Vietnam: Thoughts on War & Death

Extract

Do not, gentle reader, recoil—do not turn away from the box that adjoins this essay! It is nothing more than a list, a random and partial list of some things that have come our way during the great ten-year retrospective on Vietnam. The shelf has no rigorous rule of selection: Some titles turned up in bookstores, some at a local newsstand, to be bought on an impulse of idle curiosity. No expert intends to hold forth here, no scholar intends to grade these (too numerous) titles. Others have already done so, most notably James Chace and David Fromkin in a truly thoughtful survey (“The Lessons of Vietnam?”) which appeared in the Spring issue of Foreign-Affairs. For us, it is enough to glance at the things on the shelf and to share a few modest observations.