65. How Alertness to a Word Change Could Have Saved Us in Viet Nam.

What made us WWII veterans share the Yippie view of the Viet Nam War was, oddly, an argument in Curtis LeMay's line: our sending troops to Viet Nam was unjustifiable militarily. Forget the morality of it. You don't attack an enemy without learning his capabilities. We attacked with no idea of the staying power, much less the on-the-ground firepower, of North Vietnam and the Viet Cong. Who the hell did the staff work? Didn't we have anybody who could see that it was long-term nationalism, not monolithic communism, that explained the staying power?

Apparently President Johnson didn't have anybody, and that doomed him. He couldn't win and he couldn't get out. We'll never forget how terrible it was.

How could he have avoided that terribleness? By broader staff work, says the military man. Johnson's staff failed him in judging the enemy, sure, but it still could have judged his own people successfully. Staffs are used to telling generals about the condition of their troops — their state of training, their health, their morale. Johnson's staff could have said to him, "Sir, we've got people here, not just troops, who hate to lose. They hate to admit that they're losing. That's going to make it very hard to get out of this once you're in it."

That's military. Politicians know such things in their bones. Lyndon Johnson didn't need a staff to tell him that Americans hate to lose. He'd been to Texas high-school football games.

So, did he have a chance of bringing this knowledge to bear, and saving us from that terrible decade?

I think he had a good chance, but to take it he had to be alert to the importance of words — the way English majors are taught to be. In March, 1965, Johnson sent Americans openly into combat at Da Nang. Up to this point they had been "advisers"; here they became "soldiers" — the word naming what many of them had in fact been for some time. You'd just changed words.

If only Johnson had understood the magnitude of that change. An "adviser" can't be defeated. He is merely thwarted. Soldiers can be defeated. "Defeat" is what your rival does to your high school when it outscores your football team. "Thwart" is what city council does to it when it votes to change your principal's busing plan. Substitute the first for the second in the mouths of the people back home and you've put their team on the field. From then on it's "us against them, dig in, hang in there, give 'em hell."

I'm hard pressed to think of a moment when words were more important, when the nation's need for leaders sensitive to words was greater, when just one flash of verbal perception could have accomplished so much. It's not just seeing what big things words can do; it's seeing what big things they can trigger. I think Johnson at Da Nang triggered something so big that no government effort, no diplomatic expertise, no twisting, no turning, could stop it.