Q&A with novelist Monique Truong

Monique Truong

Monique Truong is the author of two novels, The Book of Salt and Bitter in the Mouth. She co-edited Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry & Prose. Born in Saigon in 1968, she is based in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Q: Your novel Bitter in the Mouth deals with questions of identity and belonging. Why did you decide to wait until halfway through the novel to reveal an important piece of information about Linda's background?

A: Linda Hammerick’s story hinges on the interplay between the differences that we can see (our bodies, for example) versus the differences that are internal and invisible (in Linda’s case, a neurological condition called synesthesia, which causes her to associate tastes with words that she hears or speaks).

It’s too often the visible differences that shape and over determine what we believe we know, understand or have in common with one another. We end up misunderstanding what is truly different or similar about those around us. The Linda in the first half of the book is defined by her synesthesia. She’s not ready yet to come to terms with the rest of her story.

As Linda tells us: “We keep secrets to protect, but the ones most shielded—from shame, from judgment, from the slap in the face—are ourselves. We are selfish in our secret keeping and rarely altruistic. We act out of instinct and survival and only when we feel safest will we let our set of facts be known.”

Q: Why did you include the medical condition synesthesia in the book?

A: For me, synesthesia is an irresistible example of and a metaphor for how profoundly subjective our individual experiences within the world can be and how we learn—often very early on in our lives—to hide, to modify, and to normalize our experiences in order to communicate, to form relationships with, and to fit into the family, community, and world around us.

Also, I love to write about food, so this scientifically documented condition allows me to write about tastes and flavors once again but from a very different angle, one that encourages me to rethink the description of commonly understood flavors. Linda, for instance, tells us that the taste of fresh dill is “a bright grassy entryway leading into a room where something faintly medicinal had recently been stored.”

Q: In The Book of Salt, your main character, Binh, is a Vietnamese cook for Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. How did you come up with the character of Binh, and what is the significance of the Ho Chi Minh-like character that Binh encounters on the bridge?

A: In The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook in a chapter entitled “Servants in France,” Toklas wrote the following:

“When it was evident that connections in the quarter were no longer able to find a servant for us, it was necessary to go to the employment office. That was indeed a humiliating experience, from which I withdrew not certain whether it was more so for me or for the applicants. It was then that we commenced our insecure, unstable, unreliable but thoroughly enjoyable experiences with the Indo-Chinese.

[He] came to us through an advertisement that I had in desperation put in a newspaper. It began captivatingly for those days: ‘Two American ladies wish—‘  There were many candidates. [He] was my immediate choice. He was a person with neat little movements and a frank smile. He spoke French with a vocabulary of a couple of dozen words.”

Toklas goes on to say that after this cook left their employment, she attempted to fill his place with other Indo-Chinese cooks but none of them worked out because they all either drank or lied.

I read Toklas’ cookbook during the summer of 1989, a year before graduating from college. I didn’t begin to write my first novel until my second year of practicing law, which was in 1996. During all that time, part of me was thinking about these “Indo-Chinese” men, asking myself what made them travel so far from their home and what they must have seen within that incredible Stein and Toklas household. I think part of it was also the heady mixture of affection and condescension that I detected in Toklas’s few pages about these men. 

I adored her and still do, but I felt deeply that she had done them a disservice and left them to history as caricatures of men. I wanted to imagine them as fully formed humans again.

As for the “Ho Chi Minh-like” character or as he is known in my novel, “the man on the bridge,” he is based on Nguyen Ai Quoc, the pseudonym that Ho Chi Minh used when he was living in Paris. The years when he was in Paris were a bit too early for him to meet Binh, which disappointed me greatly. 

I wanted them to meet because I had used elements of Nguyen’s biography as part of my research for how a young man like Binh would have traveled from Indochina to France (working on a freighter as a kitchen boy, apparently).

I kept on researching and found a passage in Stanley Karnow’s book Vietnam: A History in which he writes that a French communist friend of his recalled meeting Nguyen Ai Quoc on a bridge in Paris in 1927. According to Karnow, Nguyen had been organizing in southern China but was forced to flee the region. He fled to Moscow and “with little else to do…[Nguyen] toured Europe to gaze at castles and cathedrals.”

I think it’s important to emphasize that the character in The Book of Salt is a fictionalized Nguyen Ai Quoc as opposed to a fictionalized Ho Chi Minh. From what I have read about him, his name changes often signaled or were accompanied by a significant change in the man as well. 

When he was in Paris, he was literally “a man on the bridge” between democracy and socialism. He eventually felt rejected by both and turned towards communism to reach his goal of independence and self-determination for Vietnam. By that time of course, he was well on his way to becoming Ho Chi Minh. 

The man who interested me more was Nguyen Ai Quoc, the young man living in Paris who read Shakespeare and Dickens in the original English, who wrote plays and newspaper articles, and who earned money as a painter of fake Chinese souvenirs and a photographer’s assistant.

Q: You also are a co-editor of Watermark, a collection of Vietnamese-American poetry and prose. How did you and your co-editors select the work to include in this anthology?

A: My co-editors and I decided early on in the editorial process that we would base our decisions on literary merit alone. We wanted to celebrate and to highlight these writers for their beautiful, strong writings, not because of their life stories or themes fit some pre-determined agenda about the Vietnam War or its aftermath.

It really makes me so proud that many of the Watermark writers have since published highly acclaimed novels and poetry collections, including co-editor Barbara Tran, le thi diem thuy, Truong Tran, Mong-Lan, Linh Dinh, DaoStrom, Andrew Lam, and the National Book Award-recipient Thanhha Lai.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I’m working on a novel based on the life of the writer Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904). He’s half-Greek and half-Irish and, to me, entirely American in that he came to the U.S. as a young man and re-invented himself and kept on doing so throughout his life. By the time he passed away in Tokyo, he was a Japanese citizen named Koizumi Yakumo.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: I am grateful for every day that I can wake up in the morning and write. I have little savings and have no steady income. I gave up all of that when I left the legal profession, but I never regret the decision. Despite everything, writing is the only thing that has ever made me feel strong.  

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Q&A with author Lewis Sorley

Lewis Sorley, a graduate of West Point, served in Germany, Vietnam, and the United States, including teaching on the faculties of West Point and the Army War College. His books include A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam, and biographies of Generals William Westmoreland, Creighton Abrams, and Harold K. Johnson.

Q: Your latest book is titled Westmoreland: The General Who Lost Vietnam. Why did you choose that subtitle for the book, and what do you see as Westmoreland's biggest mistakes?

A: Great first question! The response, to be credible, will have to be a bit lengthy. General Westmoreland commanded U.S. forces in Vietnam for four years (1964-1968). When, in 1965, the United States began introducing large numbers of ground forces to help the South Vietnamese fight the war, Westmoreland essentially took over the conflict and sought to win it using the U.S. forces being deployed. In response to repeated Westmoreland requests for more and more troops, the U.S. forces deployed eventually grew to well over half a million, numbering 543,400 at the peak.

Westmoreland decided to fight a war of attrition. His premise was that, if he could inflict sufficient casualties on the enemy (the North Vietnamese Communists and the controlled indigenous Viet Cong in South Vietnam), they would lose heart and cease their aggression. In such a war the measure of merit was body count. Westmoreland employed "search and destroy" tactics, typically involving large-scale operations (multi-battalion and sometimes even multi-division) seeking enemy forces in the deep jungles of South Vietnam's western reaches adjacent to the borders with Laos and Cambodia.

It is important to know that Westmoreland had complete freedom of action to choose and employ this approach. Over the years of his command his forces did indeed kill large numbers of enemy, really a horrifying number. But the predicted outcome did not result. The enemy did not lose heart or cease his aggression. Instead he kept sending more and more replacements to make up his losses. Thus Westmoreland had nothing to show for his efforts. He was on a treadmill.

Westmoreland also failed to grasp the significance of the friendly casualties his forces were taking. At one point Senator "Fritz" Hollings from Westmoreland's home state of South Carolina visited Vietnam, where Westmoreland told him, "We're killing these people," the enemy, "at a ratio of ten to one." Responded Hollings, "Westy, the American people don't care about the ten. They care about the one." Westmoreland never seemed to get it.

Meanwhile, completely focused on his unavailing tactical approach, Westmoreland neglected two other key responsibilities: building up South Vietnam's armed forces so they could progressively take over more responsibility for their nation's protection, and rooting out the covert Communist infrastructure in South Vietnam's hamlets and villages where, by use of terror and coercion, the enemy was keeping the rural populace under domination. The latter task was called pacification. Said General Phil Davidson, Westmoreland's J-2 (chief intelligence officer), "Westmoreland's interest always lay in the big-unit war. Pacification bored him."

Westmoreland always maintained that he was doing a great deal to build up the South Vietnamese forces, but there was no substance to the claim. Instead Westmoreland gave the best new weaponry, such as the M-16 rifle, to U.S. forces first, leaving the South Vietnamese for year after year equipped with castoff World War II-vintage U.S. equipment like M-1 rifles and carbines. This was an enormous disadvantage, since they were fighting an enemy equipped by its backers, the Soviet Union and China, with the best available modern weaponry, to include the great AK-47 assault rifle.

After Westmoreland there came a U.S. commander who understood the nature of the war and devised a far more effective approach to its conduct, but even though things went much better the United States Congress (and, to some lesser degree, the public and much of the media) had by then had enough of this seemingly endless war and the South Vietnamese were basically abandoned.

That outcome was a direct result of the fact that General Westmoreland had by his unavailing approach squandered four years of support for American involvement in the war, and that is why he deserves to be regarded as "The General Who Lost Vietnam."

Q: You write, "Taken altogether, the life of William Childs Westmoreland turned out to be infinitely sad." How did Vietnam affect Westmoreland personally, and did he ever doubt the course that he had chosen to follow?

A: Others who served with Westmoreland in Vietnam later reflected, candidly and insightfully, on the results of their approach to conduct of the war. Wrote General William DePuy, who as Westmoreland's J-3 (chief operations officer) had helped develop his search and destroy approach, "We ended up with no operational plan that had the slightest chance of ending the war favorably." Said General Fred Weyand, later Army Chief of Staff: "The Vietnam War was not unwinnable. It was just not winnable Westmoreland's way."

Westmoreland could not, or would not, admit to any failures of concept or execution in his conduct of the war. Noted Charles MacDonald, the distinguished military historian who was ghost writer for Westmoreland's memoirs, "from the beginning Westmoreland probably expected to write a memoir of victory similar to [General Eisenhower's] Crusade in Europe and the books of other successful American generals of the past" and "the defeat in Vietnam had not deterred him from this."

In retirement Westmoreland ran an inept and unsuccessful campaign to become governor of South Carolina, then unwisely (against the advice of experienced high-powered lawyers who had his interests at heart) sued CBS for libel after the network broadcast a documentary charging Westmoreland with having manipulated data on enemy strength figures during the Vietnam War. Following a lengthy trial, Westmoreland withdrew his suit only days before the case would have gone to the jury. In exchange he received a vanilla statement from CBS, which he claimed exonerated him. "The effort to defame, dishonor and destroy me and those under my command had been exposed and defeated," he asserted. "I therefore withdrew from the battlefield, all flags flying." 

Editorial opinion was not so favorable. The New York Times succinctly stated the prevailing reaction. "At the end," it concluded, "[General Westmoreland] stood in imminent danger of having a jury confirm the essential truth of the CBS report. For, in court, as on the original program, the general could not get past the testimony of high-ranking former subordinates who confirmed his having colored some intelligence information."

In later years Westmoreland viewed himself as very much put upon. "My years away have been fraught with challenges, frustrations, and sadness," he told a hometown audience. "Nobody has taken more guff than I have," he claimed, "and I am not apologizing for a damn thing—nothing, and I welcome being the point man!" That outlook, no second-guessing of himself and no regrets, persisted through the end of his life.

Observed a former aide to the general, "Westmoreland's life since Vietnam has been miserable." Westmoreland himself contributed much to that outcome. "The Vietnam War is my number one priority," he told an interviewer some years after retirement. "I've tried to spread myself thin and visit all sections of the country."

But then, in an assertion completely undermining the meaning and purpose of years of incessant, even frantic, self-justifying activity, Westmoreland told a college audience that "in the scope of history, Vietnam is not going to be a big deal. It won't float to the top as a major endeavor."

In his later years, then, Westmoreland, widely regarded as a general who lost his war, also lost his only run for political office, lost his libel suit, and lost his reputation. It was a sad ending for a man who for most of his life and career had led what seemed to be a charmed existence.

Westmoreland's ultimate failure would have earned him more compassion, it seems certain, had he not personally been so fundamentally to blame for the endless self-promotion that elevated him to positions and responsibilities beyond his capacity. "It's the aggressive guy who gets his share—plus," Westmoreland maintained. "That principle applies to most anything."

Q: In your book A Better War, you contrast Westmoreland's approach unfavorably with that of his successor, General Creighton Abrams, who took over in 1968, and you write that during the last several years of the war, Abrams, Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker, and the CIA's William Colby "came very close to achieving the elusive goal of a viable nation and a lasting peace." How do you think they managed to come close, and why did they ultimately fail to reach that goal?

A: That is, of course, another complex story that deserves to be told at length and in detail. Just to encapsulate briefly, Abrams, Bunker, and Colby shared a view of the war that was wholly at variance with Westmoreland's. In place of a war of attrition they embarked on what might be termed a war of population security. This, they maintained, must be "One War" in which combat actions (but much revised), improvement of South Vietnam's armed forces, and pacification were of equal importance and equal priority.

Said General Fred Weyand, "The tactics changed within fifteen minutes of Abrams's taking command." Instead of search and destroy operations, forces now concentrated on clear and hold missions in which the "hold" was provided by greatly expanded and improved South Vietnamese Territorial Forces. Thousands of patrols and ambushes replaced the big-unit operations.  And, instead of thrashing about in the deep jungle, seeking to bring the enemy to battle at times and in places of his own choosing—the typical maneuver of the earlier era—allied forces now set up positions sited to protect populated areas from invading forces. This put friendly forces in more advantageous situations and forced the enemy to come through them to gain access to the population, the real objective of both sides in the war.

Confirmed a study group led by Daniel Ellsberg after an inspection tour in Vietnam: "We are using more small patrols for intelligence and spoiling, and we are conducting fewer large-scale sweeps, and those sweeps that we are conducting are smaller in territorial scope. General Abrams has begun to concentrate much more on area control than on kills."

Body count was thus no longer the measure of merit. Instead it was population living in secure areas. Said General Abrams, in a typical comment to subordinate commanders, "The body count does not have much to do with the outcome of the war. Some of the things I do think important are that we preempt or defeat the enemy's major military operations and eliminate or render ineffective the major portion of his guerrillas and his infrastructure—the political, administrative and para-military structure on which his whole movement depends."  

Later Abrams went further, saying, "I don't think it makes any difference how many losses he [the enemy] takes. I don't think that makes any difference." Later still he told a regional conference of U.S. ambassadors of his conviction that, "in the whole picture of the war, the battles don't really mean much." That of course constituted total repudiation of the Westmoreland way of war.

Ambassador Colby said of Abrams: "I was enormously impressed by his grasp of the political significance of the pacification program. Finally we had focused on the real war." Early in his command (which began near the end of June 1968) Abrams cabled General Earle Wheeler, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to report that in pacification "we are making our major effort; so is the enemy. In my judgment, what is required now is all out with all we have. The military machine runs best at full throttle. That's about where we have it and where I intend to keep it."

While all this was going on U.S. forces, which as noted above had progressively and massively increased during the Westmoreland years, were now incrementally and unilaterally withdrawn. That meant that the successes being achieved were, more and more, achieved by the South Vietnamese.

All that had been accomplished was scuttled when, in the aftermath of the 1973 Paris Accords, the United States Congress decided it no longer wished to support our ill-fated South Vietnamese allies, even though by that point the only help being provided was financial. Since neither North Vietnam nor South Vietnam was self-sufficient militarily, that decision was fatal for the South. Cabled Tom Polgar, the last CIA Chief of Staff Saigon, in one of his final messages: "Ultimate outcome hardly in doubt, because South Vietnam cannot survive without U.S. military aid as long as North Vietnam's war-making capacity is unimpaired and supported by Soviet Union and China."

Q: A Better War became very influential at the Pentagon during the Bush and Obama administrations, as the military faced wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. What lessons were drawn from Vietnam as the United States dealt with more recent conflicts?

A: While I of course was not a party to those discussions, I gather from press accounts and conversations with some participants that the principal insights involved the importance of General Abrams's emphasis on clear and hold (rather than search and destroy) tactics, on upgrading indigenous forces, and on providing security for the populace.

Q: Are you working on another book now?

A: I'm currently drafting some selective memoirs—just for my family, of course, not for publication. Over the years my children have encouraged me to do this, but until now I always responded (with complete accuracy) that I was busy telling the stories of far more important people. With publication of the Westmoreland biography I came to a point where I felt I could spare some time for the more personal task, although I was unsure of how it would go. 

The first afternoon I sat down to give it a try, I wrote about the dog my father gave me when I was eight and he was about to leave for World War II. That turned out to be a very nice dog, and I found there were quite a number of things I enjoyed recording about her and our shared adventures. The next day I wrote about my sixth grade teacher, one of the greatest friends I ever had, and that seemed to go well, too. So since then I have been adding anecdotes and reminiscences as they float up in my memory. I can recommend this to everyone. It is especially gratifying to remember all those to whom we have owed so much over the years—dogs of course, but also family members, teachers, friends, and writers and composers and artists and film makers and on and on.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: There are, despite an absolute flood of books about Vietnam and related matters, still some books we need. I am very slow, taking three or four or even five years to produce a book, so I may not have enough time remaining to undertake these projects. One that should be written, though, might be entitled Also Great: The Generation That Fought the Vietnam War. That references, of course, Tom Brokaw's widely known book The Greatest Generation in which he so characterized those who fought World War II. Many people do not know that two-thirds of the World War II cohort were drafted and only one-third volunteered, whereas during the Vietnam War the statistics are just the opposite, with two-thirds of those who served volunteering and only one-third drafted. That in itself seems to me to warrant paying some attention. I would never disparage the World War II veterans, among whom are my father and my uncle, but I do think Vietnam veterans also deserve an account that specifically recognizes their patriotism, valor, and service.

One other necessary book could be entitled Living the Dream: The Vietnamese in America. After we abandoned the South Vietnamese and they were conquered by the North, many fled their own country to find freedom and new opportunities elsewhere. As we now know, many perished in the attempt, lost at sea or dead of starvation or sickness or even the victims of piracy. Many more, though, made their way to Australia, to Canada, to France, and in lesser numbers to other nations of the world. Fortunately for us, one of the largest concentrations of expatriate Vietnamese is in America, where they have demonstrated strong family values, a thirst for education, and capacity for hard work.

In closing A Better War I wrote this: Nearly a quarter-century after the war Nick Sebastian, a West Point graduate then with the Immigration and Naturalization Service, spent three months in what had once been Saigon interviewing candidates for political asylum in the United States, former "boat people" who had been forcibly returned from refugee camps elsewhere in Southeast Asia. It was for Sebastian a moving and humbling experience, for he found both the country of Vietnam and its people beautiful, persevering with admirable spirit under a repressive regime and terrible economic hardship. "The people I met throughout the country," he reported, "accept their loss and in many cases unbelievable subsequent persecution with an equanimity, fortitude, strength of character, and will to survive that is awe-inspiring."

I hope someone will one day tell their story.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. This Q&A also appears on deborahkalbbooks.blogspot.com.

Q&A with writer Thomas E. Ricks

Thomas E. Ricks covered the military for many years for The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, is a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, and writes a blog for ForeignPolicy.com called The Best Defense. His books include The Gamble, Fiasco, and most recently The Generals: American Military Command from World War II to Today.

Q: You open your book The Generals with a quotation attributed to Napoleon: “There are no bad soldiers, only bad generals.” Why did you pick this particular quote?

A: I liked it. It made me think. And it struck me as a good introduction to the themes of the book. What makes a bad general? And what’s the difference between a good one and a bad one? These were questions I was trying to address.  

Q: General George C. Marshall is an important figure in your book, and you write, “It would be difficult to understand today's Army without knowledge of Marshall's career--and especially his powerful sense of duty and honor.” What about Marshall, in particular, do you find admirable, and which other generals since Marshall, in your opinion, have displayed that same sense of duty and honor?

A: You are absolutely right. George Marshall became a hero of mine while I was writing this book.  He wasn’t perfect—he made poor decisions on the race issue, on strategy, and one some of his picks for generals early in the war. But what I like about him stands out much more. He spoke truth to power. (His willingness to throw the BS flag on President Roosevelt was one reason FDR picked him in 1939 to be chief of staff of the Army.) 

He also kept his social distance from the president—he refused to laugh at FDR’s jokes, he made it clear he wanted to be addressed as “General Marshall,” and he never visited Roosevelt’s home in Hyde Park, New York, until he was there as one of FDR’s pallbearers.  

He also understood that he served the nation first, his soldiers second, and officers a very distant third—that seems simple, but it is very different from, say, the way the Army approached the Vietnam War. 

Finally, and most importantly for the subject of my book, he was very quick to recognize and relieve failed generals, something the Army no longer does. He also rewarded success by promoting promising younger officers, which is today why we know names such as James Gavin, Matthew Ridgway and Dwight D. Eisenhower.       

Q: You write, “By the end of the Vietnam War, the system of running the Army that had been devised decades earlier by George Marshall, a man of integrity, discipline, and objectivity, had collapsed.” Among those you blame are John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Maxwell Taylor, Earle Wheeler, Harold K. Johnson, and William Westmoreland. Would you fault the presidents and the generals equally, or does one category bear more of the responsibility?

A: I would blame both. Neither spoke candidly or truthfully to each other, and the nation was far worse off for it.

Q: How did more recent generals use the lessons of the Vietnam War in Iraq and Afghanistan, and do you think the right lessons were drawn?

A: No, I don’t think they have drawn the right lessons. For example, it is a common belief in the officer corps that civilians were too intrusive in the conduct of the Vietnam War. Actually, the problem was not that—you want civilians to be engaged deeply, as Churchill was in World War II. Rather, in Vietnam, our generals—specifically our Joint Chiefs of Staff—were not involved enough. They let President Johnson cut them off, keep them in the dark. When he cursed them, they should have resigned. They lacked the moral courage to do so. 

I worry that our generals today actually are going down the same road on Iraq and Afghanistan as they did on Vietnam, believing they did pretty good but that the civilians let them down. Now, the Bush Administration made plenty of mistakes on Iraq—some of them whoppers. But the military also made many mistakes. It was 2007 before we had an effective military strategy in Iraq. That’s more than three years of fighting before we really adapted. That’s too slow, and for that I primarily blame military leadership.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I am working on my blog and thinking about my next book. I think I may write a history of the Vietnam War—there isn’t a good operational history.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: Sure. The reception to the book has been very interesting. I’ve had lots of notes from military officers saying the book is spot on. Generals don’t seem to like it much, but military historians do. 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. This Q&A is also posted at http://bit.ly/V0ZRKu.

Q&A with Professor Donald Zillman

Professor Donald ZillmanDonald Zillman is the Edward S. Godfrey Professor of Law at the University of Maine School of Law. His books include Strategic Legal Writing, and his areas of study include veterans in Congress.

Q: What can you tell us about the newly elected veterans in Congress? Do you see any particular patterns when you look at the numbers, particularly in terms of gender or party identification?

A: I located 13 legislators with prior or present military service who joined the Congress since the 2010 election.  That dropped the total number of vets to about 100 (two elections still undecided as I write)—a loss of about eight in the total population in Congress over the last two years.  That continues the consistent decline in veteran membership since I started keeping figures in 1992.

Two of the vets are women, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii and Rep. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois.  That beats the prior record of one woman vet per Congress.  Four of the new vets are Democrats, including both Reps. Gabbard and Duckworth.  In fact, the split by party is much more than 2-1 for the GOP.  For the entire Congress the split was 70 GOP and 29 Democrats.  The split is more pronounced when the age of the members are considered.   Veterans of the World War II and the early Cold War vintage are split about evenly by political party.  The divide of vets born after 1955 (the products of the non-draft, all-volunteer military) was 30 GOP and 6 Dems.  In brief, those veterans with a service experience in recent years are overwhelmingly Republican.

All of the new veterans also have substantial years of military service of one kind or another (active duty, reserves, National Guard).  The common description might be an officer with 10 or more years of service, but with a considerable likelihood that some or most of that service is in a reserve or Guard capacity—very often in the Iraq and Afghan campaigns.  They should bring some very useful perspectives to shaping legislative military policy.

Q: What has happened to the overall percentage of veterans serving in Congress in recent decades, and where do you see that trend going?

A: I suspect total veteran numbers will continue to decline.  This election saw a good number of long-serving veterans leave Congress either by retirement or electoral defeat.  Another 16 legislators are 75 years of age or older.  By the next election we may have reduced the “Greatest Generation” vets to a handful.  I will confess to a sense of loss when Sen. Dan Inouye (World War II combat hero and the only Congressional Medal of Honor winner in the Congress) ends his service.

Q: For politicians, how does service in Iraq and/or Afghanistan affect their campaigns and political careers? How does that compare that to previous generations' service in World War II, Korea, or Vietnam?

A: This election continues to suggest that honorable military service remains a positive credential in almost all elections.  However, it is hardly a promise of victory against a non-veteran opponent in either a primary or general election.  Numerous veteran candidates lost to non-veterans.

The challenge to keeping a useful number of veterans in Congress is to seek out good veterans who would make good legislators and give them financial and political encouragement.  I and others have noted that a long-time active duty veteran would face a number of handicaps in seeking political office, including frequent military moves that would deprive the vet of a home base, limited chance to build a personal fortune, and proper military limitations on participation in political activity while on active duty.  This election may suggest the model is the National Guard officer (often following service on full-time active duty) who builds or already has roots in a community and who is able to quietly build political support while doing his/her civilian career work between periods of activation.

This generation of vets won’t have the World War II benefits of fighting in a popular and victorious war and of having large numbers of their electorates sharing those experiences.  However, they may not have any of the stigma that the Vietnam generation faced.  Most current surveys continue to indicate that the military is the most admired employer/organization in American society.  Congress could wish it was doing half as well.  Which may leave many veterans wondering:  “Why would I want to get into that….?”

Q: This presidential election was the first in the post-World War II period where neither of the two major-party candidates had served in the military. Is that trend likely to continue?

A: I think we are unlikely to see a presidential election in which both candidates are veterans.  Two weeks ago, I might have thought General David Petraeus might provide one veteran on a presidential ticket.  I’m not sure I see one plausible prospect now.  But I’d welcome suggestions.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I’m having fun on two research and writing projects.  The first examines the potentially explosive growth in oil and gas production from fracking and other techniques and the potential for carbon capture and storage underground to reduce the risks of climate change.  Oxford University Press will publish this multi-author, international study in early 2014.  The second continues my long fascination with the first hundred days of the 65th Congress in 1917.  That group, many of whom were elected with Woodrow Wilson in the “he kept us out of war” campaign of 1916 suddenly faced a declaration of war, massive expenditure increases, the initiation of the military draft, and considerable restraints on free speech and other civil liberties.  The decisions that they debated with great vigor and intelligence have impacts today.

Interview with Deborah Kalb. This interview also can be found on deborahkalbbooks.blogspot.com.

Reflections from Bernard Kalb on Sihanouk

Cambodia's SihanoukThis isn't a Q&A, but it's definitely worth reading. Bernard Kalb (brother and uncle of Marvin and Deborah) covered the late Cambodian leader Norodom Sihanouk for many years. Here are some reflections from Bernard Kalb on Sihanouk over the years.

ah, the monseigneur!  

he's got to be chuckling happily, reading through the outpouring of stories, memoirs, column, our voh recollections reviewing the zigzaging panorama of his life, the teen-ager appointed king and then, in a cascade of huge ups, downs and outs over the years, emerging with almost god-like status among his "little buddhas," as he called his cambodians--and there's that one, let's not forget, that hugely terrible, backfiring decision thinking he could manipulate the murderous khmer rouge but only to be outwitted by the KR, their medieval madness resulting in the killing of almost one-fourth of the country's population at the time, almost two million people; overjoyed, he's gotta be, as he discovers that after all these years of oblivion, lost to the world, he's back on the front page.  it took death to make a comeback but to the impresario of cambodia, the great showman with a careening career, who played the game of always being on stage as a camouflage for his diplomatic gambling to try to keep his cambodia happy, intact  and unmolested, his now moving on to nirvana has got to be just another performance.

and how remembered he is!  

when was the last time there were so many stories pouring into the voh…about someone who once was and, for decades, wasn't?  royalists, dictators, reformers, presidents, politicians--all those VIPs of varying VI that we'd met during the days we lucky few were covering southeast asia; most of those characters have moved on with hardly a syllable, come and gone, farewelled with a phrase or two, unremembered.  not so the whirlwind from phnom penh:  the outpouring flows on--and why?  was it his personality?  charisma?  his calculated clownish offerings?  his diplomatic exhibitionism?  his sheer unorthodoxy--and a king yet?  what was it that yielded this ongoing rich rush of sihanoukiana?   written without--am i right?--without referring back to old notes, all of it still so vivid half a century later, all at the very tip of our memory.  

reading through all the voh stories, the published obits too, it is all of the above, of course--plus a big plus: the reality that the world-famous objectivity so worshipped by journalists has been penetrated by a sneaking streak of…affection?admiration?  maddening admiration?  empathetic understanding? exasperated appreciation?…jim pringle, elizabeth becker, tony paul, all the rest, where are you when i need you?  HELP, please!  all that maneuvering sihanouk to try to escape the buffeting and competing ideological winds of the cold war, to keep his country from being sucked into the war next door, that double-edged civil war and proxy war between the big guys. no fun then, was it, being the little guy, king of a country born into a turbulent world, just taking its first baby steps as an independent country.  and please, gentlemen, please don't describe cambodia as "little"!  or "small"!  or "tiny"!  do you remember those unmatchable news conferences where he would throw a theatrical tantrum and lecture reporters on not using those diminutives--or risk their next visa.

to those of us based in saigon, a chance to do a story next-door in cambodia was an escape from the endless war in vietnam, from the bombings and the napalm and the kia.  sihanouk's country was, at that time, a surreal relief despite the escalating tensions just behind the facade of unity; the sight of that giant clock built into the grassy knoll in central phnom penh proclaimed that you had just entered a different world, a refuge from the killing next door.  couldn't wait to get the poolside of the hotel royal and order a cheese souffle for lunch and watch the air france hostesses tip their toes into the tropical water.  the war?  what war?  a few of us got a chance to stop by the palace for an interview with the prince, and there'd always be a press conference featuring the ex-king that would always be half news, half entertainment.  once, in addition to the "little" lecture, he startled the world with a surprise announcement that the actor peter o'toole had just been written into cambodia's "liste noir."  from that very moment, peter o'toole would no longer get a visa to the country!  pourquoi?  because the actor had, in sihanouk's view, committed crimes in belittling cambodia in the movie "lord jim," filmed in and around angkor wat.  case closed!  no appeal!

Bernard Kalbbut it wasn't all comedy; there was anxiety behind the giggle. sihanouk shrewdly using those news conferences to alert the world that cambodia was facing a variety of dangers, reading aloud what he described as top-secret cables.  "here i have in my hand," he'd sing, declassifying whatever it was he saw as a threat, hoping that going public would expose--and upend--any hostile action in advance.  indeed, all sorts of pressures surrounded sihanouk's efforts to keep his little, small and tiny cambodia on a neutralist course, trying to steer clear of the cold war, all tat diplomatic broken-field running of his--this, at a time when cambodia's territory was being violated by its neighbors and secretary of state john foster dulles was condemning "neutralism" as "immoral."  

all of us who were there, i'm sure, have our vignettes about sihanouk's fears about a hanoi that would ultimately win the war.  here's mine: 

it's the late sixties, best i remember, and sihanouk has traveled to battambang to inaugurate a new museum of the country's cultural treasures.  we--a bunch of reporters--went along, not so much to view the sculptured stone masterpieces but to get a chance to ask him about what action cambodia might take to destroy hanoi's ho chi minh trail that snaked through cambodian territory to feed military supplies to hanoi's allies in south viet nam.  the story had just broken, i think, of the secret us bombing of the trail--to which, to quote that deeply substantive becker-mydans obit in their great obit in the times, sihanouk "turned a blind eye…" 

the exact wording of his responses in the q and a with us--lots of words, to be sure; remember, we're talking sihanouk--is, after all these years, a bIt hazy but it came to, more or less, this: 

to our question about what cambodia can do to crack down on the north vietnamese, he replies, with wide-eyed disbelief, you expect us to find them?  us, with so little military.  you have five hundred thousand american soldiers in viet nam and YOU can't find them.

more of this--and then he gets to the point, to the heart of his strategy: one of these days, he says, you will leave viet nam and you will leave me with the vietnamese… 

that phrase--"you will leave me with the vietnamese"--is about as close as i can get to a recalled verbatim.  and did he shake his head when he expressed his barely hidden fear?  i can't recall.  did he use the word "abandonment?"  no, i don't think so.  but it seemed he was hoping that not taking any direct military action against the north vietnamese would by a kind of future life insurance for his country--if the north emerged as the winner.

but the visit wasn't all about war and peace.  with sihanouk as our guide, we visited the museum and one of the first things that struck me: so many of the dazzling figures of cambodian sculpture had no heads.   dazzle after dazzle: no heads!   torso after torso: no heads!

"the heads, monsigneur," i blurted, naively. "where are the heads?"  (i was then, i should confess, an amateur collector and my interest wasn't exactly disinterested.)  

"ah, monsieur buneekalb," he sang.  "the heads!  in london!  paris!  new york."

images of antique shops in london, paris and new york surged before my eyes.

finally, one or two quick adds--can't resist--and i will be outta here.  

about several visits to china in the seventies; one as a result of a cable exchange withe prince.  i'd queried him, from washington, about the possibility of doing a tv interview, he arranged for an invite to come to beijing.  the result was a 30 minute cbs news special; as of now, i can not find neither the exact date--somewhere in the seventies--nor a transcript but you don't have to be a genius to imagine sihanouk's delight to be once again front of a camera, sharing his geopolitical analysis with the world.  he was then, of course, living in the chinese capital, having been given asylum after a coup in 1970 that, plotted by a general backed  by the us, ousted him from power while he was traveling abroad.

during both visits, there were dinner invitations to sihanouk's palace; my second visit featured a sihanouk surprise--a cuisine surprise, i should add.   his menus were hand-written and i discovered that, for dessert, he was offering "peche a la bernie kalb"--but without the usual ice cream.  the french wuld have been shocked--but to an amused, crowded dinner table, sihanouk explained  that, during my first visit, i had declined eating ice cream.  i didn't at the time go into dietary details but the reason was jewish religious habit: not mixing ice cream with meat.   but sihanouk remembered and so, all these months later, maybe a whole year, he honored moi with a peche that was half missing.  "buneekalb doesn't like ice cream," he said, with a gurgle of a laugh.  

a moment, please.  memory suddenly knocks.  sihanouk again.  in his royal days, years before he is overthrown.  it's 1956, i'm brand-new in asia, barely unpacked, when i receive a cable from new york to abandon hong kong and hurry to phnom penh.  the chinese premier chou en-lai will be making a state visit to cambodia.  back in those frozen sino-american days, the possibility of even a glimpse, let alone a visa, of a chinese leader would cause a press corps to drop everything and start running, in this case, chou-wards, as cablese might put it.  so i ran.  chou-wards.

the closest i got to the chinese premier was on a cruise, hosted by the prince, along the broad tonle sap river that flows through the center of phnom penh.  it was a small ship of the  cambodian royal navy, which meant that the guests and the visitors were all thrown together, almost of us within talking distance.  sihanouk was--the word "flutter"  comes to mind, a  butterfly, wings outstretched--was fluttering about, oohing, ahing, cooing, the smiling gracious host radiating charm in all directions, anxious that any whim of his guests from up north be immediately gratified.  and there, just a few steps away from me, was the second most powerful man in china.  all i could think of was visa, visa, visa, how could i get a visa to china, which the chinese were not then issuing to american journalists.  but i could not even break through the circle of security guards surrounding sihanouk and his guest.  hopeless.  just then, a cambodian in some kind of fancy uniform happened to walk by.  "any  chance," i asked, thinking of how i might drown my frustration, "of your helping me get a glass of beer?"

the cambodian came to a full stop.  "sir," he proclaimed, shocked, "i am the commander-in-chief of the cambodian navy."

but if i failed, sihanouk did not.  he got what he want: a chance to play the china card against the vietnamese--and the united states.

and one more finally, please; about that 4,647,494-hour news conference that sihanouk gave in l979 at the great hall of the people in beijing.  well, maybe that is overstated but it really did run a record six hours.  it erupted not long after sihanouk and princess monique had been airlifted out of phnom penh by the chinese; they'd been under house arrest by the pol pot regime, and the chinese rescue was carried out in anticipation of a vietnamese invasion of cambodia.  the thrust of his oceanic comments was a denunciation of the khmer rouge and the vietnamese invasion.  to those of us who had seen hm in his royal heyday in phnom penh, it was obvious that sihanouk was back in his element, exploding with words as though making up for all the imposed silence he'd suffered while in house imprisonment in phnom penh. back on stage, he reveled in the excitement before the press crowd.  i remember leaving the conference at one point, returning to my hotel to file a tv story back to cbs news, and then returning to the great hall to discover, probaby not much to my astonishment, that the old pro was still going strong, taking one question after another, hungrily, on any issue, the nonstop ex-king.  inevitably, the conference limped to a close.  the great john roderick of the ap and i--both of us had met sihanouk in the late fifties--went up to the stage where he was still pouring forth; familiar faces we were, and he greeted us with that vast, almost shy, smile of his, almost gurgling with delight, his ams flung around us, perhaps remembering the once-upon-a-time glory in phnom penh.  all of this was captured on film, and i felt impelled to send a special message to cbs new york to explain the surprise embrace.

a final finally: i'm exhausted--and so permit me to skip a lot of the sihanouk saga.

stiil, there's the challenge of getting to the the essential sihanouk, to unravel the ultimate man despite all his maneuverings, diplomatic tight-rope walking, varied careers.  though he was prophetic that the us one day would "leave" viet nam, he was catastrophic in throwing his support to the khmer rouge.  but the ultimate sihanouk, right or wrong, always was driven by the a single motivation: how, in a world in turmoil, to safeguard, preserve, protect, guarantee the integrity of little, small, tiny cambodia.  is that enough to triumph over the terrifying, numbing sight of all those corpses on the killing fields of the kr?  that question still haunts, ineradicably whatever the answer, and in deciding, to keep in mind that the world of then isn't our world of today, the cold war now an item on scholars' shelves, the swirl of suspicion, fear, uncertainty in that part of the world at least on hold.  for now anyway.

all of this emerging in a panorama in my mind as i watched, just a night or two ago, a bbc tv report of the funeral procession of the prince through the streets of phnom penh, his body carried on a giant mythological creature, thousands of cambodians filling the streets, in awed silence, his little buddhas weeping.

the indelible monseigneur.  indeed.