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There have been other admirable Viet Nam books recently: Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato, Larry Heinemann's Close Quarters and Frederick Downs' The Killing Zone. Josiah Bunting, a novelist (The Lionheads) and former Army officer who served in Viet Nam and is now president of Virginia's Hampden-Sydney College, points out an anomaly of Viet Nam. "The Norman Mailers and William Styrons and all those guys stayed at Harvard for this war. The real literary genius never went." Nonetheless, Bunting expects that "within the next three or five years, there will...
Movies, TV shows, plays and memoirs will eventually construct a mythic reality around the American experience in Viet Nam. World War I's catastrophic trench warfare, which nearly wiped out a generation of England's best and brightest men (France's and Germany's as well), was so utterly new and unfamiliar that a highly literate assemblage spent the next decade, at least, formulating a conception of what it had all been about. Something of the same process is occurring regarding Viet...
...conquering Cambodia. Now they have invaded again, and have subordinated Laos as well, advancing that much closer to a possible Vietnamese elevation to the status of overlord. Their move against Cambodia spurred the Chinese, who supported Hanoi through the long American war, to invade the northern provinces of Viet Nam just after normalizing relations with...
...voices of reconsideration are heard. Jean Lacouture, the French journalist and biographer of Ho Chi Minh and long an expert on Viet Nam, has now called for "trials" of Communist crimes in Indochina since 1975, when Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese army. Guenter Lewy, a University of Massachusetts political scientist, fired what may be the opening shot of a revisionist view of the war in his 1978 book, America in Viet Nam. Lewy examines the process of U.S. involvement and concludes that though the performance was unsuccessful, it was legal and not immoral. Leslie Gelb, now the State Department...
...sense, the formal foreign policy lessons that the U.S. learned from Viet Nam have been easier to absorb than the deeper psychological and personal meanings, which will be years in unfolding. Says Columbia University Historian Henry Graff: "America has learned for the first time that not everything it attempts comes off successfully. What we regarded as decency, honor and pride were not implemented in the world satisfactorily to make others see us as we thought we ought to be seen. That this could have happened to us is what The Deer Hunter is really all about...