'The War Behind Me: Vietnam Veterans Confront the Truth About U.S. War Crimes,' by Deborah Nelson

"Villagers, acting as human minesweepers, walked ahead of troops in dangerous areas to keep Americans from being blown up. Prisoners were subjected to a variation on waterboarding and jolted with electricity. Teenage boys fishing on a lake, as well as children tending flocks of ducks, were killed. “There are hundreds of such reports in the war-crime archive, each one dutifully recorded, sometimes with no more than a passing sentence or two, as if the killing were as routine as the activity it interrupted,” Deborah Nelson writes in “The War Behind Me.”

The archive in question, a set of Army documents at the National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Md., reveals widespread killing and abuse by American troops in Vietnam. Most of these actions are not known to the public, even though the military investigated them. The crimes are similar to those committed at My Lai in 1968. Yet, as Nelson contends, most Ameri­cans still think the violence was the work of “a few rogue units,” when in fact “every major division that served in Vietnam was represented.” Precisely how many soldiers were involved, and to what extent, is not known, but she shows that the abuse was far more common than is generally believed. Her book helps explain how this misunderstanding came about.

After the My Lai story broke, officials acted quickly. They looked into other crimes — for example, studying anonymous letters sent to superiors by “Concerned Sgt.,” which described the deaths of hundreds of civilians, or “a My Lai each month for over a year.” Serious offenses were indeed investigated, and 23 men were found guilty, though most got off easy. The harshest sentence was 20 years’ hard labor, for the rape of a 13-year-old girl by an interrogator in a prisoner-of-war compound. The rapist served seven months and 16 days.

“Get the Army off the front page,” President Richard Nixon reportedly said. Investigations were a good way to do that. A cover-up attracts attention; a crime that is being looked into does not. The military investigations, Nelson argues, were designed not to hold rapists and murderers accountable, but to deflect publicity. When reporters heard about a war crime, they’d call the Army to see if it would provide information. If they suspected a cover-up, they’d pursue the story. If a military spokesman said an investigation was under way, the story was usually dropped.

Nelson, who wrote a series on war crimes with a military historian when she was at The Los Angeles Times, is a diligent, passionate reporter. Her zeal, though, sometimes leads to awkward moments. In Vietnam, villagers tell her about killings that took place in a ravine, giving her “hope” that she has discovered a hamlet where a massacre occurred in 1968. It is a different massacre, as it turns out; she seems vaguely disappointed.

Still, this is an important book. Nelson demonstrates that cover-ups happen in plain sight and that looking for an exclusive can blind reporters to the real story. She also points out that these crimes are endemic to counterinsurgency operations. When troops fight among a civilian population, in conflicts that extend for years, atrocities are almost bound to happen. “If we rationalize it as isolated acts, as we did in Vietnam and as we’re doing with Abu Ghraib,” a retired brigadier general tells her, “we’ll never correct the problem. Counterinsurgency operations involving foreign military forces will inevitably result in such acts, and we will pay the costs in terms of moral legitimacy.” Whether it’s Vietnam or Iraq, the truth is disturbing. “After such knowledge,” T. S. Eliot wrote, “what forgiveness?”

THE WAR BEHIND ME
Vietnam Veterans Confront the Truth About U.S. War Crimes
By Deborah Nelson 296 pp. Basic Books. $26.95





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'Postcards From Tomorrow Square: Reports From China,' by James Fallows

"James Fallows knows there are countless Chinas. He is refreshingly aware that one’s interpretations of this vast and elusive country will always change according to the angle of one’s vision and the flash of time one is observing. Over the years, in his writing for The Atlantic Monthly, Fallows has built a reputation as a shrewd observer of human foibles and political quagmires. He is also gifted with a disarming tenacity: he first obtained permission to enter China in the mid-1980s, when visas were still hard to secure, by learning Esperanto, together with his wife and children, so they could participate in the world Esperanto conference in Beijing. At the same time, Fallows has the eye for detail of an experienced journalist, capturing, for example, the spirit of China in late 2006 by noting that when he and his wife went to the local Shanghai Pizza Hut, they were turned away because they hadn’t made reservations.

Yet Fallows remains cautious about exaggerating his own powers as an observer. He tells us frankly that he has never managed to become fluent in Chinese, despite several years of determined effort, and that he tends to rely on interpreters during his interviews and to draw on his previous studies of Japanese to help him read Chinese posters and newspaper headlines. By using the word “postcards” for the title of this lively collection of a dozen reports written between the summers of 2006 and 2008 (11 of which were published in The Atlantic), he seems to be alerting readers to expect vignettes rather than extended essays. But readers shouldn’t be put off by the word, because Fallows does manage to give us panoramic views of China that are both absorbing and illuminating. If these reports are “postcards,” it is only in the Chinese sense — the three characters commonly used to translate “postcard” (ming xin pian) literally mean something more like “exposed letter card” or “open letter.” That may not quite be an exposé, but it’s certainly more than a quick note.

Over the past few years, there has been a major expansion of reporting from China by Western journalists. Some have chosen to focus on the interlocking lives of specific groups of Chinese, like the students from a local school in Fuling, Sichuan, poignantly brought to life in Peter Hessler’s “River Town,” or the young women migrant workers in a factory near Hong Kong unforgettably depicted in Leslie Chang’s “Factory Girls.” Fallows doesn’t seek to capture that level of group detail. Instead he chooses a wider canvas, aiming to show us how swiftly China remakes itself, how multifaceted the impact of modern technological and financial change can be. Each of his “postcards” is situational, linking lifestyle to circumstance. Thus he shows us the grandiose realm of an air-conditioning mogul in the inland city of Changsha, the eager yearnings of contestants in reality game shows and the world of China’s giant electronics factories, with their dormitories, their dining halls and the logistical wizards who integrate all the component parts. He explores the giant new gambling casinos of Macao, already surpassing those of Las Vegas in luxury and business volume, and presents the economic rationales for — and the domestic costs of — China’s immense investment in American financial markets. He describes the Chinese government’s erratic and ultimately ineffective attempts at Internet control.

In other essays, Fallows investigates the industrial muscle of the cement and coal industries (and those scientists trying to curb the waste and damage these industries have caused) as well as attempts to apply private philanthropy to bring some of the poverty-mired schools in China’s far west into the electronic era. And he elaborates on the overlapping crises — from blizzards to earthquakes — that gave such a distinctive sense of trauma to China’s 2008 Olympic year.
The difficulty with such ambitious and highly topical reporting is that however carefully the observer tries to catch something permanent that might underlie the fleeting moment, the world is always changing before his readers’ eyes. It’s unavoidable that Fallows’s book, germane to the needs of the moment though the original essays were, is doomed by chronology and structure to be unpredictably behind the times: post-earthquake but pre-­Olympic, post-Internet-firewall yet pre-Obama.

Nothing in “Postcards From Tomorrow Square” could have seemed more logical than the list of the greatest and most confident players in the global gambling game in Macao as described by Fallows in September 2007: “So which side will prevail in the battle for Macao? The shady system that has been the backbone of its economy, and that local companies still rely on? Or the international standards that the Nevada Gaming Commission and the shareholders of the world are forcing on the likes of Wynn, Adelson, and MGM Mirage?” From the vantage point of 2007, compiling a list of the effective long-range and international guarantors of honesty and prosperity at those same Macao casinos would have seemed a no-brainer: the big combines that came to mind ranged from “Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch to Deutsche Bank and Citibank.” Now such a list has other echoes.

What then is of enduring interest in Fallows’s observations about China? First, he has created portraits that illuminate the fragility and hustle of the Chinese pattern of growth, its constantly shifting boundaries, reminding us that nothing of this current growth should be seen as permanent. Fallows rightly emphasizes the deeply rooted poverty and the accompanying perils and opportunities that are present in China’s bypassed far-western regions. He shows us — for China’s economic life as a whole, and in response to global patterns — that China’s strength is not just that it is cheap but that it is fast. He shows us how unclear China’s goals are, how opaque its political system remains, how messy and ineffective and arbitrary its social controls can be. At the same time, he shows the remarkable inventiveness and energy that China’s entrepreneurs can bring to global competition. Perhaps most important to Fallows (and to us), he shows that the worst thing the United States can do is to cut itself off from China’s skills and opportunities.

For Fallows, the effort that the United States should (and must) make is to open itself to the Chinese, to develop the areas where mutual cooperation is feasible and valuable, to respect China’s brainpower and do everything possible to recreate the United States in Chinese minds as a focus for research and a potential source of fruitful collaboration. The venues for this collaboration range from basic agriculture to banking, from global warming and the conservation of natural resources to the reconfiguring of Chinese views of their own future. If China has taught him one key thing, Fallows suggests, it’s that a meeting of the minds from both societies is essential to the well-being of all."

POSTCARDS FROM TOMORROW SQUARE

Reports From China

By James Fallows

262 pp. Vintage Books. Paper, $14.95

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'China Witness: Voices From a Silent Generation,' by Xinran

"In the early 1950s, shortly after the Chinese Communist revolution, Chairman Mao Zedong set into motion one of the largest peacetime mobilizations in modern history. Prisoners of war, “reform through labor” convicts and decommissioned Red Army soldiers were dispatched to the Gobi Desert to transform the landscape and obliterate the past. The Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps built roads, canals, bridges and dams, turning wasteland into fields of cotton, maize and rice. They built entire cities in the desert. Interviewed in one such place, Shihezi, half a century later, a survivor of the force, a woman called Teacher Sun, recalled making schoolhouses — even desks and lecterns — out of sod bricks and mud in scorching summer heat and winters so frigid she was forced to use her plaited hair as padding for extra warmth. “At that time there was nothing I couldn’t bear,” boasts Sun, who received a pittance as a salary but proudly notes that she was honored at the time as a “Progressive Student of Mao Zedong Thought.”

Sun’s recollections of Communist Party zeal, sacrifice and staggering economic transformation are among the personal narratives assembled by Xinran, a Chinese journalist now a resident of Britain, in “China Witness: Voices From a Silent Generation.” In 2005 and 2006, she crisscrossed the country, tracking down and interviewing elderly Chinese and coaxing them — sometimes with difficulty — to open up about their experiences. The result is a Chinese version of Tom Brokaw’s portrait of “The Greatest Generation”: an oral history of the men and women who lived through the Communist takeover and the Cultural Revolution, then watched as China tore off its ideological straitjacket and recast itself as a nation of capitalists and entrepreneurs.

Some of Xinran’s interactions are extraordinary. She locates practitioners of vanishing Chinese crafts — including lantern makers and the “news singers” once widely found in traditional tea ­houses — and meets a 90-year-old survivor of the Long March. She interviews General Phoebe, a Red Army commander born in Ohio, who managed to survive the Cultural Revolution with her rank, health and self-esteem intact. Mr. and Mrs. You, married petroleum engineers who helped tame the remote Daqing oil fields in northwest China, describe sleeping outdoors in sandstorms and surviving on an improbable diet of grapes and melons.

Yet “China Witness” can also be slow going. Too many of Xinran’s interviews read like raw, unfiltered transcripts, with her subjects prattling on about what they ate for lunch that day (“I had noodles — Beijing noodles with minced pork and bean sauce”) or the weather (“Today’s report was 30 degrees, the last two days have been Autumn Tigers, very hot”). The interviews are sloppily put together, with no apparent thematic or chronological organization. And the breathless, Oprah Winfrey quality of many of Xinran’s questions wears thin. “You’ve got such a burning desire to do this, such a strong will, how many young people are studying lantern making with you now?” she asks a septuagenarian artisan in Nanjing. “You really are a witness to the history of education in the Shihezi Construction Corps!” she gushes at another point.

“China Witness” can, nevertheless, have a powerful effect. Many of the older Chinese Xinran meets still take a glossy view of the Communist Party and regard Mao himself as near infallible. (“When we were tending our vegetables, we saw Chairman Mao in the vegetable garden too,” marvels Mr. Changzheng, the Long March survivor. “Think of that. . . . A chairman, tending his vegetables just like a peasant.”) Occasionally, Xinran encounters someone who evinces startling candor about the failings — even crimes — of the Chinese leadership. She herself mixes admiration for China’s ability to mobilize the masses with horror at the humiliations and violence of Mao’s anti-rightist campaigns. Most important, she uses a wide range of stories — of public-works projects and persecutions, romance and re-education — to show how China’s masses clung to scraps of individuality amid the deadening conformity of the Communist system."

CHINA WITNESS

Voices From a Silent Generation

By Xinran. Translated by Nicky Harman, Julia Lovell and Esther Tyldesley

Illustrated. 435 pp. Pantheon Books. $28.95

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'Magic Bus: On the Hippie Trail From Istanbul to India,' by Rory MacLean

“Hippies were the fireworks of freedom,” an Istanbul journalist declares at the beginning of “Magic Bus,” Rory MacLean’s retracing of the eastward path traveled by enlightenment-hungry pilgrims in the 1960s and ’70s. With a spiritual craving kindled by a pantheon of idiosyncratic gurus that included Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, Bob Dylan and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, these so-called Intrepids had little money but plenty of time — and a yen to sip tea and smoke dope with the locals. Their goal wasn’t to observe other cultures but to absorb them and be transformed.

That Istanbul journalist credits hippies with nothing less than the rebirth of humanity, but Mac­Lean’s travelogue conveys a measure of cynicism about the consequences of their intrusion. In many places, the antimaterialist hippies’ arrival stimulated a crass tourist trade and an attendant defilement of native culture. Another Turkish acquaintance refers to their path as the “hash-and-hepatitis trail,” and MacLean even suggests that their hedonistic ways might have been partly responsible for the rise of Islamic militancy, strengthening traditionalists’ anti-Western resolve.

Good or bad, were they really so significant? MacLean thinks so. He lectures a group of young travelers that the beats and hippies “brought minority rights, ecology and alternative medicine into the mainstream” and “for a few short years tied together the world.” Whether such grandiose claims are true or just an expression of the baby-boomers’ self-­importance, there’s no denying that the stoned rovers were present at the beginning of a cataclysmic period in history, whose legacy “Magic Bus” describes in exquisite detail, most of it sorrowful.

As he travels from the Bosporus to the notorious trance-dance beach at Goa, MacLean goes from areas of commercial desecration to brutal police states and ghastly combat zones. The decimation of Kabul reminds him of Dresden or Hiroshima after World War II. Tehran, “an urban disease fed by anger, despair and pollution,” is a “sprawling cemetery to tolerance.” A fight between Nepalese troops and Maoist rebels leaves 15 dead and several secondary-school students shot. “Bullets have not been removed from their bodies,” The Katmandu Times reports, “due to lack of money.”

Traveling along this horrendous path, ironic considering its erstwhile symbolism as the road to Shangri-La, MacLean balances apocalyptic bereavement with engaging cameos of individuals who manage to persevere. Carla Grissmann, the “Grandmother Intrepid” whose wanderlust “predates the Beatles and Beats,” is met at the sandy ruin that is Kabul’s once-grand museum. She’s trying to piece together shards of precious pottery gleefully sledgehammered by a delegation led by the Taliban’s minister of culture, who deemed the world’s greatest collection of Central Asian artifacts un-Islamic. “I weep for the Kabul I knew and loved,” she says. Ahmed, a British comedian whose parents emigrated from Pakistan to the Midlands in the 1960s, delivers an invidious set of terrorism jokes when MacLean meets him on a railway platform in Rawalpindi. “Hey,” he asks, holding his hands under his stomach, miming a bulky explosive belt, “does my bomb look big in this?”

MacLean also crosses paths with an original flower child called Penny, who rode the magic bus with Ken Kesey, survived Woodstock, traversed the Asia trail when she was young and has now returned for a last swim in the Himalayan lake where she found serenity 40 years earlier.

The most memorable character, and the man MacLean jokes that he wants to adopt as his guru, is Rama Tiwari, an enormously charming bookseller and publisher “who touched — and enlightened — more Intrepids than any other Indian.” Rama succinctly summarizes the hippies’ big mistake: “They didn’t see we can only live in happiness if we conquer the restless dream that paradise is in a world other than our own.”

MAGIC BUS

On the Hippie Trail From Istanbul to India

By Rory MacLean

280 pp. Ig Publishing. Paper, $14.95

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'The Bloody White Baron: The Extraordinary Story of the Russian Nobleman Who Became the Last Khan of Mongolia,' by James Palmer

"James Palmer’s “Bloody White Baron,” his life of Baron Roman Nikolai Maximilian von Ungern-Sternberg, is the story of “a loser — albeit an upper-class one” — who turned himself into a visionary psychopath in the Russian far east. Uncomfortable but fascinating reading, it weaves together the weird alliances, murderous dreams and improbable careers that emerged in the aftermath of World War I and the fall of czarist Russia.

Mongolia is the focus, at a time when it was nominally free of Chinese rule after the 1911 revolution that overthrew the Qing dynasty and ushered in a failing republic. The Japanese — flush with victory against the Russians in 1905 — were groping toward the expansionist, pan-Asian dream they articulated a few years later, while the Russians were caught up in the vortex of the Bolshevik revolution. Into this terrible shifting world of alliance and double-cross came Baron Ungern, a czarist Buddhist anti-Semite with messianic objectives.

Born in 1885 and raised at the other periphery of the Russian Empire, in Estonia, Ungern belonged to the minor German aristocracy that supplied the czarist armies with officers. His military career was hardly glorious, although his cavalry service on the Western front proved his idiotic valor. Russia’s collapse in 1917 found him in the Russian far east, where he joined in wild exploits of daring with another White commander, Captain Grigori Michaelovich Semenov, which brought him notoriety and some recruits.

The atmosphere was apocalyptic, right down to the cheapness of human life. Millions had died on the Western front. Russian nobles were fleeing with their jewels to China. Local Buddhist rulers were vicious and corrupt. “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” was being read by everyone from the imprisoned czarina downward.

Engines plated with steel and equipped with weapons ripped from the gunboats on the Siberian lakes rammed back and forth along the trans-Siberian railway line, dragging behind them mobile towns of czarists, with opulent dining cars, theater cars, printing shops, brothels — and torture chambers. Prisoners were packed into waterless cars and left to die in sidings. The Whites simply ran amok. Pirates in command of these dreadnoughts of the steppe, but incapable of winning hearts and minds, they spent as much time hunting out Bolshevik spies — and torturing and killing the locals — as they did fighting the Reds. Ungern himself carried this sadistic paranoia to fever pitch.

His specialty, though, was Mongolia. He spoke the language, was an idiosyncratic Buddhist and liked the Buriats — nomads he always trusted over ordinary Russian peasants. Hence the increasingly Mongolian nature of his escapades. He was able to seize the Chinese-held town of Urga (Ulan Bator) with an army of some 6,000 men and to reinstate its ruler, the Bogd Khan.

With its panoply of outlandish tyrants, fortune tellers, mounted tribesmen and wild dreams advanced against absurd odds, the whole story could have possessed the makings of a glorious offshoot of the Great Game, had Ungern been anything more than a murderous sadist. His chief contemporary biographer, the Polish author Ferdinand Ossendowski, ladled on the trappings — the messianic visionary who stood too firm for czar and the right of kings.

Presumably Ossendowski saw beyond the torture, the firing squads, the casual executions; perhaps he was not unduly fazed by Ungern’s command to exterminate all the Jews, down to their children. Like many mad people, Ungern had the glittering eye and the gift for wandering prophecy that could, at a pinch, be taken for inspiration; and for a while his life seemed to be demonically protected. But it would be more true to say that the times brought forth the man, and these were appalling times.

Whites degenerated into warlords, with no realistic chance of turning back the Bolshevik tide. Ungern was the weirdest of the White warlords, presenting himself as the heir to Genghis Khan and for a few months holding the reins of power in Mongolia. He governed by terror. His men were forever trying to desert, but he pursued them like a fury, subjecting them to insane disciplinary actions.

Equally insane were his military decisions. He chose to march into Russia when the only course was to flee. At the end he was making for Tibet, although he made no real effort to escape.

Palmer, a travel writer who lives in Beijing, gives us a brilliant portrait of a very nasty war, fought by horrible people in a hostile environment. As he points out, the final capture and execution of Ungern in 1921 was a sideshow, and the chaos of Russia’s far east was not overcome by the defeat of the Whites. The Communists had only just got going, and were to massacre their own people by the millions in the coming years. The Japanese atrocities in China were a mere decade away. Ungern’s contempt for human life, his icy hatred of Jews, his appeal to a monstrous, ill-formed mysticism fore­shadowed the foundations of the Third Reich. What makes “The Bloody White Baron” so exceptional is Palmer’s lucid scholarship, his ability to make perfect sense of the maelstrom of a forgotten war. This is a brilliant book, and I’m already looking forward to his next."

THE BLOODY WHITE BARON

The Extraordinary Story of the Russian Nobleman Who Became the Last Khan of Mongolia

By James Palmer

274 pp. Basic Books. $26.95

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