From Why To What

Sixty years ago President John Fitzgerald Kennedy sent a group of military advisors to a little country in the Far East that most Americans had never heard of. Their government was having some trouble with rebels and turned to the U.S. for help. Who else should they turn to? The United States was the most powerful country on earth. We had recently led the free world in defending South Korea from the Chinese Communists. We had stemmed the tide of the Stalinist takeover of Europe with the Marshall Plan. With unparalleled generosity we had rebuilt the economies of our fallen enemies, Germany and Japan. We were the defenders of freedom, the champions of the weak, the symbol of hope and prosperity for millions around the world. We wore the white hats. We were the good guys.

Ten years later the country was mired down halfway across the globe in a war we had little prospect of winning. America had been torn apart, leaving wounds it would take a generation or more to heal. The nightly news showed shocking sights of atrocities like My Lai alternating with angry students shouting “Hell, no! We won’t go!” to the TV cameras. Ugly images of nervous young national guards - men firing upon students no younger than they - haunted the national consciousness. Authority was a dirty word and patriotism a joke. Returning veterans were shunned if not spat upon. Old values, old ways of ordering and understanding our lives had been uprooted and discarded, leaving nothing in their place. The “Make Love, Not War” generation had discovered bad trips: faded pictures of flower children handing out daisies to policemen had given way to headlines announcing the deaths of Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. Three of the nation’s best loved leaders had been assassinated and Watergate was waiting around the corner. The Irish poet Yeats put it well long before it happened here: “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”

What happened? What went wrong? Why did we fail so miserably?

Military historians tell us that we simply blew it strategically. The limitations imposed by domestic politics crippled the military. Our leaders said, "It isn’t really a war, just a 'police action.'” We’re just “helping” the Vietnamese, we can’t tell them what to do. We can’t cross this border. We can’t cross that border. We can’t do this, we mustn’t do that. Some strategists believe that if we had thrown the full weight of U.S. power into the field the war might have been over in a matter of months, with far fewer casualties on both sides. America yielded to the imperative of her own self-image - John Wayne never loses, and never does anything which can’t be filmed. We embraced, and were ultimately imprisoned and defeated by, our own self-deceptions.

A few thousand years earlier, the scene in Joshua 7 probably had a lot in common with pre-Viet Nam America, including a kind of cocky self-confidence born of the certainty of possessing God’s favor. The Israelites were flushed with victory after destroying one of the most important cities in Canaan. God had more or less handed Jericho to them on a plate. Imagine how they must have been feeling; picture the dancing, the singing, the feasting, the telling of tall tales of heroic deeds around the campfires. And underlying all the excitement, dreams of settled prosperity in the land of milk and honey which was now - after 40 years - almost within their grasp.

But then, without any warning at all, things changed. Joshua 7:2 tells us,

“Now Joshua sent men from Jericho to Ai... and told them, 'Go up and spy out the region.' When they returned to Joshua they said, 'Not all the people will have to go up against Ai... for only a few men are there.' So about 3,000 men went up; but they were routed by the men of Ai... They chased the Israelites from the city gate ... and struck them down on the slopes. At this the hearts of the people melted and became like water.'"

What happened? What went wrong? Why did the Israelites fail to take Ai? They weren’t exactly overwhelmed by superior enemy forces; the one percent casualty figure makes that clear. What might the troops have been saying among themselves?

“The old man’s getting past it. God’s not with him any more. Maybe it’s time we got some new blood up there.”

“Hey, Reuben signed up to help win the war, not to help lose it. Let’s go back to Gilead.”

“Joshua should have let the Benjamites lead the raid; Benjamites never run away.”

“The spies blew it; there were at least three times as many men up there as they said.”

The Israelites had every expectation of winning and no clue at all as to why they lost. The obvious answer, the first answer people turn to, is: somebody did something wrong.