Both Forgotten and Misread: Robert Taber’s The War of the Flea

Just finished re-reading the ‘60’s counterinsurgency classic, War of the Flea: The Classic Study of Guerrilla Warfare, by Robert Taber. I think I read it back in high school, as it has that real familiar feel to it of a book you’d read years ago. The details were gone from my memory; if you’d asked me about it last week or earlier I couldn’t have told you jack about it. Right now it is being bruited about as a necessary and essential read in military / diplomatic circles. I’m tending to agree; the author ain’t dumb and ain’t blind neither. Most all the US written stuff in that time frame – the ‘60’s – dealing with counterinsurgency and wars of national liberation and third world security issues was all puerile garbage. This ain’t. There’s more than a touch of wisdom to it.

Taber seems to have been forgotten almost like his books have. There aren’t any more details readily available on his life than the liner notes on his books, which state that he was an investigative journalist for CBS in the ‘50’s, and was among the first journalists who searched out and interviewed Fidel Castro in the Sierra Maestra mountains in 1958. He wrote a book on that, M-26; Biography of a Revolution, in 1960, and this book, in 1965. This book came to me courtesy of Trinity University via ILL, and it apparently has been checked out exactly once in its lifetime, in 1995.

The book is a quite well-written survey of all the major guerilla movements in the 20th Century, up to 1965. Taber manages to keep the material lively, which isn’t generally the case for military writings, and also manages to keep it short, which is rare most everywhere. See for yourself – here’s some of Taber’s writings:

Taber, quoting our old friend Vo Nguyen Giap, the Vietnamese commanding general from 1944-1978, on guerillas fighting a conventional Western army:

Couldn’t have said it better myself about our two wars ongoing. Giap’s apt turn of phrase – “the psychological and political means to fight a long, drawn-out war” – is something we overlook completely, both in our foes and in ourselves. We look to the power of our weapons and the prowess of our troops in using them. Giap looked to the soldier’s and citizen’s hearts, where individual will and patriotism reside, and he defeated us and the French both.

Taber quotes a news article dated 4-21-64, which pointed out that the number of ARVN (our South Vietnames ally’s army) small-unit operations in the preceding week totaled 5190. Only 70 of them made contact with the enemy, and contact meant as little as a single bullet fired at them from a hedgerow. Shows that even back then, the truth was out in the open, if anyone had their eyes open to see it. Can’t say as anyone has produced similar statistics from Afghanistan or Iraq – haven’t heard of any, and the fact that nobody in the reportorial corps has tried to turn them up, as the percentage of contacts per operation, and the percentage of contacts you, and not the enemy, initiate, are probably THE key statistics in explaining how the war is going – shows what a bunch of military illiterates the fourth estate are, and how they haven’t learned anything from Vietnam, either.

Another one from Giap, this, the classic dilemma of an invading foreign army:

And one from Bernard B. Fall, from his The Two Vietnams:

So there it is. The United States, and our good friends, the Limeys, have a political system more broken than the French Fourth Republic’s. We’ve been fighting more obviously lost wars for longer, and apparently are doubling down on one of them as we speak. Maybe starting a third one, too.

For all the talk of this book being greatly read in military circles, well, hell, it’s time to test the officer corps on their reading comprehension and see if it is up to a sixth-grader’s level. Maybe the State Department’s, too. If stuff like this not jumping off the page and hitting you square between the eyes – and making you wince at how little we learned from Vietnam then, or since, and how shamefully we are repeating ourselves in self-delusion and contempt for our foes’ intelligence, motivation, and bravery – well, hell, whatever bad happens to us, we’ve got it coming. The almighty might smile on fools and children, but to the best of my knowledge his mercy doesn’t extend to the stupid.