Vietnam
Story Stream
Choosing Defeat June 01, 2023
Writing five years ago in the Claremont Review of Books (“The Vietnam War Revisited,” Spring 2018), I criticized a ten-part PBS series, The Vietnam War (2017) by directors Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, arguing that, rather than an evenhanded examination...
Make the Days Count May 30, 2023
Don’t count the days—make the days count. So goes an old adage on military deployments. Ronald J. Glasser did both as a physician treating the wounded in the Vietnam War. After returning home, he wrote 365 Days, a collection of short stories drawn fr...
Remembering Leo Thorsness May 29, 2023
Power Line observes its twenty-first anniversary this Memorial Day weekend. I am taking the liberty of looking back by pulling out three of my favorite posts of the past twenty-one years. This is the third.Stephen Spender wrote in his most famous poe...
Viet Thanh Nguyen on the Cover of His New Memoir April 06, 2023
The book is finished, in one sense, and not finished in another sense. Story and words are there, copy editing is done, pages laid out, an ISBN number assigned. What remains is the cover, something over which the author has little control, and yet wh...
Who Lost Vietnam? February 01, 2023
Scholars and writers who challenge conventional accounts of history are often courageous and invaluable seekers of truth. They don’t always find the whole truth, but their work often gets us closer to what really happened. One such scholar is Mark Mo...
The Fall of South Vietnam April 27, 2021
I’ve known George J. Veith, author of the new Drawn Swords in a Distant Land: South Vietnam’s Shattered Dreams, since 2008, when he interviewed me about my own long history of operating in Vietnam as a clandestine collector of signals intelligence ag...
Cold War Culture April 23, 2021
There was once a time—Louis Menand recalls at the beginning of “The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War”—when “people cared. Ideas mattered. Painting mattered. Movies mattered. Poetry mattered.” Even criticism mattered. It was a time when “pe...
Giving Hemingway Another Look April 05, 2021
Could there be anything more subversive than turning a spotlight, in this moment, on Ernest Hemingway?Though his influence on generations of writers is inescapable, he has come to be seen as an avatar of toxic masculinity, the chest-thumping papa of ...
How the Navy Revolutionized Air Combat April 22, 2019
Navy aviation officials were stunned in the late 1960s at the heavy losses sustained in Operation Rolling Thunder, Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara's attempt to win the Vietnam War with a sustained aerial blitz.This, despite confidence that Ameri...
Lessons From Life in the Village April 23, 2018
A book about a small squad of U.S. Marines embedded in a Vietnamese village as a part of the Combined Action Program......
Post-Traumatic Whiteness November 27, 2017
Joseph Darda looks at how war trauma became the basis for a white identity politics that adapted the politics of multiculturalism for its revanchist ends......
Voice of the Vietnam Generation October 23, 2017
Halfway through episode five of Ken Burns and Lynn Novick's ten-part documentary, the smooth, sonorous-voiced narrator Peter Coyote describes how 50,000 antiwar activists marched......
Vietnam War's Ambiguity From the Source September 16, 2017
Geoffrey C. War and Ken Burns offer portraits in companion volume to documentary series......
20 Must-Read Books on the Vietnam War September 16, 2017
Here's a list of essential reading just in time for the new Ken Burns documentaryÂ?Â? on the conflict that divided America......
Fools, Cowards, or Criminals? September 11, 2017
Auschwitz and the My Lai massacre, or French torture prisons in Algiers, are equivalent, let alone that the Vietnam War was a criminal enterprise on the same level as the Holocaust. Nor does Ophuls doubt that the judgment on Göring and his gang at Nu...
Nuremberg and Vietnam September 11, 2017
Like many others I tend to confuse what a reviewer says with the book itself. It's so much easier. Well, I haven't read the book, but the review says......
Brutal Battles of Vietnam July 28, 2017
During the Paris Peace talks in the early 1970s, American Col. Harry Summers was talking to his North Vietnamese counterpart during a break......
Veterans Use Writing to Tame Trauma July 09, 2017
Vietnam veteran and retired managing editor of the East Oregonian, he had cobbled together the words during a Red Badge Project writing workshop......
The War That Time Forgot June 15, 2017
If you plan to become a bureaucrat, you might really want to think about going to work for a secret one. There is little to no accountability, and it is easy to spin abject failures into policy successes. That argument seems to be one of the major ...
From a Hawk to a Dove May 30, 2017
Vietnam Veteran Ray Cocks, who'd eagerly enlisted in 1967, was forever changed by the realities of war....
5 Men, What They Learned at Annapolis April 03, 2017
Book follows Senator John McCain, John M. Poindexter, Robert C. McFarlane, James Webb and Oliver L. North....
Sen. John McCain on Defense, Vietnam and His Favorite Book March 17, 2017
Sen. McCain discusses defense policy, acquisitions, the Naval Academy and the novel that inspired him...
Playing Poker with World War II and Vietnam March 08, 2017
I enjoy a game of low-stakes poker whenever I can stand it. ...
How Spies Became Soldiers on Sly March 06, 2017
Should a federal agency empowered with the sole task of gathering intelligence for national security be allowed to morph into one that also conducts paramilitary operations?...
