Patriots - 9780142004494

Christian Appy's oral history is the first work to probe the war's path through both the United States and Vietnam. The testimony in this book, sometimes detached and reflective, often raw and emotional, allows us to see and feel what this war meant to people literally on all sides - Americans and Vietnamese, generals and grunts, policy makers and protestors, guerrillas and CIA operatives, pilots and doctors, artists and journalists, and a variety of ordinary citizens whose lives were swept up in a cataclysm that killed three million people.
The accounts of 135 men and women span the entire history of the Vietnam conflict, from its murky origins in the 1940s to the chaotic fall of Saigon in 1975. Their memories take us from deafening jungle firefights to Oval Office policy debates, from the underground tunnels of Cu Chi to Kent State, from press briefings in Saigon to dogfights in the skies over North Vietnam, from POW tiger cages to the Paris peace talks. There are famous people here - William Westmoreland and his North Vietnamese counterpart, General Vo Nguyen Giap; Alexander Haig, Walt Rostow, and John McCain; Oliver Stone, Tim O'Brien, and "Country" Joe McDonald. But some testimony also comes from the less well known - an American who parachuted into Vietnam in 1945 to train Ho's guerrillas; a Playboy playmate who visited in 1965; the widow of the Quaker who burned himself to death in front of the Pentagon. We hear from eyewitnesses at My Lai and Kent State, and meet the original campaigners for MIAs; we see how the war bled into other aspects of the 1960s and 1970s - the women's movement, the civil rights movement - and how it unexpectedly changed the lives of people who never came within ten thousand miles of Vietnam.
By turns harrowing, inspiring, and revelatory, Patriots is not a chronicle of facts and figures but a human history of the war. It makes clear what made the Vietnam War one of the most significant conflicts of the twentieth century and why it continues to generate such bitterly divisive moral and political debate. The voices in it show us how hard the war was fought, how much it destroyed, how passionately it was protested, and how far it reached into every crevice of daily life in both countries. They speak eloquently to many of the toughest questions about the war that, until now, have too often been met with silence.