WHAM!

VIETNAM INC.

by PHILIP JONES GRIFFITHS 223 pages. Macmillan. $7.95.

Philip Jones Griffiths is a young Welshman, a Magnum photographer-writer who worked in Viet Nam roughly for five years (1966-71). He hates the war, and his book, particularly the captions and brief texts that begin its various sections, will perhaps initially dismay even some readers who would like to run, not walk, to the nearest exit in Viet Nam.

As a writer, Griffiths does indeed have a weakness for overstatement and simplification. But he has grasped that the American presence in Viet Nam has little to do with chatter about genocide and neocolonialist exploitation. Instead he believes that the tragedy is the result of twin U.S. delusions. The first is that Viet Nam wants to become, and can be made into, something like a modern free-enterprise democracy. The second holds that no country, however different from our own, if given any choice, would ever choose anything but the American way.

In trying to show that the muscular and largely blind application of those two delusions in Viet Nam has helped make the country into an incipient urban slum, a vast garbage heap, and a burnt-out case of political and military folly, Griffiths follows the lead of Graham Greene, who more than 15 years ago, in The Quiet American, wrote what is still the most prescient book about the U.S. intervention in Indochina. Greene's American, it may be recalled, was well-intentioned and high-minded in a peculiarly tenacious and disastrous way. But his real problem was complete ignorance of historic cause and effect, of the Vietnamese language and culture, and above all a lack of understanding about what can and cannot be accomplished through dynamite and politics.

Griffiths' book is sharpest when he is dealing with subjects that lend themselves to the kind of heavy irony he practices--pacification, for example, WHAM (Winning the Hearts and Minds of the people, etc.), and Washington-based computerized evaluation of the ill-fated hamlet program. But Vietnam Inc. is more valuable when simply showing the pain and mess the war has caused. Because Griffiths, at his best, reinforces the sound historic conviction that this particular war could never have been won on terms useful to anyone, these sections have doubly tragic effect. They make the book one of the hardest-edged and most perceptive polemics against the war yet pub lished -- and the war still seems far from fading away.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.