The Vietnam War, by those shaped by it
NONFICTION
Few histories of the Vietnam War shy away from contentious questions or bold conclusions. Was the United States right to wage war in Southeast Asia? Why did Washington fail to achieve its objectives? What are the key lessons of the American defeat? Authors have clashed for years over the answers, making the war one of the most hotly disputed topics in all of American history.
Geoffrey C. Ward takes a different tack in his “intishow mate history,” the exceptionally engaging, if not wholly satisfying, companion book to “The Vietnam War,” the 18-hour documentary by famed filmmaker Ken Burns, which premiered Sunday on PBS. Rejecting clear-cut judgments, Ward aims instead to capture the war’s ambiguities by telling the story through the varied experiences and emotions of ordinary men and women whose lives were profoundly shaped by it.
“This was a war of many perspectives, a Rashomon of equally plausible ‘stories,'” Burns and his co-director for the television series, Lynn Novick, write in the book’s introduction. Both the documentary and the companion volume, they assert, give voice to “seemingly irreconcilable outlooks” reflected in “as many different perspectives as our narrative could accommodate.”
This approach will be familiar to anyone who has watched Burns’ awardwinning documentaries or read the accompanying over the past 30 years or so. On topics ranging from the Civil War to baseball to the Roosevelt family, Burns and his team have offered a broadly affirming vision of American history that provokes less by stirring debate than by tugging at viewers’ heartstrings with emotionally charged portraits of individuals at the center of their stories.
It’s unquestionably an appealing formula, and Ward’s companion book, a visually stunning tome weighing in at more than 600 pages, overflows with moving profiles of not just soldiers, sailors and airmen, but also doctors, nurses, prisoners, journalists, activists, mere bystanders and more. For example, Ward, who also wrote the script for the television series, unfolds the life story of Denton “Mogie” Crocker of Saratoga Springs, N.Y. After growing up on stories of heroic fighting men, Crocker defied his adoring parents by enlisting in the Army in 1964, only to be cut down by machine gun fire two years later, just short of his 19th birthday, while trying to capture a hill in South Vietnam’s Central Highlands.
On the communist side, Ward tells the story of Nguyen Thanh Tung, a southern-born revolutionary who survives the war despite shrapnel wounds to her leg and unspeakable losses along the way. Four of her brothers died fighting the French and another four battling the Americans. She also outlives her two sons, both born in dank underground tunnels where communist forces took refuge from the fighting above.
These portraits are accompanied by a spectacular array of photographs likely to be the book’s most striking feature for many casual readers. Predictably, the volume includes many old classics, including widely published photos of a South Vietnamese police chief executing a communist suspect and an American chopper lifting off a rooftop during the final colbooks lapse of Saigon in 1975. But it also features hundreds of evocative images — many of them focused tightly on the facial expressions of everyday Americans and Vietnamese — likely to be unfamiliar even to experts on the history of the war.
The overall effect of the vignettes and photos is to how people far removed from the corridors of power were swept up in events beyond their control, often with tragic consequences. The stories suggest parallels in the ways Americans and Vietnamese were victimized by questionable, even immoral, decisions by political and military leaders on all sides.