History remembers two Robert McNamaras

I had an uncle that was drafted to play professional football but instead got scooped up by the Vietnam draft. He was an enthusiastic hunter but he refused to carry a gun in war and became a battlefield medic instead.

On the battlefield he would triage all of the wounded and treat them or evacuate them by helicopter based on their injuries. The problem was though that he treated soldiers on all sides the same - USA, south Vietnamese, and north Vietnamese. This wasn't normal - there were USA soldiers that would execute wounded north Vietnamese.

His story started making it back to the USA. There were these press conferences the government would do where they report wounded and dead and basically tried to show how they were winning. Reporters brought him up and asked McNamara (I think - if I remember the article correctly) about it and he answered something like "we are investigating it".

Nothing came of it though. My uncle had another article written about him a few years ago and he still talks about how he visited one of the north Vietnamese soldiers in the hospital that he evacuated and how happy he was to see him.

This is a wonderful article.

Not being American and not having lived through the Vietnam war (nor am I a history buff) I wasn't particularly familiar with McNamara, but I watched "the fog of war" years ago, and it's a brilliant movie.

What stayed with me was that McNamara states that their reasoning for getting into the war was (partially) based on incorrect understanding of the situation (i.e. that Vietnam would side with China).

This squares with the persona described in the article, and with the idea that having a lot of information is fundamental but maybe not enough if you don't have the right bits.

Something to keep on mind.