"THE ONLY WAR WE'VE GOT" is taken from the dispatches the author had been contracted to write for a national magazine in the U.S., based on his experiences as a journalist on attachment with the U.S. Army in South Vietnam between May and July 1964. At the time Ford was in-country, "there was a grand total of forty foreign reporters in the country - full-time and part-time, and of all nationalities, not just American." 

Ford had written his observations and reflections of all the people he met in South Vietnam --- soldiers, airmen, and civilians alike --- from Saigon to the Mekong Delta, to further north in the Central Highlands near the Laotian border, and eastward to the shores of the Gulf of Tonkin. 

Ford returned home before the end of the summer and within a few months, the Vietnam War would take on a greater urgency with the landing of U.S. combat troops on March 8, 1965. The chapters he had written and then sent home were never published after all. Indeed, it would be another 36 years before Ford would re-read those chapters. According to Ford, "[t]hey were a revelation: about the country and the sort of war we were fighting in those early days, and likewise about the young reporter who'd flown to Saigon with an innocence as grassy-green as the American involvement itself." 

I was inspired to read this book because of the PBS TV documentary series on the Vietnam War that has been broadcast both last week and this week. I was born the same year Ford went to South Vietnam and have no memories of most of the events associated with that war. I was simply too young to take all that in. But my earliest memories of Vietnam are from 1973, when I watched on TV the arrival in the U.S. of freed American POWs. I grew up with the feeling as the '70s proceeded apace that most Americans simply wanted to put Vietnam as far behind them as possible, and just get on with their lives. Thus, Vietnam became for me a vague abstraction. The Second World War, by contrast, for me was very real because my Dad had fought as a GI in Europe during 1944-45 and several other relatives had also served in the U.S. military during that time. It has only been in the last 20 years (when I read David Halberstam's book 'The Best and the Brightest', a history of the Vietnam War as it passed from being a French war of reconquest in Indochina to an American war) through a slow, gradual process that I began to want to know more about the Vietnam War. 

For all its 163 pages, "THE ONLY WAR WE'VE GOT" is a very engaging story replete with many of the B&W photos Ford himself took during his sojourn in South Vietnam. One passage that stands out for me concerns the meeting Ford had with a civilian aide worker who had 20 years' experience of work in underdeveloped countries. It is as follows ~

'I asked USOM Man [the name Ford gave to this civilian aide, because he didn't want to name him, for fear of possibly costing the aide his job] what better solution he had in mind. He said we should cut our military advisory group to its 1962 level - five or six thousand - put most of our money and energy into educating the people, training them to use modern agricultural techniques, and providing them with health care. "The people, " he said mournfully in his almost-German accent. "We need men and women who will work with the people, not more and more military advisors. Pah! What do military men know about the people?" It was a fair question and I decided to find out.'

Well, it would be pretty hard to go below 4 stars on this one because I like me some fighter pilot stories. This revised edition is a fine way to spend a few hours learning about an iconic war story. My preconceived notions on the unit were set straight. First of all, they did most of their fighting in Burma, not China. That was news to me. They met the same Japanese units time and again through the year they were actively engaged in combat. I'd say they were poorly treated by the "Big Army" in the end but the US home front held them up as heroes.

They had some interesting experiences working with the RAF for the defense of Burma. This was one way to maximize the number of "scrambled" aircraft at the same time:

Group Captain Manning assigned the Tomahawks to Mingaladon’s east—west runway—the crosspiece of the letter A—while his Buffaloes used the one that ran north—south. Each squadron was split into flights, one at each end of its assigned runway. Thus, when the alarm went off, upward of thirty planes bounced across the gravel from four directions, blowing up a dust storm as they went. All pilots were supposed to keep to the right, and the Buffalo pilots to hold down and let the Tomahawks cross over them where the runways intersected.
The system was put to the test on Saturday, when Burma Observation Corps reported Japanese bombers flying into Tenasserim from Thailand. Fourteen Buffaloes and sixteen Tomahawks made the rush across the gravel, sweeping past each other with a flair that did credit to the Flying Trapeze—”the damnedest rat race you ever saw,” Curt Smith recalled. One Hell’s Angel had to stand on his brakes to avoid a Buffalo but all thirty planes got airborne without damage, and faster than any other system would have permitted. They climbed to a chilly rendezvous, three miles above the chalk-white runways and green-brown rice fields.

The Japanese initially held the Americans in contempt and dismissed their tactics. But that changed after the Flying Tigers started winning some dogfights. After the Rangoon Christmas raid, the Japanese had a different story:

At Sugawara’s headquarters in Bangkok debate had continued without letup since Christmas Day. Where allied fighters had previously been reported as stodgy, JAAF officers now described their speed as “incredible,” a problem compounded by their policy of “shooting and leaving” instead of sticking around to make turns with the Nates and Hayabusas. In the end, Sugawara called off the campaign against Rangoon. Henceforth, he’d concentrate on Malaya and Singapore, where his heavy-bomber sentais could come and go as they pleased.

It was a pretty wild group of pilots, undisciplined, but eager to fight. Greg "Pappy" Boyington was one of the pilots.

Boyington assumed he was being led into combat by a veteran, until he saw that Probst was attacking from below and into the sun. Prescott, flying on Boyington’s wing, was untroubled by this unorthodox approach. “You don’t see anything except your leader when you fly in formation,” he explained years later. When he did spot the radial-engine fighters overhead, Prescott took them for Buffaloes: “They were diving, looping, and just going nuts. I thought, Silly bastards. . . . Hell, let’s get these people out of here and we’ll fight this war. Then I looked again. . . . Hell, that’s no Buffalo—that’s a Jap. He’s diving at us!. .. I was ‘on Greg’s left wing, and this Jap was diving over my left shoulder. I couldn’t leave the formation, but nobody said I couldn’t move over and get on Greg’s right wing, so he’d shoot Greg first.”

Ford came under fire when this book was first published because he had the temerity to actually use Japanese records to match up against the kills claimed by the AVG. Well, turned out there was a little overcounting of kills made in the air and on the ground. On both sides.


When someone asks, they oblige with the same stories that were told the winter and spring of 1941—1942: that the Flying Tigers shot down 300 (or 600 or 1,000) Japanese planes, that they met and outfought the Mitsubishi Zero, that they stopped one Japanese army in the gorge of the Salween River and another in East China. (All wrong, save possibly the last, Operation Sei-go did indeed evaporate after the AVG reached Guilin. What they don’t say is that for a few months, more than sixty years ago, in their incandescent youth, they were heroes to a nation that needed heroes as never before and never since.

Yes. They fought magnificently, and their achievement isn’t at all diminished by the fact that they believed their accomplishments to be greater than they were.

I found a couple of areas I would have liked more information on:

1. The Japanese and AVG units kept running into each other. It was good to get some feel for this but would have liked more on the Japanese side to match the AVG.
2. The RAF and the AVG had a lot of interaction that was barely covered. Need more.
3. An exotic locale for the combat. Would like to see pictures of the area and targets.

They were there. Mercenaries, gamblers, innocents, black-marketers, romantics, war lovers—they were there when the British Empire was falling, and when America’s future seemed nearly as bleak. “Did you ever regret joining the AVG?” a reporter once asked R T Smith. R T glanced off to the side, put his tongue in his cheek, and said: “Only on those occasions when I was being shot at.” Yes. Frightened men in fallible machines, they fought against other men as frightened as themselves. All honor to them.