The Vietnam War ranks among the most bizarre episodes of this century. And no part of it was more insanely conceived and executed than the Phoenix program. ''The Phoenix Program,'' by Douglas Valentine, documents the results of an unseemly liaison between impotent military tactics and money-logged technology. According to those who formulated it, this monster child with its computer brain and assassin's instinct would make the Vietcong wither from within. Not by attacking guerrillas in the field, but by destroying infrastructure - a term, as Mr. Valentine explains, used to refer to ''those civilians suspected of supporting North Vietnamese and Vietcong soldiers. . . . Central to Phoenix is the fact that it targeted civilians, not soldiers.'' ''Infrastructure'' was the hobgoblin of the Central Intelligence Agency and the State Department. The military mouthed the word - a shopworn mantra - only to pacify the safari-suited civilians who actually ran the war. For the military dreamed of head-on assaults; it was the civilians who blathered on about infrastructure. The intention of the planners who devised Phoenix was to ''neutralize'' this infrastructure - which meant, in practice, to kill, capture or coerce into defection those figures identified as belonging to it. So out into the countryside went teams of accountants and case officers, Vietnamese assassins and their American counterparts, with bags and bags of money, the whole effort tethered to a computer in the United States Embassy in Saigon. And from the embassy came reports again and again that the program was working. Body count became our most important product. The bodies turned out to be just about anyone who got in the way, sometimes even genuine, certifiable ''infrastructures.'' The Phoenix program became a playground for the demented fringes of both American and Vietnamese society. It was a brothel for both blood lust and printout lust, featuring a weird crew of characters: grizzled Army officers, bespectacled accountants and bloodless computer modelers. It had its own air force, training camps and interrogation centers. Torture chambers, if you like. It is the stuff of both awful history and glorious black comedy. It needs to be chronicled by an A. J. P. Taylor or an Evelyn Waugh, or both - not by Douglas Valentine. Mr. Valentine - the author as well of ''The Hotel Tacloban,'' about life in a Japanese prisoner of war camp - has written as turgid and dense and often incomprehensible a book as I have ever had the misfortune to open. Somewhere in those almost 500 gray pages there is stuff of great importance: examples of human folly, courage, stupidity and greed. Mr. Valentine handles these epic themes as so much fodder from a database - not unlike the paper end of the Phoenix program itself. He has interviewed scores of participants in Phoenix, but instead of putting the interviews into some kind of historical (or even logical) framework - it's called editing - he has simply transcribed them. And if Phoenix acted like Phoenix talked, then the American intervention in Vietnam was even more inept than those of us who were witnesses believed. Here is a typical eye-glazing example: ''Said Dillard: 'Well, I am a military man, and I have a job to get done.' And from that day on the Field Police and their Public Safety advisers were the Phoenix program's scapegoats in the Delta. At their expense Dillard achieved peace between the CIA and MACV in the Delta. He convinced the CIA that by sharing its information, military resources could be used against the VCI. In exchange for supporting the CIA's attack on the VCI, the military benefited from CIA intelligence on the location of main force enemy units. That translated into higher body counts and brighter careers. ' 'I could do what I wanted within the guidelines of the Phoenix program,' Doug Dillard said with satisfaction, 'which to me was the overall coordination of the units that existed in the Delta to destroy the infrastructure.' With his regional reaction force ready and raring to go, Dillard mounted regional Phoenix operations on the Ward mini-cordon and search technique. '' 'At the province level we had almost daily involvement with the CIA's province adviser and SEAL team PRU adviser,' Dillard explained. 'This was either trying to help them get resources or going over the potential for operations.' '' The words don't inform; they simply take up space. The most cogent sentences in the book come from Bruce Palmer, a retired general who commanded the Ninth Infantry Division in Vietnam in 1968. General Palmer, perhaps wisely, chose to communicate with Mr. Valentine by letter rather than tape recorder. '' 'My objection to the [Phoenix] program,' he wrote in a letter to the author, 'was the involuntary assignment of U. S. Army officers to the program. I don't believe that people in uniform, who are pledged to abide by the Geneva Conventions, should be put in the position of having to break those laws of warfare.' '' General Palmer sounds like a thoughtful man with a belief in the power of the simple declarative sentence. Perhaps he should have written the book.
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