SAIGON FELL APRIL 30, 1975, ending the Vietnam War. Unlike World War II, America's last "unambiguous war," there are no truisms about Vietnam, because its meaning is as poorly understood by those who lead now as by those who fought then. Why did we fight? Why did we lose? To President Reagan and many others, we tought in Vietnam because of what was happening there. We lost because of what was happening here.

The conclusion of BACKFIRE: A History of How American Culture Led Us Into Vietnam and Made Us Fight the Way We Did is precisely the opposite. Loren Baritz attempts to show the Vietnam War as a product of the American political and cultural psyche, a war that had to be fought because of the way we viewed ourselves and our role in the world. It was a war that was lost because Vietnam was not the country our leaders had decided it to be, and the reality they chose to see was completely unrelated to what the fighting in Vietnam, even before American troops arrived, was about.

Backfire begins with a discussion of American culture, centering on two of its prominent features. From the Pilgrims on. America has been a missionary nation, one whose ideology has been to show the world the way to the ideal society, a society defined by America. Along with missionary ideology. Baritz describes an American confidence based on technology. Our belief, fortified by technique, makes us strong, but our machines make us invincible. "As Hiroshima demonstrated conclusively, we could think of ourselves not only as morally superior, but as the most powerful nation in history." Americans did not conceive that it was possible for this country to lose a war against anyone, certainly not poor, ignorant peasants.

In a broad cultural frame, Vietnam became the quintessential proving ground of these myths. America's will, its ability to meet its destiny as the world's savior Vietnam was five thousand miles away from San Francisco, but we had to be as willing and able to fight Evil (a.k.a. "Communism") in that remote land as we were in Europe. Vietnam was also the place where the efficacy of America's technological omnipotence would be conclusively demonstrated to the world. The thirty years of American involvement in Vietnam proved both those concepts false, Baritz includes, though for many they endure.

MORE THAN AN attack on these suppositions, however, Backfire is an indictment of the bureaucratic culture that actually involved the United States in the Vietnam War, and its conduct throughout the decade of massive American involvement. Baritz is an academic-turned-university bureaucrat, and he explains Vietnam policy as the ultimate example of technocracy gone wild. The men at the top-first Kennedy then Johnson and Nixon--had a vision of Vietnam that existed in spite of reality. The men below them, from defense secretaries to platform commanders, had to provide Upstairs with what it wanted to hear. The trait of deceit and cover-up that publicly emerged with Johnson's "credibility gap" and continued through the Pentagon Papers and Watergate to its most recent chapter revealed in the CBS documentary "The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception" was not the result of an imbedded American evil, but rather the outcome of bureaucratic values where pleasing the man upstairs is the highest calling.

Baritz' achievements is to link these cultural realities to the actual history of the war. He recounts the entire history of American involvement in Vietnam, from the World War II days when Ho Chi Minh worked as a U.S. intelligence agent against the Japanese occupation, to the initial American opposition, to France's postwar attempt to reestablish its colonial empire in Indochina. America's attidue toward Vietnam changed, though, not because of any change in Ho Chi Minh or the Vietnamese liberation movement, but because of political events at home.

The anti-Communist witch-hunt that Sen. Joseph McCarthy introduced into American public life extended long after Tail Gunner Joe drank himself to death. The mainstream, as represented by Eisenhower. Kennedy, and Johnson, was so afraid of re-awakening the venomous far-Right that it felt compelled to demonstrate its unflinching opposition to Communism around the world. It was perceived as soft on the Reds, it felt doomed. This is why liberal Harvard-educated Kennedy felt compelled to risk nuclear annihilation over missiles in Cuba, while Nixon, a man who made his reputation as a Red baiter, could embrace Mao Tse-tung with no fear of domestic political trouble. Liberal Democrats Kennedy and Johnson had to fight in Vietnam to prove to the Right that they were no structure in the war against Communism. These domestic American concerns motivated little to the men and women who farmed the rice paddies along the Mckong.

Kennedy felt he had to make Vietnam an example of his resolve, says Baritz, Johnson inherited the enormous legacy of JFK. And Nixon, with his duplicitous henchman Henry A. Kissinger '50 saw in Vietnam the political opportunity to carry them to the White House and keep them there while they each worked, almost separately, toward their dream of becoming the world's greatest statesman--a phenomenon Baritz calls "the politics of ago." To the men and bureaucracies under all three administrations, Vietnam provided the opportunity to advance their own agendas, as long as the men upstairs were kept happy. The whole military bureaucracy was extremely excited about the prospects Vietnam offered, Individually, officers had a chance to receive combat decorations and promotions in the only war then available. On the organizational level, each agency had to show it was doing the most effective job possible, making way for even larger budgets in the future.

WHAT THAT JOB exactly was became the unanswered question of the war years. Because there was no military goal except the defeat of the Viet Cong, the Army turned to measuring its success by the number of suspected guerrillas killed. Body counts-the grisly listing of how many Vietnamese killed each day-became the war's .

Baritz charts the machinery of bureaucratic deceit, from the inflated body counts from the filed to the stream of lies American leaders told at home about Vietnam. The most penetrating imagery he presents, however, is that of cultural opposition between the American teenagers who were sent by ambitious bureaucrats and paranoid presidents to fight the war, and the people of Vietnam whom they met, the very reason for America's presence. The average age of the American fighting man in Vietnam was 19, and he was given the power of life and death over all the Vietnamese he saw. The hatred he soon had for the mysterious villagers, any one of whom could be an enemy in the political war he was fighting, made the very concept of the war a joke. He was fighting to save people he hated, which is why it was so easy for him to destroy their villages in order to save them.

Backfire is not a dispassionate survey of events, although it does provide an excellent summary of Vietnamese history from the 1940s on, the sort of knowledge that is essential to understanding America's involvement. More than a war history, it is a sociological study of modern America and ideology, and how that ideology brought the United States to its greatest disaster in the twentieth century. Baritz does not discuss economic motives, except in passing, and this is perhaps Backfire's greatest lacking as a comprehensive explanation of why this country fought in Vietnam.

It has been a decade since South Vietnam fell, ending America's latest debacle overseas. Backfire suggests that the lessons of Vietnam are not so much how to light and deleat a political insurgency in a foreign country, but how tenuous are our claims to the right and ability to do so.