Facing the Phoenix: The CIA and the Political Defeat of the United States in Vietnam.

• Author: Geyer, Georgie Anne

Facing the Phoenix: The CIA and the Political Defeat of the United States in Vietnam. Zalin Grant. Norton,

We have tried to put Vietnam behidn us, particularly those parts that deal with American techniques there--and, thus, American failures there. This is a time to mourn our dead, to stand by their monument, and to forget the interminable arguments about "What went wrong in Vietnam?" So still another such book on Vietnam would seem about as welcome as an Iraqi chemical warhead lobbed to our side in the Persian Gulf.

And yet here is an unsettling book, somewhat of a new genre on Vietnam, telling us things we still didn't know and forcing us to think on new levels. In many ways, Vietnamese-speaking correspondent Zalin Grant, who worked in Vietnam during the war for Time and The New Republic, has written the first comprehensive book to deal with the real issue of America in Vietnam: the "Political war" and America's mostly unknown and long-suffering "political warriors."

Grant begins this concise book with a concise conversation between an American colonel and his North Vietnamese Army counterpart, one Colonel Tu, during a meeting in Hanoi just a week before the fall of Saigon. "You know you never beat us on the battlefield," the American tells his North Vietnamese enemy. "That may be so," the Northerner responds, "but it is also irrelevant." That encounter sets the stage for this saga of the "other war"--the war whose buzz words were not "body count" but "civil action," "pacification," and "a third-force solution"; the war waged not by bombers and ground forces but, as Daniel Ellsberg put it, by "the good guys."

"I met a half-dozen guys who thought of themselves as the good guys in Vietnam," Grant quotes Ellsberg as saying. "They believed they were different from other Americans. They had Vietnamese friends, and some of them spoke the language. They didn't believe in the use of air power, but believed we should be engaged in small political operations. They were contemptuous of the French, and anxious that Americans not imitate them. Above all, they had a view of the way the war was going which was totally at odds with the official view." That is what this book is all about. It traces the parallel war of the Americans in Vietnam --the war of trying to create, impose, and cajole a different and more democratic ideology there--the war that was finally lost along with the military war. But how, and why?

The story is told through one of the...