Table of Contents

PatriotsPreface

Part One: Introductions

Commanders

Bernard Trainor: It turned out the major of Danang was a double agent

Dang Vu Hiep: With all those choppers they seemed terribly strong

War Heroes
Roger Donlon: We were babes in arms in every way

Tran Thi Gung: I was stuck in a tunnel for seven days

Paying the Price
Ta Quang Thinh: They carried me the whole way back to the North

George Watkins: That sand was probably the only thing that saved me

Phan Xuan Sinh: Ail my ancestors are buried here

Where is Vietnam?
Jo Collins: I just thought I was going to Europe

Deirdre English: How can my country be at war and I don't know about it?

Part Two: Beginnings (1945-64)

History Is Not Made with IFS

Henry Prunier: These were not ragtag farmers

Yo Nguyen Giap: The most atrocious conflict in human history

Deliver Us From Evil
Daniel Redmond: The doctor who won the war in Indochina

Rufus Phillips: Tell 'em I'm not French before they lynch me

Ngo Vinh Long: If they're making maps, they're preparing for war

Kick the Tires and Light the Fires

Richard Olsen: It was like 'Terry and the Pirates'

Malcolm Browne: You could smell the burning flech

Le Leiu Browne: There was one coup after another

Paul Hare: My cock lost the fight

The Emporor Has No Clothes
Paul Kattenburg: What's good for Peru is good for Vietnam

Evelyn Colbert: Dissent which contradicted the public optimism was ignored

Chester Cooper: Boy, you speak just like an American

Sergei Khruchchev: The Vietnamese had their own ideas

Paradise Island
John Singlaub: We sent them all back with a generous gift package

Luyen Nguyen: She divorces her second husband and waited for me

Part Three: Escalations

Trails to War

Vu Thi Vinh: The Truong Son jungle gave us life

Nguyen Thi Kim Chuy: We came home hairless with ghostly white eyes

Helen Tennant

Hegelhimer: I was their wife, their sister, their girlfriend

You Want Me to Start World War III?
James Thompson: This was crazy and deceitful policy making

Seth Tillman: We could stop this war tommorrow

Charles Cooper (I): He used the f-word more freely than a marine in boot camp

Walt Whitman Rostow: Take the North Vietnamese of Vinh hostage

Central Highlands
Dennis Deal: Man, if we're up against this, it's gonna be a long-ass year

Ward Just: It approached the vicinity of the spiritual

Le Cao Dai: Sometimes I operated all night while the staff took turns pedaling the bicycle

From Civil Rights to Antiwar
Julian Bond: They said I was guilty of treason and sedition

General Baker Jr.: When the call is made to free the Mississippi Delta...I'll be the first one in line

The Ultimate Protest
Anne Morrison Welsh: It was like an arrow was shot from Norman's heart

Free-Fire Zone
Jim Soular: A goddamn chopper was worth three times more than David

Triage
James Lafferty: No draft board ever failed to meet its quotas

David M. Smith: The knife man

Sylvia Lutz Holland: We saved their lives, but what life?

Chi Nguyen: Being wounded was not considered the worst thing that could happen

Morale Boosters
Bobbie Keith: I got a butterfly right on the butt. So that's my war story

James Brown: After they got the funk they went back and reloaded

Quach Van Phong: An artist ca be as important in war as a soldier

Nancy Smoyer: I can't believe the Donut Dollies got us to do that

Vu Hy Thieu: Nothing was more essential than our sandals

Joe McDonald: I was president of my high school marching band

Air War
Jopnathan Schell: I had my notebook right there in the plane

Harlan S.

Pinkerton Jr.: Good luck and good hunting

Luu Huy Chao: Before I trained as a pilot I had never been in an airplane

Nguyen Quang Sang: That was the first time I ever saw an American

Fred Branfman: What would it be like to hide in a cave all for five years?

Prisoners of War (I)
Porter Halyburton: I don't see how you've got a worse place than this

Troung My Hoa: They tried to make us say, 'Down with President Ho!'

Randy Kehler: Friction against the wheel

Cameras, Books, and Guns
Philip Jones Griffiths (I): Go see what they did to those people with your money

Larry Heinemann: We had this idea that we were king of the fucking hill

Doung Thanh Phong: We didn't need a darkroom

Joan Holden: The counterculture was visible everywhere

Oliver Stone: He lived to kill. He was like a real Arab

Nguyen Duy: Whoever won, the people always lost

Yusef Komunyakaa: Soul Brothers, what you dying for?

H.D.S. Greenway: We would write something ans the magazine would ignore it if it wasn't upbeat

Antiwar Escalations
Todd Gitlin: A rather grandoise sense that we were the stars and spear-carriers of history

Tom Englehardt: It was like Vietnam had somehow come all the way into our living rooms

Vivian Rothstein: What? Meet separately with women?

They Slept At Our House
Paul Warnke: We fought for a separate South Vietnam, but there wasn't any South

Part Four: The Turning Point (1968-70)

Tet

Tran Van Tan: He asked me for directions to the police sensations

Barry Zorthian: Then-boom!-Tet comes along

Philip Jones Griffiths (II): You're not safe in those cities

Nguyen Qui Duc: I was living a double life

Bob Gabriel: We buried our own men right there

Tuan Van Ban: Attack! Attack! Attack!

Memorial Day 1968
Clark Dougan: He Was Only 19-Did You Know Him?

From Johnson to Nixon
John Gilligan: Our only shot was to help Humphrey break away from Johnson

Peter Kuznick: Political conversion was the greatest ahprodisiac

J. Shaeffer: The Palace Guard

Samuel Huntington: You had to be pretty stupid to stay out in the countryside

Douglas Kinnard: While we had the power, it turned out they had the will

A Three-Square-Mile Piece of the United States
Tom O'Hara: It was like being in a minimum-security prison

Familes At War
John Douglas Marshal: You will not be welcome here again

Huynh Phuong Dong: Recieving a letter was a mixed blessing

Richard Houser: They told me I needed to choose between my country and my brother

Nathan Houser: A sign this country has grown up will be when there is a memorial erected to the war resisters

Suzie Scott: This nice young man from the FBI was here

Lam Van Lich: I was away from home for twenty-nine years

My Lai
Larry Colburn: They were butchering people

Michael Bernhardt: The portable fire-free zone

You Look Like a Gook
Vincent Okamoto: Damn, I'm a Gook

Wayne Smith: I was thinking God they didn't have air support

Charley Trujillo: It sure as hell wasn't 'English only' in Vietnam

An Acute Lack of Forgetfulness
Gloria Emerson: Before the war, I was Miss Mary Poppins

Nguyen Ngoc Luong: To get their ID cards, the girls had to go to bed with the police

From Cambodia to Kent State
Anthony Lake: Quitting wasn't heroic

A.J. Langguth: I think they pictured it as a kind of huge bamboo Pentagon

Tom Grace: As much as we hated the war on April 29, we hated it more on April 30

Part Five: Endings (1970-75)

The End of the Tunnel

Alexander M. Haig Jr.: Even the tough guys...caved in

Morton Halerin: Kissenger did not trust anybody fully

Judith Coburn: Vietnamization wasn't working any better than Americanization

We Really Believes...
Beverly Gologorsky: God forbid my boss finds out I'm here

Nguyen Ngoc Bich: Why should my son die for your country?

Chalmers Johnson: The campus was turning into a celebration of Maoism

Steve Sherlock: Steve Sherlock, bronze star with a V.

Watergate
Daniel Ellsberg: We're eating our young

Egil "Bud" Krogh: Let's circle the wagons

The World Was Coming to An End
Frank Maguire: The whole attitude was, stand back little brother, I'll take care of it

Charles Cooper (II): All this area was Indian country

Everybody Thought We'd Won the War
Charles Hill: Reporters just kept writing as if it were Tet

Paris
Daniel Davidson: I wouldn't buy a used car from that man

Nguyen Thi Binh: The longest peace talks in history

Nguyen Khac Huynh: It wasn't a mistake, it was an inexplicable crime

Prisoners of War (II)
Jay Scarborough: I read Anthony Adverse about four times

Tran Ngoc Chau: The curriculum was designed to detoxicate us

John McCain: Americans like conspiracies

Patty and Earl Hopper Sr.: What mushroom do they think we were hatched under last week?

Gloria Coppin: The government wanted to control the POW/MIA movement

Copllapse
Frank Snepp: There was classified confetti all over the trees

Troung Tran: We could either lose or tie, but not win

The Merriment was Short-Lived
Le Minh Khue: The letters remain, but the senders are gone forever

Part Six: Legacies (1975- )

Missing In Action

Tran Van Ban: We saw so many parents crying for their lost children

Tom Corey: Why do you hate the Vietnamese?

War-Zone Childhoods
Tran Luong: I never got there in time to capture an American pilot

Bong Macdoran: It's not worth my energy to lay blame on anybody

Luong Ung: People just disappeared and you didn't say anything

Silences
Toshio Whelchel: i didn't her to worry, so I lied

R. Huynh: Your real self was only for you

Jayne Stancavage: I just want to know what happened

Souvenirs
Hoang Van Thiet: They bought Zippos as a kind of birth certificate

Taps
Leroy V. Quintana: Old geezers...playing taps on a tape recorder

William Westmoreland: I was leading an unpopular war

Thai Dao: The first time I ever encountered the Vietnam War was in Hollywood movies

Tim O'Brien: You can't talk with people you demonize

Huu Ngoc: We no longer hate the Americans

Wayne Karlin: The roof that hasn't been built

Duong Tuong: Because love is stronger than enmity

Acknowledgments
Index

About the Author

Christian G. Appy is a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and the author of two previous books on the Vietnam War. His oral history of the war, Patriots, was a main selection of Book of the Month Club and won the Massachusetts Book Award for nonfiction. His most recent book is American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity. He lives in Amherst.

Reviews

Intense and absorbing... If you buy only one book on the Vietnam War, this is the one you want. (Chicago Tribune)

A gem of a book, as informative and compulsively readable as it is timely. (The Washington Post Book World)

Intense and absorbing... If you buy only one book on the Vietnam War, this is the one you want. (Chicago Tribune)

A gem of a book, as informative and compulsively readable as it is timely. (The Washington Post Book World)

When Appy (Working-Class War) says "all sides" he is not exaggerating. It's difficult to think of any group of people who were involved in the many and varied aspects of the American war in Vietnam not represented in these oral history pages. Appy's testifiers include war hawks; peace activists; former Vietcong guerrilla fighters, Vietnamese Communists, Vietnamese anti-Communists; American veterans of many stripes, from privates to generals, medics to infantrymen; POW/MIA activists; poets, novelists, journalists; entertainers; and former government officials from all sides. Appy amply fulfills his goal of presenting a "vast range of war-related memories" in this massive, valuable book. He spent five years traveling around the country and in Vietnam, interviewing 350 people, and included about half of their stories. Oral histories often suffer from loose organization or from voices that pop up confusingly again and again. Appy takes a different approach. Each person appears only once, and Appy gives the participants plenty of room to tell their stories. He also provides on-the-mark, often insightful introductions to each entry, along with brief but to-the-point chapter introductions to set the historical context. The book contains the remembrances of some well-known people, including Gen. William Westmoreland, Gen. Alexander Haig, Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, Walt Whitman Rostow, Julian Bond, Ward Just, Oliver Stone, poet Yusef Kumunyakaa and writer-activists Todd Gitlin and Jonathan Schell. There are others known mostly to Vietnam cognoscenti (Chester Cooper, Le Minh Kue, Rufus Phillips, Wayne Karlin and Nguyen Qui Duc), as well as many of the voices of just plain folks who experienced the war in myriad ways. It all adds up to a solid contribution to the primary source background of the longest and most controversial overseas war in American history. (May 26) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.