After World War II the United States (U.S.) struggled to counter communist expansion by establishing a world order that fostered capitalism. Key to success in the Asian-Pacific region was rebuilding the Japanese economy as a capitalist power. Toward that end, the U.S. indirectly supported the French during the First Indochina War to recolonize and take advantage of the area's raw materials. The French failed and agreed in the Geneva Accords to partition the country with a goal of reunifying North and South Vietnam. The U.S. realized the Viet Minh would dominate and gain control of the country providing a communist victory in the region. Unwilling to accept this, the U.S. pressured Emperor Bao Dai to install Ngo Dinh Diem as Premier of South Vietnam. This was based in part on Diem and his family's Catholic heritage, which led to pressure from leaders in the U.S. who were either Catholic or sympathetic to the Catholic Church. Ultimately, influence from the Vietnamese Catholic Church, the American Catholic Church, and the Vatican would become a factor in the foreign policy decisions by the Eisenhower Administration as they related to Vietnam. These decisions led to direct involvement in Vietnam and eventually the Vietnam War.

In Don't Thank Me for My Service, the author recounts his tour of duty in Viet Nam, which provided a toxic shock and awakened him to the extent to which he and generations of American citizens had thoughtlessly succumbed to the relentless barrage of lies and propaganda that infest US culture-from the military and political parties to religious institutions, academic and educational institutions, sports, fraternal and professional associations, the scientific community, the economic system, and even entertainment-that seek to rationalize the US' otherwise inexplicable and morally repulsive behaviour around the world and at home. Indeed US American history reveals a unifying theme: prosperity for a few through expansion at any cost, to preserve the exceptional American Way of Life (AWOL). This has been structurally guided and facilitated by the nation's founding documents, including the US Constitution. From the beginning, the US was envisaged as a White male supremacist state serving to protect and advance the interests of private and commercial property, and this course has never been reversed, though the 1960s witnessed multiple aligned social movements. The US-waged war in Viet Nam is one of hundreds of examples in a long pattern of brutal exploitation. A quick review of the empirical record reveals close to 600 overt military interventions by the US into dozens of countries since 1798, almost 400 since the end of World War II alone, and thousands of covert interventions since 1947. This history overwhelms any rhetoric about the United States as a beacon of freedom and democracy, committed to promoting domestic and global equal justice under law. Such interventions have assured de facto subsidies for US American interests, regulated global markets on US terms, and provided access to cheap or free labour and to raw materials. Millions of people around the globe have been murdered with virtual impunity as a result of US interventions in a pattern that illustrates what Noam Chomsky calls the Fifth Freedom-the freedom to rob and exploit. This freedom is ultimately protected with use of force when a country or movement seeks to protect or advance the domestic needs and desires of its members or citizens for political freedom or economic wellbeing. This book provides an invaluable tool for today's activists, who may be similarly shocked into wakefulness-whether by war, economic dispossession, or loss of the freedom to dissent.