Herring, the dean of American historians of the war, who passed away just last year.
I’d add to this opening list the masterful scholarship of George C. Dispatches similarly encapsulates a particular instant in time, and it still stands out for its empathy with the ordinary grunts with whom Herr chose to embed, sharing their privations and their terrors, in the nightmarish landscapes along the DMZ in I Corps, the northernmost military zone in South Vietnam, where most of The Long Reckoning is set. But to take issue with it for that, as some do these days, seems to me like condemning Jimi Hendrix for his feedback-drenched mutilation of The Star-Spangled Banner at Woodstock because it’s out of touch with current trends in rock music. Michael Herr’s hallucinogenic Dispatches has many of the narrative tics and excesses of the New Journalism of the 1960s. Yet Greene nails all of the illusions and naïveté that led the Americans to disaster more than a decade after it was published, and needs less than 200 pages to do it.įrances Fitzgerald’s Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam, has been taken to task in recent years for its overly romantic view of the Vietnamese struggle for national independence, but it’s still extraordinary to think that a work of such historical sweep and depth could have been written in 1972, when American troops were still in the field-and by a woman, just 32 years old, working in a male-dominated reporting environment. Agreed, the earliest of these classics, Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, set during the latter years of the French War, has in some ways not aged well, especially in its stereotypical portrait of the young Vietnamese woman, Phuong-beautiful, passive, available, but in the end inscrutable. It’s more accurate still to talk about the First and Second Indochina Wars, and the themes I explore in my own book on the war and its aftermath, The Long Reckoning, make no sense without embracing the critical role of the famous Ho Chi Minh Trail through neighboring Laos.Īny list of books on the war, whatever we choose to call it, has to include some of the early classics, even if time, hindsight, and new generations of scholarship can sometimes be harsh judges of their shortcomings.
My own preference is to talk about the American War in Vietnam, which is what the Vietnamese themselves call it, as opposed to the earlier French War, from which it grew organically. By one estimate, something like thirty thousand books have been written about we call “the Vietnam War.” It’s a term I generally try to avoid, because it distorts our understanding of what the conflict was about, where it was fought, and by whom.
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