Nearly three decades after the last U.S. helicopter lifted off from Saigon, countless Americans still struggle to make the Vietnamese war into history. I know. A former platoon leader in an armored cavalry unit, I’m one of them. At the same time, my life has brought me into contact with a large number of others attempting in their own ways to come to terms with the experience of the war. Some of them are in VA wards. Some of them take care of people in VA wards. Some hold high public office or win literary prizes. Some sell real estate,...

For Americans serving in the military in Vietnam, “gook” was definitely the operative term. Throughout the war, with the possible exception of “shit” or “fuck,” it may have been the most ubiquitous word in the American soldier vocabulary. Ironically, as a piece of GI slang, it had absolutely nothing to do with the Vietnamese people, their language or their history, being (in its newest iteration, at least) a hand-me-down from army and marine veterans of Korea, another lousy Asian war of ten to fifteen years earlier, where it allegedly derived from a disparaging native word for “people.” In retrospect, that...

More than thirty years later, and not a week goes by when I don’t think of the dead Vietnamese boy at Gia Ray. Actually, I go through periods when I see him every day. I zip open the body bag, and out he comes, face first, the rest of him in a fetal crouch, arms and legs drawn up in front like some dreadful insect mutation. Later I find out that is what dead bodies often do. Everything—head, limbs, torso—is covered in a kind of viscous, translucent slime, the stuff used in monster movies. A combination of mucus,...

I begin this examination of the strange and often dreadful reciprocity between American life and American entertainment—a commemorative essay, one might call it, in several meanings of that term—by adducing two parallel narratives, both essentially factual and both spanning roughly the same period more than thirty years ago. Each begins in early April 1970 and ends slightly more than a month later, after the U.S. Army invasion of Cambodia and the killing of four students by Ohio National Guardsmen at Kent State University. The first involves a U.S. president and his obsession with a war movie. The second...

Years later, when I look back on the personal performance of my duties as an armored cavalry platoon leader in the Vietnamese war, I do so with a mix of modest satisfaction and profound unease. In combat I some-times met the test of average competency. Recalling certain occasions, however, I cringe with something close to shame over the dumb luck that kept people from having to pay with their bodies and their lives for my callow errors in response and decision making. Outside of combat, the one place where I failed miserably in Vietnam was with race. In an army...

One Saturday morning not long ago, I sat down alone and watched the movie Platoon for the first time. More than thirty years had passed since I came home from Vietnam. More than fifteen years had passed since the movie first appeared. I had heard strangely conflicting things about it ever since. On one hand, it was supposed to be the most realistic movie made about the war, notable for its GI authenticity on everything from the sheer day-to-day misery of humping the bush (the endless patrolling, the heat, the moisture, the vegetation, the insects, the fear, the fatigue) to...

My guess would be that any Americans who served in-country during the Vietnamese war still have a personal sound-track album inside their head—a set of songs, titles, lyrics, that can flash them back to wherever they were thirty or thirty-five years ago, standing there now looking at their younger self in exactly the place they were when they heard some particular piece of the music of the Nam. It is said in this regard, with considerable aptness, that Vietnam was the first rock ’n’ roll war. It is also said that, for Americans at least, Vietnam was not so...

Military history sections of big chain bookstores and the paperback buy-and-swaps now devote entire shelves to paperbacks about the war in Vietnam, books with titles like LRRP Team Leader, Marine Sniper, Assault on Dak Pek, Death in the Delta, Death in the Jungle, Death in the A Shau Valley, Inside the LRRPs, Inside Force Recon, Inside the Crosshairs, Inside the VC and NVA. On the lists of the big Internet marketers such offerings currently number around one hundred. More than forty years after the first American counterinsurgency warriors began arriving in Vietnam and more than twenty-five years after the last...

When I first read Robert McNamara’s In Retrospect, I almost went insane with grief and rage. The title of a review at the time, by Pat C. Hoy II, a former West Point officer of my generation, seemed to say it all: “They Died for Nothing, Did They Not?” Having read David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest many years before, I knew the story was bad. However, until I read McNamara, compounding dismal policy rehash with the worst sort of mealymouthed apologia—a mea culpa, noted one editorialist, decidedly more mea than culpa—I didn’t know how bad.

After...

Bizarre as it may seem, as recently as a year ago, an Internet search for the name “William Calley” led you directly to his alumni association Web page at Miami Edison High School in Florida. The first thing you saw was his graduation picture, class of 1962, in which he already wore the look of goofy vacuity made familiar during his army court-martial and brief period of public notoriety. A short, upbeat paragraph followed about what he did in the years immediately after high school. Only then did the narrative turn to his involvement in the My Lai massacre and...

This is a story of parallel lives. The time lines they follow are almost exactly contemporary. You might call the narrative accounts twinned moral and political autobiographies. The first is that of the poet John Balaban. The second is mine. They both center initially on our experience with the Vietnamese war during an intense period of personal involvement in the late 1960s. They then turn to the life of writing and the effort, extending over several decades, to come to an understanding of that experience in terms of both personal memory and cultural reflection.

In many respects, the two lifelines,...

Forty years ago, Bernard Fall published an interview with Ho Chi Minh that began with some of the North Vietnamese leader’s observations on an impending war between the People’s Republic of Vietnam and the United States of America. “It took us eight years of bitter fighting to defeat you French in Indochina,” he said. “Now the South Vietnamese regime of Ngo Dinh Diem is well armed and helped by ten thousand Americans. The Americans are much stronger than the French, though they know us less well. It may perhaps take ten years to do it, but our heroic compatriots in...