Yeah, I know, I put in a cute comment about arendt's use of "Mr. Burns" -- standard academic writing would have been "Burns" or "Ken Burns." Apologies to arendt.

At any rate, the truth of the matter is that one can learn far more from reading (books y'know), from Internet research, and from watching YouTube videos than one can from watching movies and documentaries. This is true if the subject is history, science fiction, or any topic one cares to name. Print still goes a long way in displaying what cameras can't, although of course with print one has to use one's imagination to a significant extent, which is perhaps "filled in" with movie scenes which are themselves products of someone else's imagination. And even firsthand accounts are colored by the human imagination, so that's another dilemma.

ADMISSION OF BIAS: I think that history will eventually bear out my belief that the American involvement in Vietnam was colored from the outset by a fantasy of "nation-building," emanating from American universities (specifically Michigan State) as a foundational belief in the superiority of the American Way of Life, and that the escalation beginning in 1964 was a byproduct of this fantasy. Whether or not the US could have "won the war in Vietnam" is ultimately an unimportant question, because in order to "win the war" the US participants would have had to know a lot more than they bothered to investigate, and so in the end the attempt to substitute bombs and guns for human relations failed.

At any rate, here is my brief annotated bibliography on America in Vietnam. This will be short, and perhaps a bit behind the times -- I'm sure that readers will be able to fill in with stuff they've read that will add something to this short diary.

*****

Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves

The American engagement in Vietnam, from the escalation beginning in 1964 to the withdrawals and bombings of 1972, was characterized by all sorts of casual murder, as depicted for instance in the movie "Platoon." For this book Nick Turse did some hardcore research to find out what the aggregate effect was of all this casual murder, with special emphasis upon "Operation Speedy Express."

Alan Dawson, 55 Days

Judging from Amazon it appears this book is out of print. Dawson was the UPI bureau chief in Saigon; he offers in great detail what happened from the beginning to the end of the collapse of the Republic of Vietnam in 1975, arguing that the government of southern Vietnam was in economic terms a kleptocracy, and that the Vietnamese in the south might have held out for longer had they actually believed in what they were doing. But they didn't, so they didn't.

James Carter, Inventing Vietnam

It's been awhile since I read this book but I think it was centered around the Michigan State Vietnam Group Archive, the library of a group of academics who organized the nation-building project that was to be imposed upon Vietnam. The people who did this did not take into account the particulars of Vietnamese culture, nor did they care: the "strategic hamlet" program they initiated back before the escalations of 1964 et seq. paid no heed to traditional rural Vietnamese ties to specific land areas. This book is for the most part about the early history of the Vietnam conflict; it doesn't really go into detail about what happened after Diem's overthrow in 1963.

Neil Sheehan -- A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam

This is the story of the conflict in Vietnam as seen through a biography of John Paul Vann, a field adviser for the US effort. Vann understood full well and through firsthand experience how thoroughly misguided were the US efforts there; he nonetheless fooled himself into believing the war could be won, and continued in his heterodox pursuit of the war all the way up to his mysterious death in a helicopter crash in the Vietnamese wilderness in 1972. There's a lot of good side information in this longish book.

Howard Jones, My Lai: Vietnam, 1968, and the Descent Into Darkness

This is a very recent attempt to write the definitive book about the massacre at My Lai, a small community of hamlets in Quang Ngai province in Vietnam in March of 1968. Jones tries to capture the ambiguity of the event (perhaps as an attempt at rhetorical defense against expected attacks upon his book from Vietnam veterans), but readers of this book will nonetheless be impressed with the heedlessness of a war-fighting policy (Westmoreland's, during the Johnson administration) based on accumulating "body counts."

Prados, John, Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War

This is a book that attempts to show that the regime popularly called "South Vietnam" never really gained traction within the chunk of turf it claimed, and that even when the regime in the north was at its least popular, in (if I recall correctly) 1969, there was still no solid popular loyalty to the regime to the south. I can't really say whether Prados' argument is entirely borne out by the facts because I haven't really seen an account yet that contests Prados' argument on his own terms.

*****

So, OK, that's what I've got so far. I try to stay current, though since it's not really a major topic of my present-day research I can't say that I'm entirely current. Your thoughts?