Avoiding the issues: David Buring’s review of The Minefield: An Australian tragedy in Vietnam
While it is flattering that a former officer of Brigadier David Buring’s seniority has written a six-page review of my book, it is remarkable that he has overlooked the first requirement of book review writing: to understand the work under review. Buring’s misreading of The Minefield begins in his first sentence where he states that the book is ‘on the Australian Army’s mine warfare experience in Vietnam’. The subject is, rather, the minefield Brigadier Stuart Graham ordered First Australian Task Force (1ATF) to lay with over 20 000 M16 anti-personnel in Vietnam in 1967 and the related tragedy. Buring does refer to ‘the barrier fence and minefield’. He adds that the consequences of laying it were ‘extensive and serious’. But still, he never effectively engages with these issues.
Buring’s review misses or ignores my main storyline. He shows no awareness that Graham laid what he imagined was a barrier minefield to protect people in the most densely populated villages of the province without realising that those villages largely contained his enemy. He misses my key point that the patrol program and other measures Graham designed to protect the minefield were never going to be effective because he did not know who or where his enemy was. In other words, he never realises that what he described as Graham’s ‘barrier minefield’ could never have been one. He misses my close analysis of Graham’s ‘tactical confusion’, and garbles my account of how people from the relevant villages—initially teenage girls—entered the minefield and lifted thousands of M16 mines. Naively, he still wonders why the people lifting the mines ‘were remarkably exposed, yet they were not challenged’.
What about the ‘extensive and serious’ consequences of Graham’s blunder? Nowhere does Buring say that, from around late 1967 to early 1971, the M16 mines from the 1ATF minefield were the lightly armed guerilla enemy’s number one strike weapons in the province. Nowhere does he clarify the fact that over 500 Australians and their allies were killed or dismembered and mutilated by re-laid M16 mines from the minefield. And nowhere does he note that these mines seriously skewed 1ATF operations and enabled 1ATF’s enemy to defend successfully its vital population and base areas.
What then of the question my book is built around? How could a capable officer like Graham turn over to his enemy the extensive arsenal of M16 mines and other ordnance that had such a heavy impact on 1ATF? Buring’s opines that ‘deficiencies in ... execution’ were to blame for the outcome of Graham’s decision and remarks vaguely on the ‘loss of intent’ and ‘lack of capability’ to patrol the minefield. Yet Buring is unable to offer any indication of why the deficiencies existed in the first place—especially not knowing who the enemy was. His suggestion that Graham ‘actually deserves credit for the attempt’ forgets what he actually did.
My argument is that a combination of ambition and great operational stress caused Graham to act unwisely. Yet he could not have made the decision he did, if he had understood who or where his enemy was. The question about why he did not have this vital information then raises large questions about the nature of Australian strategic policy. No one in the high command knew who Graham’s enemy was either. Hence, the political and strategic analysis of this problem I present in the opening chapters of my book, which Buring attempts to dismiss by declaring that their ‘wide net ... catches more than was really necessary to do justice to the subject’.
So how might we understand Buring’s efforts to review a book with which he seems so singularly unable to engage? A reasonable explanation is that he is marching past and avoiding confrontation. While not accepting the need to cast a wide net, but being sufficiently expansive to indulge the romance of the Australian Government’s fight for ‘freedom’ in Vietnam, he fails to confront the fact that it didn’t know who its enemy was.
The Minefield offers the following explanation of why the Australian Government sent token forces to a war about which it had such inadequate strategic intelligence. At a time of Western, especially British imperial decline, conservative Australian governments fearfully opposed independent Asian nationalist movements, but could not say so. Blinded by wilful ignorance of the political and military force of Asian nationalism, those governments sought to erect diplomatic and military barriers against political change in the region. The deployment of token Australian forces to encourage and support the suppression of Vietnamese nationalism by US forces thus followed. Buring’s review chimes with that failed policy and a desire to turn the clock back on history.
His defence of Graham’s decision thus precludes the best explanation for and fairest mitigation of it: his reaction to the insoluble military problems created by the blind political impulse that drove the government. Institutionalised ignorance of Vietnamese conditions in Canberra precluded an adequate appreciation of the battlefield and enemy. Graham’s misreading of the political allegiances and military capacities of the people he tried to protect with the minefield went with the unbalanced, under strength, and far too lightly armed force he was sent to command in Vietnam in 1967. It was in an attempt to compensate for 1ATF’s incapacity to deal with the array of military problems it faced in Phuoc Tuy that Graham personally faltered in an inherently stress generating situation. So much for Buring’s trite assertion that I ‘expand’ Graham’s ‘limited purpose’ in laying the minefield into ‘a much wider barrier philosophy’ in order ‘to criticise it’. I see Graham as a victim of that policy—and also of his own weaknesses.
Among other major errors and inaccuracies Buring claims that I criticise the Army for not applying sanctions to Graham, and for issuing what he describes as an understated press release about mine laying casualties. These claims are inaccurate. I show in detail that, for various bureaucratic reasons including the then Chief of the General Staff’s ignorance of the situation in Vietnam, he was neither in a position to veto Graham’s decision nor later sack him. In relation to the press release, far from criticising it for being merely understated, The Minefield demonstrates that it contained ‘misleading’ and ‘untruthful’ statements and that it constituted a ‘betrayal’ of the sappers who were killed in the laying of the minefield. The nonsense Buring goes on with here is all too revealing. He claims that, in the propaganda struggle for worldwide opinion, a public airing of command and casualty issues would have resulted in what he absurdly calls a ‘pre-emptive capitulation’. No matter how little information the press received, there was no need for a betrayal.
‘Strategic Implications’ further reveals Buring’s support for lost causes. In the final paragraph of that section we have this: ‘To argue that because [campaigns] did not succeed, they should have not been attempted is too facile’. Again his review is pretentiously off-beam. I argue that, because of its colonial foundations in the period of decolonisation, the Vietnam campaign ran in Canberra on institutionalised ignorance about the battlefield, such that Graham could not have known his enemy. Once more, Buring places himself in the invidious position of attempting to defend the indefensible.
Traditionally, Australian officers have had a weak feel for strategy, because in the conduct of imperial expeditions their focus has been/is overwhelmingly tactical. Buring’s inability to comprehend my strategic as well as tactical analysis of Graham’s decision is consistent with that tradition. But more than that, we need to note his assertion that in relation to Vietnam Australia’s strategic choices expired with the decision to join the conflict’—and so ended where the campaign started. Wittingly or unwittingly, that assertion works to obscure what The Minefield shows was a critical point: the High Command’s colonial construction of the battlefield and the serious difficulties that construction caused 1ATF and Graham. Avoiding key issues, Buring keeps the conversation tactical and loads all responsibility for the minefield disaster on the battlefield commander, Graham—whose ‘attempt’ he nevertheless praises.
No aspect of Buring’s review transcends this confusion. The section he calls ‘Soldiers and Mines’ is one in which we might have expected a former engineer officer like him to have revealed an understanding of his sappers. But all we get is some old imperial rhetoric. Unlike sappers, who see mine laying as ‘a completely normal task’, he claims ‘outside observers’ are more likely to perceive the work as being ‘much more hazardous’. These remarks fly cheaply in the face of the evidence I present in the book. I am certain that the amputee sappers and other mine warfare practitioners I interviewed in and out of clinics around 2002–03 did not think the risks involved in laying mines, especially for Graham’s minefield, made it a ‘completely normal’ task.
The review is no more successful in the field of semantics. Here Buring claims I use ‘far too many coloured and emotive words’, but only provides three examples that all turn out to be wrong. One involves his double displeasure with the expression ‘we thought the hierarchy were Dickheads’—and this ‘from a former officer’, he exclaims in horror. But Buring’s dismay not only shows that he doesn’t understand the conventions of quoting, it reveals again that he has misread the text. The ‘Dickheads’ comment was a direct quote from a statement by a sergeant I interviewed, not an officer. Buring also seems unaware that the other examples he gives—my use of the word ‘dummy’ and of the metaphor ‘the blind leading the blind’ in relation to Graham—involve standard Macquarie Dictionary Australian English usage.
Buring’s review falls apart on the philosophical front too. Quoting British historian John Keegan he reproduces the following sentence from page 298 of the 1994 edition of Keegan’s 1976 classic The Face of Battle: ‘Battle is a historical subject, whose nature and trend of development can only be understood down a long historical development’. Referring to The Minefield, Buring adds in his own words ‘maybe it is still too soon’. But Keegan is not saying that a historian cannot consider recent battles. He is saying that battles have to be understood in historical context and in relation to other battles. Apparently, Buring doesn’t yet know that the subtitle of Keegan’s 2003 book Intelligence in War is From Napoleon to Al-Qaeda. He also seems to have missed Keegan’s 2004 book The Iraq War!
This embarrassment also draws attention to Buring’s affinity for the old positivist idea that, ultimately, in the fullness of time, history will deliver its verdict. This view had its heyday around 1900 at the height of the British Empire. Therein, the imperial project did not sit comfortably with the reality that historical discourse can begin any time after an event and remains open ended. Buring forgets that each generation writes its own history.
So as his review crumbles, it comes down to the old imperial sigh: ‘so much depends on the attitudes of the time’. Of course it does. That is why, for example, The Minefield details the influence of failed French colonial military models on Australian tactical thinking. In a final whimper we have this: ‘the southern zone of Vietnam was arguably entitled to self-determination without military or terrorist coercion’. Of course they were entitled; there is no argument about that. The argument is in the adage that one person’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter. The villagers Graham so tragically thought he was protecting were the ones who lifted the mines because they thought 1ATF was in the province to terrorise them. That Buring is still unaware of this salient point—plus the point of even greater salience that those villagers were on the side that won the war—shows that his review of The Minefield has its ethos in the fearful political bias that still seeks validation in old imperial attitudes.
Greg Lockhart
