Recommend me a book on the Vietnam war, please

'Ashes of Vietnam' by Stuart Rintoul
'Australia's Vietnam' ed Peter King
'Australia's War in Vietnam' by Frank Frost

Rintoul is mainly soldiers' recollections, King is the most 'political' book, Frost has elements of both but also (alone of the three) touches the military stategy. All were current when I did my degree (about 12 years ago) so may be massively out of date now.

(the computer game, combined with a serendipitous ipod juxtaposition of Country Joe's "Feel Like I'm Fixin' To Die", Paul Hardcastle's "19" and Simon and Garfunkel's "Silent Night (7 O'Clock News)", inspired my current interest)

some absolutely terrifying photos:

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/05/vietnam_35_years_later.html

Amazing stuff, can't ever imagine what it was like.

I grew up with this shit in the news every fucking day. I turned 18 just after the draft lottery was begun and drew a number about 30 above the "projected" cutoff. A relief, but still too close to be comfortable about it.

http://www.vice.com/read/vietnam-and-the-mere-gook-rule

guy I sort of know did this interview. pretty sickening.

http://twistedsifter.com/2013/02/soldiers-engraved-zippo-lighters-from-vietnam-war/

http://i.imgur.com/5zerA5V.jpg

Long Exposure Vietnam War Photos Released

There are many photos of the Vietnam War, but a veteran who took photos one fateful evening decided to keep them secret. He has now released them 40 years later. They are a set of night-time photos that documented a short battle between a US army camp and one lone Viet Cong sniper. For a few days, the sniper had been firing down on the camp at night from a nearby hill. After the US soldiers were frazzled enough, they decided the next time he shot at the camp, they would open up full force on him. This was when James Speed Hensinger got out his camera and positioned himself for the fireworks that were about to take place.

Setting himself up in a guard tower near the perimeter of the camp, James took his 35mm Nikon FTN camera and got ready. When darkness came, the sniper took his first shot and that’s when all hell broke loose on the hill. Two 7.62mm M60 machine guns shot rounds from the left and right, with one red tracer shooting every four bullets. An M42 Duster open turret tank fired its twin 40mm anti-aircraft guns and a M2 Browning .50 caliber machine gun shot high explosive shells creating white bursts of light. James shot away with his Nikon using long exposures between 15 and one minute long.

Upon returning and developing the film, James was surprised at how well they turned out. He decided he wouldn’t make them public until 40 years later – and now, with the Vietnam war in the history books, it is a striking reminder of the raw fire power used in the conflict. When the US army sent out a patrol the next morning, the Viet Cong sniper was never found, yet there was a blood trail leading away from the hill.

http://cdn.visualnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/james-speed-hensinger-16-600x403.jpg

http://cdn.visualnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/james-speed-hensinger-85-600x403.jpg

Few Americans born after the Tet Offensive know even the barest facts about the Vietnam War. I aim this generalization not at the oft-underrated Joe Sixpack but at graduates of our finest universities. I remember getting coffee with an old friend, then fresh out of Yale, right after she had backpacked through Vietnam. Whenever she mentioned the war she referred to the former South Vietnam as “the democratic side.” It was immediately clear that she, like virtually everyone else of her and my generation, had never heard of the Geneva Accords of 1954 to guarantee free elections in South Vietnam, elections scuttled after the CIA predicted that Ho Chi Minh would win. My friend had had no sense that the U.S. invaded (a word rarely used, but what else can you call sending 500,000 troops to a foreign nation?) South Vietnam to prop up an authoritarian government with little popular legitimacy. We launched a ruthless pacification campaign; it failed—but not before Washington spread the war into Laos and Cambodia and ultimately killed some two million civilians. This was the war, and there was no “democratic side.”

By contrast, my interlocutor—an intelligent and cultured person—did show a sure command of the political history of Tibet, which had been the next stop on her Asian tour.

From Generation X on down, there is a gaping lack of knowledge about the most foolish and brutal of our postwar wars. (Yes, worse than Iraq.) But this is not a vacant lot ready for intellectual development. Instead this block of nescience is something dense, opaque, and fenced off with barbed wire. Why is there so much socially reinforced ignorance about our bloodiest war since World War II?

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/vietnam-a-war-on-civilians/

because we lost?

and because it makes us look like assholes?

that is prob one of the best things i've ever read on TAC, btw, i highly recommend reading the whole article

and because pretty much every country downplays its own atrocities?

fwiw I heard an interview with the author of that book and it was pretty amazing, and harrowing. I felt really, really bad about everything for a few days after.

yeah article's rly good. this is probably important to remember now that we're in an interminable global insurgency war with no really important buildings to change the flags on:

But the relentless violence against civilians was more than the activity of a few sociopaths: it was policy. This was a war fought along Fordist principles—Robert McNamara had gone to the Department of Defense straight from the helm of the auto giant—and the slaughter was industrial in scale. Victory over the Viet Cong was to be achieved by quantifiable “kill ratios,” to reach that elusive tipping point where the insurgency could no longer replenish its troops. This approach hard-wired incentives to secure a high “body count” down the chain of command, with the result that U.S. soldiers often shot civilians dead to pad their tallies and thereby move up the ranks.

good use of "tipping point" too

More impressive still is his mastery of archival resources: Turse was bequeathed the copious notes of Newsweek’s Buckley and Shimkin, and he has broken new ground with the previously unexplored files of the Army’s War Crimes Working Group—which he happened upon in the National Archives and photocopied for several days straight while sleeping in his car in the parking lot. And a good thing he made copies because the drive to suppress memories of Vietnam has entered even the archives: the files were later removed from the shelves.

<3

jesus

the lugubrious prose style beloved of conservative intellectuals aside, it's a good piece

are 'educated' americans are in general as deluded about the violence and idiocy of the war as he claims?

The main effect of the My Lai news was to provoke a wave of sympathy for Lieutenant Calley, with state legislatures from Mississippi to New Jersey passing resolutions in support of the man, who was under house arrest at Fort Benning. (In Georgia, Calley had a vigorous defender in the young Democratic governor, Jimmy Carter.)

perlstein's weaving of this stuff into nixonland is horrifying iirc

i dunno, i found it pretty readable. i was on the verge of giving up on TAC what with their spate of civil war revisionist pieces.

i'm always surprised at how much the actual facts of vietnam have faded into the background, and i think war hawks have deftly exploited that. i remember a bunch of liberal-ish supporters of the iraq war doing this dismissive "oh, it's not gonna be another vietnam, c'mon guys not EVERYTHING is like vietnam!" routine without ever really addressing what the actual differences might be. then a few years later everyone was bemoaning "the worst foreign policy mistake ever" as if vietnam had never happened. part of the issue, of course, is that the vietnam war was a complicated event with a 20-year backstory and the government lied nonstop about it throughout so the american public never had a really good fix on how to think about it as it was happening, let alone how to remember it decades later. so the agreed-upon judgment became more 'this is a mess' than 'this war was an awful thing to do,' and that judgment easily translates into 'well, this was a mistake -- we'd better do better next time!' which, of course, more easily translates into iraq, afghanistan, et al.

tried but failed to find a youtube of dana carvey saying "and let me assure you, this will not be another vietnam. because we have learned well the difficult lesson of vietnam: stay out of vietnam."

i was on the verge of giving up on TAC what with their spate of civil war revisionist pieces.

lol tbh i had a queasy feeling during this piece that it was going to swing around to the routinized civilian butchery of meade, sherman and grant

currently reading gareth porter's 'perils of dominance,' which is the most detailed and convincing account of the behind-the-scenes shenanigans leading up to the war i've read. wouldn't recommend it to anyone for their first vietnam book, but maybe after you've read a couple others. here's a good piece by porter that sums up his take on the gulf of tonkin incident:

http://truth-out.org/news/item/25377-the-real-tonkin-gulf-deception-wasnt-by-lyndon-johnson