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Books > Humanities > History > American history > From 1900 > Postwar, from 1945 > Vietnam War
American military advisors in South Vietnam came to know their
allies personally - as few American soldiers could. In addition to
fighting the Viet Cong, advisors engaged in community building
projects and local government initiatives. They dealt firsthand
with corrupt American and South Vietnamese bureaucracies and not
many would have been surprised to learn that 105mm artillery shells
were being sold on the black market to the Viet Cong. Not many were
surprised by the Communist victory in 1975. This memoir of a U.S.
Army intelligence officer focuses on the province advisors who
worked with local militias that were often disparaged by American
units. The author describes his year (1969-1970) as a U.S. advisor
to the South Vietnamese Regional and Popular Forces in the Mekong
Delta.
Philip D. Beidler, who served as an armored cavalry platoon leader
in Vietnam, sees less and less of the hard-won perspective of the
common soldier in what America has made of that war. Each passing
year, he says, dulls our sense of immediacy about Vietnam's costs,
opening wider the temptation to make it something more necessary,
neatly contained, and justifiable than it should ever become. Here
Beidler draws on deeply personal memories to reflect on the war's
lingering aftereffects and the shallow, evasive ways we deal with
them. Beidler brings back the war he knew in chapters on its
vocabulary, music, literature, and film. His catalog of soldier
slang reveals how finely a tour of Vietnam could hone one's sense
of absurdity. His survey of the war's pop hits looks for meaning in
the soundtrack many veterans still hear in their heads. Beidler
also explains how ""Viet Pulp"" literature about snipers, tunnel
rats, and other hard-core types has pushed aside masterpieces like
Duong Thu Huong's Novel without a Name. Likewise we learn why the
movie The Deer Hunter doesn't ""get it"" about Vietnam but why
Platoon and We Were Soldiers sometimes nearly do. As Beidler takes
measure of his own wartime politics and morals, he ponders the
divergent careers of such figures as William Calley, the army
lieutenant whose name is synonymous with the civilian massacre at
My Lai, and an old friend, poet John Balaban, a conscientious
objector who performed alternative duty in Vietnam as a
schoolteacher and hospital worker. Beidler also looks at Vietnam
alongside other conflicts--including the war on international
terrorism. He once hoped, he says, that Vietnam had fractured our
sense of providential destiny and geopolitical invincibility but
now realizes, with dismay, that those myths are still with us.
""Americans have always wanted their apocalypses,"" writes Beidler,
""and they have always wanted them now.
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