter to a single battle in 1962. (Sheehan also devotes a chapter to the crusading efforts of another Vietnam naysayer, his colleague David Halberstam, one of the war's journalistic superstars.)

Sorley's optimistic take on the late war is supported -- if not wholeheartedly endorsed -- by Dave Flitton's groundbreaking Battlefield Vietnam, a 12-hour documentary series that explores the war in painstaking detail from Dien Bien Phu to the fall of Saigon. It's true that the Viet Cong killed a significant number of American soldiers and brought down an alarming number of US warplanes (900 during the three years of Operation Rolling Thunder alone). But it's equally true that the Viet Cong were perhaps one of the most incompetent fighting forces ever fielded, despite the hyperbole surrounding General Vo Nguyen Giap's planning of the Tet Offensive. The NVA and the VC were successful against the South Vietnamese (hence the initial large-scale US buildup in the mid-'60s), but the South Vietnamese had a lousy army. The US, by contrast, had a great army that also possessed the massive firepower to, as happened time and again during the war, defeat almost any Viet Cong action. What's most stunning about watching the Battlefield series is the gradual realization that, between 1962 and 1970, US forces suffered so few significant battlefield defeats, while B-52 Arc Light raids (contributing a large portion of the eight million tons of bombs dropped during the war), air strikes, and merciless artillery routinely thwarted major VC offensives. The real problem, of course wasn't so much that the VC always lost, but that the VC always escaped, retreating to vast underground tunnel complexes dug throughout the South, or slipping across the border into Cambodia or Laos, where they could not be pursued.

THE PICTURE OF THE WAR that emerges from A Better War and Battlefield is one of a protracted military challenge suspended between the vicissitudes of geopolitics. Chinese and Soviet support for the NVA and the NLF was never interrupted, but numerous targets and actions were considered off-limits for fear that the war might widen. The stakes of the war were extremely high; after the final American pullout and the fall of Saigon, Vietnam entered a period of torture, killing, and repression that left millions dead (in addition to the more than one million killed during the war). The country is just now beginning to recover. Of the improving situation on the ground in 1969-70, Sorley quotes Richard Nixon: "We should have dealt a swift blow that would make Hanoi's leaders think twice before they launched another attack in the South... [W]e would have ended the... war in 1969 rather than in 1973. [T]hat was the biggest mistake as President."

Where, then, has all the confusion about the war -- especially the late war -- come from? Ironically, the big search-and-destroy battles with the VC and the NVA that Westmoreland sought in 1965 were becoming plausible once Abrams' clear-and-hold tactics achieved success in 1968-'70. The VC -- far from the wily jungle warriors who picked off hapless Americas at will, lured them into ambushes, impaled them in punji pits, maimed them with booby traps, and then melted into the scenery -- were a very well-organized and highly motivated guerrilla force that was, ultimately, no match whatsoever for a well-trained and well-equipped modern army. An interminable war of attrition was what Hanoi desired, and until 1968, that was what they believed they would get. (They didn't have much choice; almost every time they massed their numbers and came looking for a big fight, they got waxed, until the US forces departed.) Eventually -- 10, 15, 20 years down the road -- the Americans would have had enough and the South would fall. What both Battlefield and Sorley reveal is that this NLF strategy would have failed had the US not decided to betray its commitment to the South. Hanoi, of course, knew this; the communists' own desire to win the war swiftly was what provoked the massive Tet Offensive. Michael Lind, the Beltway polymath whose work runs a gamut from memoir to epic poetry, adds the geopolitical angle to Sorley's more focused revisionism with Vietnam: The Necessary War. Lind's revisionism isn't tactical; it's historical. He agrees that Vietnam is hopelessly misunderstood, but he also argues that the war, like Kosovo, was a test of American resolve. He maintains that while Vietnam was a battlefield loss, it was a cultural victory -- for the Left.

Raised on movies that depict battle as a background aspect of the war experience -- that have tried to recast the war as either a psychedelic theater of hypocrisy or an opportunity to depict American leadership in the 1960s as inevitably fated to surrender its ideological worldview to the counterculture -- Americans of my generation have such a debased idea of what actually happened in Vietnam that our ignorance could almost be taken as a concession that the war was little more than raw material for an ascendant entertainment apparatus shaped by Bob Dylan, SDS, the Woodstock Nation, Dan Rather, and Oliver North. Vietnam, the first television war, has become little more than television in the national consciousness. Fifty Hueys sweep into a purple-hazed landing zone and disgorge whole battalions who...well, then what? A fly black dude from Detroit and a cherry draftee whiteboy from Kansas share a nervous midnight doobie in their foxhole while they wait for Charlie to put one between their eyes? The psycho platoon sergeant kidnaps a friendly to literally and figuratively rape, then murder? Robin Williams hoots and keens? Where do the B-52s -- arguably the most devastating weapon used during the war (a single bombload neared the punch of a tactical nuclear weapon) -- come in? When does John McCain get shot down? Who lost the war -- or failed to win it?

Unlike more recent military engagements, Vietnam was a war that was genuinely fought by all four services branches. Losses of men and materiel that today would be considered intolerable were common. Vietnam, particularly after 1968, was warfighting at a savagely accomplished level.

Since then, Americans have lost their ability to see this. Hollywood has voided the war's military achievements and obfuscated its goals, in the service of a foggy Boomer perception that Vietnam was either a comedy of errors or a grand conspiracy. To make matters worse, recent combat has been so overwhelmingly one-sided that we believe force can be used without cost, and as a consequence Vietnam looks sloppy, deranged, perverse. Absolutely minimal casualties in the rapidly multiplying late century "peacekeeping" operations are assumed -- and if minimal losses can't be guaranteed, the troops won't go in. Planes can never go down. Ships can never be sunk. No one will ever die screaming in a jungle again. Unfortunately, Vietnam was not a national aberration that we must, collectively, get over. Because the United States can't reasonably expect to fight all its coming wars -- and they will come -- from 15,000 feet, we need to acknowledge the unsettling fact that Vietnam is not our buried past; it is our future. And if we continue to accept the myths spawned by our long national nightmare, we might never truly wake up.

Matthew DeBord is a contributing editor at FEED.

In the Feed Feature "The Art of War," Tom Spurgeon looks at Vietnam from a different angle: "There have always been notable literary jeremiads and cold, factual reportage, but ever since World War II, comics have existed as some of the rawest, most poetic and underappreciated media for war commentary."

Read an excerpt from Michael Lind's book, Vietnam: The Necessary War: "It was necessary for the United States to escalate the war in the mid-1960s in order to defend the credibility of the United States as a superpower, but it was necessary for the United States to forfeit the war after 1968, in order to preserve the American domestic political consensus in favor of the Cold War on other fronts."

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