No more Vietnams.

THE TWO very different books will come to have classic status in the literature of the Vietnam War. They will be read and discussed wherever the war is seriously discussed, and they both represent considerable literary as well as historical achievements. Perhaps their authors were moved to stylistic excellence by the tragic character of their subject, an American encounter with the Great Fish, in which the Fish won. The concentration camps were not emptied, as in 1945, but filled. There was no surrender document signed in Tokyo Bay, but an ambiguous and leaky "peace treaty" signed in Paris. Then the roof fell in.

Mr. Nixon's No More Vietnams is extraordinarily concise, providing, along with its strongly argued central thesis--about which more in a moment--a history and an assessment of our Vietnam policy beginning with the Truman Administration in the immediate post-World War II period. Mr. Nixon's perspective here is presidential, his grasp of the history firm, and his judgments persuasive.

His central thesis may be stated briefly. By January 1973, when we signed the Paris Peace Accords, so-called, we had won the war in Vietnam. The Vietnamization program had been successful. ARVN replacing withdrawing U.S. forces, had fought with great effectiveness in the two Cambodian incursions and against the massive conventional offensive launched by the North in March 1972. When the resilient ARVN forced the invaders into set-piece battles, our B-52s came in and turned the NVA to marmalade.

Thus Nixon believes that a balance of power had been achieved in Southeast Asia. ARVN plus U.S. airpower guaranteed the survival of South Vietnam as an independent entity. Success.

But then: "We won the war in Vietnam, but we lost the peace. All that we had achieved in 12 years of fighting was thrown away in a spasm of congressional irresponsibility." Congress cut off funds for further military action in Vietnam, passed the War Powers Act--Nixon is correct that it is probably unconstitutional, and Reagan ought to challenge it before the Supreme Court--and cut severely our military funding of the South Vietnamese. We starved them for fuel, ammunition, and materiel. In the opinion of this reviewer, Nixon is perfectly accurate in his moral judgment here. The performance of Congress at this critical juncture was beneath contempt.

But what about Nixon's thesis that by January 1973 the war was "won"?

It is one of the great virtues of this book that it is so lucid and honest, introducing and facing the facts. On Nixon's own analysis, South Vietnam could not be held militarily as long as Cambodia remained a staging area for invasion. But by the time the war in the South had supposedly been "won," the forces of Hanoi had so beefed up the Khmer Rouge guerrillas in Cambodia that the pro-West regime of Lon Nol was reeling. Therefore, on Nixon's own showing, the South could not be held.

I believe that there is a tragic moment in this book, a peripeteia in the classical sense. On assuming office, Nixon considers his options. Quit and go home. Use the "knockout punch," not necessarily nuclear. Try to establish the "balance of power."

Nixon went for the last. The "knockout punch" would have killed up to a million people. Bombing the dikes: 500,000. Dresdenizing Hanoi: 500,000. The price tag for the failed policy was much greater, perhaps by a factor of four to six. Nixon refused to adopt the humane solution.

VICE ADIMRAL James Stockdale, then Commander Stockdale, USN, recalls the effect of the B-52s as he entered his last months as a prisoner in Hanoi. Remember, these B-52 strikes were not "carpet bombing" as in Europe, but "surgical strikes" carried out at low levels, which left our bombers vulnerable to SAM anti-aircraft rockets. It would have been a very different story from thirty thousand feet. Nevertheless, Stockdale recalls an end-of-the-world mood in Hanoi as the big bombs rained down. "One look at any Vietnamese officer's face . . . told the whole story . . . the shock was there; our enemy's will was broken. I was going to be home right away." But it was not the "knockout punch."

In 1965, Stockdale commanded a carrier-based air squadron. He was shot down over North Vietnam and impresioned for eight years. The husband-and-wife narrative is presented in an unusual literary form, alternate chapters describing the life of each during the eight-year ordeal, and it is enormously moving, and beyond that informative. Stockdale, like the other POWs, was tortured, degraded, the treatment Stockdale's chapters deal with her own reactions and her relentless campaign to get Washington to do something about the plight of our prisoners at the Hanoi Hilton and other Communist spas. There are times when one is moved to reflect that the North Vietnamese were fortunate not to be engaged in hand-to-hand combat with Sybil Stockdale.

There is so much of enduring interest in this remarkable book that a review of this length can touch upon only a small corner of it. Much has been made of the fact that while the August 2 Tonkin Gulf attack on our destroyers did indeed occur, the August 4 attack, upon which the de facto declaration or war, the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, was based, did not occur. Commander Stockdale was in the air at saw no attackers. Big deal. We were in fact at war.