Vietnam, The Definitive Oral History.

[Robski]

I'd like to recommend this book to the guys on this forum that were involved in the conflict in Vietnam

and also to all of you that are interested not only in the conflict, but in the history and culture of Vietnam.

It's an oral history and comprises insightful introductions with short recollections of people involved in all aspects of the conflict on both sides,

covering the military and political aspects of the war, but also it's social, cultural and psychological effects.

It's a well reserched and presented book that is fascinating, revealing and moving.

ISBN: 978 0 09 101012 9

£14.99 paperback.

Reviews:

Vietnam: The Definitive Oral History, Told from All Sides, by Christian G Appy (Ebury, £14.99)

Appy means that subtitle about "told from all sides". His North and South Vietnamese contributions I expected, though the enduring duration of their fight and captivity always awes (a commando said goodbye to his 10-year-old son before a sortie that ended in imprisonment: when he next saw him, his son had an 11-year-old son of his own). More surprising are the Pentagon brass who started out gung-ho and stayed that way - nothing neo about his conservatism; and the US army nurse who told her son during the first Gulf war that if there was a draft he would be a conscientious objector since "if anybody's going it'll be your old mom". This covers the whole catastrophe, from the US's creep into the mission circa 1962 to "Taps" played on a tape recorder by such geezers as remember too much - and the Saigon manufacture of fake Zippo lighters, engraved with slogans and handcraftily vintaged, to sell to tourists. Overall, notwithstanding Oliver North's recollections of the sound and fury of defending Firebase Burt, I was left feeling distant and calm, possibly the only response to such waste, absurdity and political-military-industrial lies. Vera Rule http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2257063,00.html

VIETNAM: The Definitive Oral History Told from All Sides

by Christian G Appy

Ebury £19.99 pp574

Vietnam is a long time ago, and most young people today know the war — one of the great traumas of American history — only through Hollywood or as thousands of names on the black granite wall of the Vietnam war memorial in Washington. But for those who served and suffered, Americans and Vietnamese alike, communist and non-communist, it will always be a defining moment of their lives.

Christian Appy, an American history professor, has written an oral history of the conflict. It is an extraordinarily compelling and powerful book, disorientating to read when American and British forces are embroiled in another bloody and troubled conflict in a faraway land. I read it just a few days after President Bush admitted the possibility of an Iraq comparison with Vietnam, and it gave me distinct moments of déjà-vu.

Frank Maguire, for example, was an American army major who liked Vietnam, served three tours there and believed in the cause. He recalls how, when he first went home, he made speeches telling people that Americans were not just killing people but building and trying to improve their lives. In the end, though, the Americans failed miserably to understand the Vietnamese.

“I think it’s a national trait that we always feel we know what’s better for everybody,” says Maguire. “It was an attitude of misguided benevolence — that we know what’s good for them and they don’t really understand what’s happening. We really wanted to win their hearts and minds, except we could never find one or the other.”

Such benevolence, 32 years on, is one of America’s problems in Iraq. A senior state-department official controversially and publicly confirmed as much last weekend. There are obvious differences; no insurgent force in Iraq can be compared to the Vietcong; Saddam Hussein is not Ho Chi Minh; nobody can confuse Baghdad with Saigon. The current cost in lives is far lower than Vietnam, too. Although this October has been one of the bloodiest months since the 2003 invasion, with the deaths of at least 87 American servicemen and hundreds of Iraqis, these rising casualties are less than one day’s combat at the height of the Vietnam war. Then, 400 Americans were dying each week.

Yet just as the Vietnam era of the 1960s started with huge American self-confidence that it could put the world right by intervening against communism, the Bush presidency began, too, with grandiose, naive ideas of saving the Middle East through Saddam’s overthrow. Bush and the neocons saw the invasion as the critical fulcrum for creating democracy in a region of oppressive, corrupt regimes that is of vital importance to America. Three years on, America is preoccupied with many issues familiar to those who lived through Vietnam: an unwinnable war started on false pretences and with little knowledge of the history of the country it was invading, mounting casualties and atrocities, no clear exit strategy, all leading to disillusionment with the White House leadership.

Senator Edward Kennedy has called Iraq Bush’s Vietnam, and fewer and fewer Americans are disagreeing.

But Appy’s book is not a history of the Vietnam war or the policies that led to it, though there is a bit of that. It is a riveting portrait of what happened to some 135 Americans and Vietnamese, northerners and southerners, communists and non-communists. Their voices provide vivid, illuminating and often harrowing insights from a host of different angles.

The breadth of Appy’s interviews is the strength of this book. He talks to some of the key military players, General Vo Nguyen Giap, the North Vietnamese military genius, and General William Westmoreland, the US commander, among them. The CIA operative Frank Snepp tells how he is so wrapped up trying to save his Vietnamese agents as Saigon falls that he neglects to evacuate a former girlfriend despite her threat to commit suicide. Later, he learns to his shame that she killed herself and their child rather than fall into the hands of the communists.

There are interviews with Senator John McCain, America’s most famous prisoner of war, and the survivors of My Lai, and the brave American helicopter pilots who intervened to try to stop the massacre. There is Mrs Thieu describing how, trapped beneath a pile of bodies, she was drowning in their blood. There is Larry Colburn, an American helicopter pilot who talks of his crew wading waist deep through the dead to rescue one child who was moving. The two are reunited many years later.

These stories really bite. Some are amusing. Bobbie Keith, the weather girl for Armed Forces Television in Saigon and the GIs’ pin-up, sometimes makes up the weather data just as American troops made up body-counts to convince their generals that they were winning the war. The rock star James Brown insisted on sporting a .45 and a US army uniform when he gave a show, to look like a GI. He said even the Vietcong had a ceasefire during his shows. They liked the funk, he tells Appy. “Then they went back and reloaded, boy. They were very smart.”

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol...ticle612173.ece

Edited March 9, 2008 by Robski