Portrait of the enemy.

• Author: Stein, Jeff

When the War Was Over Bitter Victory Portrait of the Enemy

Radicals of the sixties used to chuckle overthe irony of the most persistent criticism of the Vietnam war being squeezed between ads for Mercedes cars and Boehm chinaware in the pages of the chic New Yorker. There, long before The New York Times or The Washington Post turned their editorial backs on Lyndon Johnson, the regular dispatches of Robert Shaplen from Indochina hinted at his deep skepticism about American policy in Vietnam.

Shaplen's Indochina was laced with joss sticksand bougainvillaea and peopled with a cast of stone-faced Buddhist monks, bitter CIA agents, upbeat American colonels, shadowy Viet-Cong, and greedy Saigon politicians. Month after month, like dependable characters in some Asian soap opera, they, and we, sank deeper and deeper into a plot of inescapable doom. It was Vietnam as "Dallas,' a war fought, watched, and written about in a state of suspended disbelief.

I discovered Shaplen's Vietnam on the shelvesof the base library in Ft. Bliss, Texas, where, before going to Southeast Asia as an Army Intelligence agent handler, I had been sent to study Vietnamese in 1967. Shaplen's The Lost Revolution (1965) is a gloomy account of U.S. prospects that suggested America had frittered away a natural reservoir of good will among South Vietnamese and blundered destructively into an unwinnable war. On the day North Vietnamese tanks paraded into Saigon, Shaplen writes 20 years later in Bitter Victory,* he felt "remorse and shame' because the U.S. had so badly botched the war and destroyed Vietnam to boot. Afterwards, "like so many other Americans,' he writes, "I wanted to forget--or try to forget--what had happened in Vietnam.' And like so many of us, he couldn't.

* When the War Was Over. The Voices of Cambodia's Revolutionand Its People. Elizabeth Becker. Simon & Schuster, $19.95.

Nor could Elizabeth Becker, who covered thewar in Cambodia as a correspondent for several news organizations, including The Washington Post. Like Shaplen's Bitter Victory, Becker's book* is a return to the scene of the crime where a highly talented and serious reporter attempts to understand what went wrong.

* Bitter Victory, Robert Shaplen. Harper & Row, $16.95.

In Cambodia, teenage revolutionariespersuaded apprehensive city-dwellers to leave Phnom Penh by saying that the U.S. Air Force was coming back to bomb them. Then, behind closed borders, they virtually abolished the 20th century, putting the entire nation to work by hand on massive agricultural projects, and systematically murdering those suspected of having worked with foreigners. Being perceived as being hostile to "the organization,' or having been born to parents who were not peasants, was cause for death.

For this fate, Becker argues, the Cambodianshave no one to blame but themselves. "Ultimately, the Cambodians were victims of...