The Vietnam War An intimate history

Review by Choice Review

Since the Vietnam War, several hundred books, thousands of periodical articles, and dozens of movies have been produced, mostly adding to the controversy over the war. Left-wingers cling to their copies of Stanley Karnow's Vietnam: A History (CH, Jan'84), maintaining that the US should never have become involved. Right-wingers find solace in Mark Moyar's Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965 (CH, May'07, 44-5183), proclaiming that the US could have won the war if only it had used different tactics. Historian Ward portrays the perspective of all sides. Those Americans who fought the war believed they were fighting to protect freedom. Opponents of the war saw it as immoral. Even those who fled to Canada are viewed as heroes who gave up their friends, neighbors, and families rather than partake in an unjust war. Ward has collaborated on numerous occasions with filmmaker Ken Burns, the most famous being their documentary The Civil War (1990). A well-written text, excellent maps, iconic photographs, and a superb bibliography make this a mandatory purchase for all libraries and an excellent gift for those who fought for the war in Vietnam or against it in the streets of US cities. The subtitle could well be "A Time for Healing." Summing Up: Essential. All public and academic levels/libraries. --Michael O'Donnell, CUNY College of Staten Island

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

---

Review by New York Times Review

THIS EVENING PBS begins airing Ken Burns's new 10-part Vietnam War documentary, co-directed by Lynn Novick and written by Geoffrey C. Ward, Burns's longtime collaborator. Although Burns's team has produced many epic histories - on jazz, baseball, the American West - his 1990 Civil War series made him into the nation's most laureled documentarían. Clocking in at 18 hours, "The Vietnam War" is Burns's most anticipated work since that magisterial feat. As before, Ward has written a weighty companion book to the series. "The Vietnam War: An Intimate History" tells once again the painful tale of America's protracted, divisive and (most would now agree) futile involvement in the fight to keep South Vietnam unconquered by the Communist North. After filling in the historical background, the book ranges over two decades, from Dien Bien Phu in 1954, when the French left their former colony in defeat, to the 1975 fall of Saigon, when the United States left. It's all here: the Gulf of Tonkin and the Tet offensive, the Perfume River and the Ho Chi Minh Trail, napalm and draft notices and teach-ins and My Lai, P.O.W.s and fragging and Kent State and the Christmas bombing, and much more. Numerous historians, of course, have already written exemplary histories of the war. To distinguish this book, Burns and Novick, in their introduction, proclaim their intention to do what few have done: recount the war from not just the American viewpoint but from that of the North and South Vietnamese too. (One pioneering academic work offering such perspective is Lien-Hang Nguyen's "Hanoi's War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam.") This intention is laudable; more than a century ago Lord Acton called for a history of Waterloo "that satisfies French and English, German and Dutch alike." In the end, though, apart from a few sections - including an oddly starry-eyed sketch of Ho Chi Minh - Ward pursues this goal of a multinational account in only a desultory, sporadic way. The introduction also tries to differentiate the book by spotlighting stories of "ordinary" participants in the war: "grunts and officers in the Army and Marines, prisoners of war, a fighter pilot and a helicopter crew chief... a nurse, college students, reporters" and more. Ward and Burns did something similar in "The Civil War," relying on soldiers' letters from both sides, and in their 2007 series on World War II. Once again, the personal testimonies effectively capture the ground-level experience of the conflict. Memorable vignettes and arresting details abound in "The Vietnam War," like the scene of American prisoners deciding to skin and eat the camp commander's cat, or the reminder that eight of 10 servicemen never saw combat. And yet to those who've read in the existing literature, many of these soldiers' stories will sound awfully familiar. We hear from Lt. Col. John Paul Vann (featured in Neil Sheehan's "A Bright Shining Lie"), Philip Caputo (the author of "A Rumor of War"), W.D. Ehrhart (the poet and memoirist) and others already famous from well-known books. Besides, the recollections in "The Vietnam War," though often moving or insightful, don't always advance the book's narrative. In "The Civil War," epistolary excerpts from soldiers like Elisha Hunt Rhodes and Sam Watkins were brilliantly employed to convey the grunts' experiences while simultaneously providing needed exposition. Here, the individuals' anecdotes tend to stand alone as set pieces, disconnected from what follows. Undercutting the narrative thrust further is the layout - sumptuous to behold but unfriendly to readers. The main text is laced through a gallimaufry of maps, photos, captions and sidebars, and rendered mostly in flat prose. The result is a coffeetable book aspiring to be a history book that reads like a textbook. In literary grace, it ranks behind another companion book to another PBS documentary, Stanley Karnow's "Vietnam: A History," from 1983. One major problem for any narrative account of the Vietnam War lies in the nature of the conflict. The Civil War ground on from clash to clash, place to place, progressing relentlessly and suspensefully toward its culmination, with key battles like Gettysburg and Vicksburg providing dramatic pivots. The Vietnam War played out differently, in countless skirmishes that lacked strategic consequence. Questions of who was winning and losing were forever murky, and not only because Presidents Johnson and Nixon deceived Americans about the prospects for victory. In the face of implacable North Vietnamese resolve, even successful military campaigns simply didn't do much. Thus, when recounting some of the important battles - ?? ??? early in the war, the fighting at Hue during the 1968 Tet offensive - Ward's writing comes alive, but only for a short spell. And he's chosen to cover so many topics that after each combat tale, the reader is inevitably diverted elsewhere. In "The Civil War," priority went to the military story, then to politics and last to society and culture. That ordering may have been old-fashioned, but it made sense given how crucial combat was to determining the war's outcome. By contrast, with Vietnam, especially by the late 1960s, the political narrative - not the battlefield developments - most compelled Americans' interest. Readers of this volume, like Americans in the 1960s or '70s, won't be waiting for a game-changing victory like Ulysses Grant's hard-won 1865 triumph at Petersburg. Rather, they will look to the political dramas: Lyndon Johnson's decision to forsake re-election in 1968, the Moratorium protests of October 1969, Henry Kissinger's exhaustive Paris peace talks. We wait expectantly not for a victory at the front lines but for the moment when America consents to withdraw. overall, this political history is well told, though Ward makes one big error. In 1968, Richard Nixon, the Republican presidential nominee, secretly worked a back channel to the South Vietnamese to undermine Johnson's diplomacy. That subterfuge was illegal and immoral, but there's scant evidence that it alone led the South Vietnamese president, Nguyen Van Thieu, to reject Johnson's terms. Ward wrongly asserts that Nixon "scuttled the negotiations." One highlight of the book is the five brief stand-alone essays that seek to examine a single question about the war in depth. In particular, the meditations by the Harvard historian Fredrik Logevall, on whether John E Kennedy would have become embroiled in the war, and by the onetime antiwar activist Todd Gitlin, on the movement's legacy, offer original assessments in the kind of personal voice that's mostly missing from the book. However, one otherwise evocative rumination by the novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen is marred by a surprisingly blinkered dismissal of not just the entire corpus of American films about the war, but also most of the "American books about the war, fiction or nonfiction." So much for "Apocalypse Now," "Full Metal Jacket," "The Best and the Brightest," "Dispatches," "Fire in the Lake," "The Things They Carried" and other filmed and written works that provided source material for this very volume. Perhaps the most worthwhile contribution of "The Vietnam War" is its compilation of hundreds of astonishing photographs. Ward and Burns reproduce nowfamous images like Eddie Adams's picture of a Vietcong prisoner being shot in the head at close range and Nick Ut's shot of a naked Vietnamese girl fleeing a napalm raid. But they also include powerful and less familiar scenes of rubble-strewn streets, desperate villagers, bewildered squadrons, and Americans and Vietnamese alike who are wounded, maimed, dying or freshly killed. If "The Vietnam War" falls short as scholarly or even bedside reading, though, it remains a vivid and often captivating volume - and, construed literally as a companion to the television series, a valuable resource. Twenty-seven years after it aired, the "Civil War" documentary is now streaming on Netflix, as gripping as ever, still a spark for conversations and learning and discovery. The companion volume is not what people remember. The political narrative - not the battlefield developments - most compelled Americans' interest.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 17, 2017]

---

Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* In their new intimate yet capacious history, the award-winning, audience-enthralling duo of historian and screenwriter Ward and documentarian extraordinaire Burns investigate the complex, divisive, and tragic Vietnam War from a unique plurality of perspectives. The consistently lucid, flowing, and dramatic narrative begins with French colonial rule in Indochina, then marches forward through every phase of Vietnam's struggle for independence, the international intervention that divided the country, the ensuing civil war, and the Cold War-instigated, ultimately catastrophic American embroilment over four administrations. With the combined impact of robustly detailed writing and more than 500 staggering photographs, Ward and Burns thoroughly chronicle horrific combat and relentless bombing missions, the mass deployment of napalm and Agent Orange, the suffering and death of civilians, the resiliency of North Vietnamese forces, and the powerful antiwar movement. The eye-opening stories of key public figures, from Ho Chi Minh and Ngo Dinh Diem to Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, are matched by those of ordinary people, including American and South and North Vietnamese soldiers and their families; an American doctor POW; a woman field nurse; a young, long-separated North Vietnamese couple; antiwar activists, including war veterans; and Vietnamese refugees. With reflections by prominent journalists and writers, including Philip Caputo and Viet Thanh Nguyen, this is a vivid, affecting, definitive, and essential illustrated history. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Powerful in its own right, this superlative volume will be released with much fanfare and a 350,000 print run in conjunction with the September airing of Burns and Ward's 10-part PBS series.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2017 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

---

Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Burns continues his tradition of narrating the audio abridgment of his documentary work, as he has done before with The Civil War, The National Parks, and other projects. The results are mixed, but that's not because Burns lacks talent as a narrator; he has a measured, clear voice, and a strong delivery. Rather, the abridgment itself and the limitations of the audio format cause this product to falter-missing are the intense battle images, the unforgettable music of the 1960s and '70s, and the personal interviews with Vietnamese speakers. Here, the only eyewitness recordings spliced in with the narration are ones by Americans. As a result, Burns, with his natural American accent, becomes the mouthpiece for Vietnamese soldiers and civilians, which creates a distance for the listener. The recordings of U.S. presidents with various generals and advisers becomes tedious in the audiobook, with Burns merely reading "Johnson" and "McNamara" followed by a rendering of their remarks. A Knopf hardcover. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

---

Review by Library Journal Review

In their latest collaboration (after The Civil War: An Illustrated History), Burns and Ward present the details of the Vietnam War (November 1, 1955-April 30, 1975). This companion volume to the ten-part film series airing on PBS this September will enlighten readers to the events that led up to the war, the combat itself, and its aftermath. The authors use archived material and interviews with soldiers and antiwar protestors to tell the story; brief essays by historians and Vietnamese fighters are also offered throughout. Further included are newly classified transcripts from American and Vietnamese politicians revealing the event from all sides, including perspectives of the North Vietnamese soldiers. The finest aspect of the volume may be the stunning yet devastating pictures of the time period. Unique details include artist Maya Lin's model for the Vietnam Memorial and the contact sheet of Eddie Adams's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of the death of a North Vietnamese man. VERDICT A powerful work that adds value and insight to any collection. Fans of Burns and Ward will be awed by their mastery in creating an accurate, thorough historical narrative.-Jason L. Steagall, Gateway Technical Coll. Lib., Elkhorn, WI © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

---

Review by Kirkus Book Review

A sweeping, richly illustrated narrative of a conflict fast retreating in memory, one that noted documentarian Burns calls a "lamentable chapter in history."As they have done in numerous collaborations (The Roosevelts: An Intimate History, 2014, etc.), Ward and Burns take a vast topic and personalize it. Regarding the Vietnam War, this involved tracking down veterans of the war and recounting their experiences to gain insight into how great events play out on the individual levelthus the "intimate" element of the subtitle. Of particular value is the inclusion of Vietnamese voices on both sides of the conflict, most of whom agree more than four decades later that the question of who won or lost is less important than the fact that no one really prevailed. Ward and Burns use several of these figures as returning characters in the narrative. One, for instance, is Vincent Okamoto, a Japanese-American soldier born in a relocation camp during World War II, who recalls a Southern soldier's advice for not being confused for one of the enemy: "Hey, no offense, partner; but if I was you I'd dye my hair blond and whistle Dixie' when it gets dark." Other figures are relegated to revealing walk-on roles, such as a Vietnamese operative who, with the "pride of a revolutionary," coordinated the assassinations of hundreds of South Vietnamese and American soldiers and officials. The text is accompanied by more than 500 photographs, some of them immediately recognizablethe execution of a Viet Cong on the streets of Saigon, children running to greet a returning American prisoner of warmany others fresh. As ever, Ward and Burns aim for a middle-of-the-road, descriptive path, but the very nature of this enterprise courts controversy, as when they remind readers of Richard Nixon's secret negotiations with North Vietnam while he was a candidate for president, an act that Lyndon Johnson privately deemed treasonous. Accompanying the PBS series to be aired in September 2017, this is an outstanding, indispensable survey of the Vietnam War. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

---

Introduction On April 23, 1975, President Gerald R. Ford was scheduled to give the keynote address at the Tulane University convocation in New Orleans. As the president took the stage, more than 100,000 North Vietnamese troops were massing on the outskirts of Saigon, having overrun almost all of South Vietnam in just three months. Thirty years after the United States first became involved in Southeast Asia, ten years after the Marines had landed in Danang, the ill-fated country for which more than 58,000 Americans had died was on the verge of defeat. "We, of course, are saddened indeed by the [tragic] events in Indochina," the president said. He reminded the subdued crowd that 160 years earlier America had recovered from another conflict in which she had suffered "humiliation and a measure of defeat"--the War of 1812--and promised that the nation would once again "regain the sense of pride that existed before Vietnam." But, he continued to thunderous applause, "it cannot be achieved by refighting a war that is finished as far as America is concerned." The time had come, the president said, "to unify, to bind up the nation's wounds . . . and begin a great national reconciliation." Just seven days later, North Vietnamese soldiers stormed the gates of the Presidential Palace in Saigon and raised the communist flag. The Vietnam War was over. It's been more than forty years now, and despite President Ford's optimism, we have been unable to put that war behind us. The deep wounds it inflicted on our nation, our communities, our families, and our politics have festered. As Army veteran Phil Gioia said in an interview for our documentary series, "The Vietnam War drove a stake right into the heart of America. It polarized the country as it had probably never been polarized since before the Civil War, and we've never recovered." Nearly ten years ago, as we were completing post-production on a seven-part series about the American experience in the World War II, we resolved to turn our attention to the painful, bitter, confounding, and much misunderstood tragedy that is the war in Vietnam. It has been our privilege throughout this undertaking to collaborate with the writer, Geoffrey C. Ward, and our producer, Sarah Botstein, along with our team of editors, researchers, and coproducers. We were also ably assisted by an invaluable board of advisers, historical consultants and veterans of the war who saved us from innumerable mistakes, but, more importantly, pointed us to the critical moments and astonishing contradictions that haunt any serious study of the Vietnam War. From the start, we vowed to each other that we would avoid the limits of a binary political perspective and the shortcuts of conventional wisdom and superficial history. This was a war of many perspectives, a Rashomon of equally plausible "stories," of secrets, lies, and distortions at every turn. We wished to try to contain and faithfully reflect those seemingly irreconcilable outlooks. We were interested in trying to understand the colonial experience of the French--and the way it eerily prefigured what would befall the United States in subsequent years. We wanted to find out what actually happened in the halls of power in Washington, Saigon, and Hanoi, and to get to know the leaders who made the decisions that determined the fates of millions. Through the availability of recently declassified records, ongoing scholarship, and revelatory, sometimes shocking, audio recordings, the actions and motives of Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon are laid bare, as are the complicated power struggles going on in South Vietnam during the autocratic, ruthless regime of Ngo Dinh Diem and the succession of generals who followed him. Of particular focus for us were the fascinating political dynamics in Hanoi, where the familiar figure of Ho Chi Minh fought for supremacy with other less-well-known but more powerful figures. Most important, we wanted to understand what the war was like on the battlefield and on the home front, and we wanted to find out why, as Marine veteran Karl Marlantes told us, Americans have been unable to have a civil conversation about one of the most consequential events in our history. "For years, we just did not talk about that war," he said. "You would open your mouth and you'd ask, which side was this person on? Am I going to get into a fight here? It's like living in a family with an alcoholic father . . . you know, shh, we don't talk about that."   Wars, all wars, create a kind of dissonance that obfuscates and deflects clear understanding. Vietnam is no different. To shed new light on such a complicated and unsettled time in our history, to struggle to comprehend the special dissonance that is the Vietnam War, we needed to look beyond the familiar stories Americans have told about the war and include as many different perspectives as our narrative could accommodate. Nearly one hundred "ordinary" people agreed to share their stories with us on camera: grunts and officers in the Army and Marines, prisoners of war, a fighter pilot and a helicopter crew chief, a Gold Star mother and the sister of a fallen soldier, a nurse, college students, reporters, protesters, military analysts, spies, and many others. To have been present as they bore witness to their experiences remains for us one of the enduring gifts of this project. Throughout our long production, we were inspired by the architect Maya Lin, whose Vietnam Veterans Memorial was initially as controversial as the war itself, but which has become one of America's sacred places. When she unveiled her design in 1981, Lin told the press that her memorial to the Americans who died in the war would be a journey "that would make you experience death, and where you'd have to be an observer, where you could never really fully be with the dead. . . . [It isn't] something that was going to say, It's all right, it's all over. Because it's not." Nothing, certainly not our film or book, can make the tragedy of the Vietnam War all right. But we can, and we must, honor the courage, heroism, and sacrifice of those who served, those who died, and those who participated in the war against the war. As filmmakers, we have tried to do that the only way we know how; by listening to their stories. "It's almost going to make me cry," Army veteran Vincent Okamoto told us, remembering the infantry company he led in Vietnam in 1968. "Nineteen-, twenty-year-old high school dropouts that come from the lowest socioeconomic rung of American society . . . they didn't have the escape routes that the elite and the wealthy and the privileged had . . . but to see these kids, who had the least to gain. . . they weren't going be rewarded for their service in Vietnam. And yet, their infinite patience, their loyalty to each other, their courage under fire, was just phenomenal. And you would ask yourself: how does America produce young men like this?" While Okamoto and hundreds of thousands of other Americans were fighting and dying in a brutal and bloody war overseas, hundreds of thousands of their fellow citizens were taking to the streets back home to protest against that war. As the antiwar activist Bill Zimmerman recalled for us, "People who supported the war were fond of saying 'My country right or wrong . . . or better dead than red.' Those sentiments seemed insane to us. We don't want to live in a country that we're going to support whether it's right or wrong . . . so we began an era in which two groups of Americans, both thinking that they were acting patriotically, went to war with each other." A chasm opened in American society, and on both sides of the divide things were said--and things were done--that could never be unsaid, could never be undone. "When I see the war protesters . . . intellectually I certainly understand their right to the freedom of speech," Army adviser James Willbanks remembered, "but I will tell you that when I see them waving NLF flags, the enemy that I and my friends had to fight and some of my friends had to die fighting, that doesn't sit very well with me."   When Americans talk about the Vietnam War, the scholar and novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen wrote, too often we are just talking about ourselves. We were determined not to make that mistake. How could we hope to make sense of this turbulent time in our history, or to explore the humanity and the inhumanity of all sides, without hearing directly from our allies and our enemies--the Vietnamese soldiers and civilians we fought with, and against? Off and on for several years, we traveled to Texas, California, and Virginia to get to know many Vietnamese Americans who came to the United States as refugees, having suffered the unimaginable loss not just of their families, friends, and comrades, but of their country. They spoke honestly about the failings of their own government, and shared their doubts and fears about whether the Republic of South Vietnam under Nguyen Van Thieu and Nguyen Cao Ky had been worth fighting for. "Thieu [and] Ky, they were corrupt," Saigon native Phan Quang Tue remembered. "They abused their position. And they received more from Vietnam than Vietnam received from them. We paid a very high price for having leaders like Ky and Thieu. And we continue to pay the price." To understand what the war was like for the winners, we traveled to Vietnam, traversing the length of the country, meeting and interviewing veterans and civilians. We were surprised to discover that the war remains as unsettled and painful for them as it is for us. For decades, they too have avoided speaking about what happened. The memory of the nearly incomprehensible price they paid in "blood and bone" has been too grievous. But now, as they near the end of their lives, they want their families, and the world, to know what they went through. "The war we fought," General Lo Khac Tam told us on camera, "was so horribly brutal I don't have words to describe it. I worry, how can we ever explain to the younger generation the price their parents and grandparents paid?" For Bao Ninh, a foot soldier in the North Vietnamese Army, who became a celebrated novelist after the war, the official public narrative celebrating their great, noble victory rings hollow: "People sing about victory, about liberation," he told us. "They're wrong. Who won and who lost is not a question. In war, no one wins or loses. There is only destruction. Only those who have never fought like to argue about who won and who lost." In the winter of 2015, as we were nearing the end of the editing phase of the project, we invited Nguyen Ngoc, an eighty-five- year-old veteran of the North Vietnamese Army (now a revered scholar and teacher of literature), to travel from Danang to Walpole, New Hampshire, where we screened the fine cut of the film and asked him to share his thoughts about the war with us. After reflecting on the stories he saw onscreen, he told us that the time had come for them to be told; the people of Vietnam, he said, "are starting to rethink the war, to ask the questions. Was the war necessary to achieve justice? Was it right? What is most important now is to find some meaning, some lessons in the war for our lives." There is no single truth in war, as this difficult story reminded us at every turn. Each of us can only see the world as we are; we are all prisoners of our own experience. We did not set out to answer every question embedded in this lamentable chapter in history. With open minds and open hearts we simply tried to listen to the brave and honest testimony of a remarkable group of men and women. If we have been able to find some meaning in this devastating calamity, it is in no small measure thanks to their generosity, humility, and humanity, for which we are profoundly grateful.   Ken Burns and Lynn Novick Walpole, New Hampshire Excerpted from The Vietnam War: An Intimate History by Geoffrey C. Ward, Ken Burns All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

---