Book Review: American Reckoning

American Reckoning:The Vietnam War and our National Identityby Christian G. AppyViking, 2015It's one of the more melancholy American anniversaries, 2015's 50^th of President Lyndon Johnson's decision to deploy regular U.S. Combat troops in the deepening quagmire of Vietnam, thereby ushering in a decade of horror and bloodshed that, as University of Massachusetts history professor Christian Appy acidly notes at the conclusion of his eloquent and devastating new book American Reckoning, produced extraordinary literature but precious little else of value. Appy, the author of two previous books on the Vietnam War, here presents almost a meta-history of the conflict, tracing not only its worsening historical barbarities but also its complicated renditions in popular culture. His readers under the age of 60 will find it all a masterfully-done and deeply bizarre tour of a nation's capacity for self-delusion. His readers older than 60 will find it riveting but almost unbearable reading.It's an angry book, and that anger seems more controlled and thereby more ruthless when he's recounting history rather than assessing such dubious cultural artifacts as the Rambo movies (no amount of high dudgeon can possibly elevate a discussion, however brief, of Top Gun). In his book's primarily historical sections, he describes with perfectly-chosen quotes the twisted, Suetonian dementia that so much of the time seemed to affect President Johnson on the subject of Vietnam:

Nation building looked like a sick joke alongside the wreckage caused by American weapons. But even as the military was doubling and redoubling its bombing attacks and search-and-destroy missions, President Johnson was still prattling on to his advisers about building schools and dams: “I want to leave the footprints of America in Vietnam. I want them to say when the Americans come this is what they leave – schools, not long cigars. We're going to turn the Mekong into a Tennessee Valley.”

The much darker psychoses of the men doing the actual fighting are equally well-drawn by Appy, particularly as his narrative enters the war's most violent escalations. After the Tet Offensive, for instance, General Westmoreland was replaced by General Creighton Abrams, who cooperated with the CIA's infamous Phoenix Project, under which “thousands of unarmed, unresisting suspects were murdered” and “the body count continued to be a primary measure of success.” This bloodthirsty tactic was epitomized by General Julian J. Ewell, commander of the Ninth Infantry division in 1968-69 and an unrepentant psychopath:

When Lieutenant Colonel David Hackworth arrived to take command of one of Ewell's battalions, the general said, “It's a pussy battalion and I want tigers, not pussies.” According to Hackworth, every battalion commander in the Ninth Division was required to carry a small card with an “up-to-date, day-to-day, week-to-week and month-to-month body-count tally, just in case Gen. Ewell happened to show up.” Ewell “didn't give a damn whose body was counted, and a great many – too many – civilians in the Delta were part of the scores … 'If it moves, shoot it; if it doesn't, count it' would have been the perfect division motto.”

But although he displays an enormous amount of skill at bringing it to life, the main subject of Appy's book is not the Vietnam War itself but rather the various increasingly untenable mental spaces it occupied in collective American conception, starting out as a virtuous crusade to free the helpless people of South Vietnam from the depredations of Communism and morphing, through a well-known series of disillusionments, into the dark, stain-like shape it holds today (Appy isn't exactly slow to draw the obvious comparisons with the Terror Wars of President George W. Bush). “Vietnam brought something wholly new and unexpected into the American war story,” he writes with simple sparseness. “Failure.” And, as he goes on to elaborate, something worse than failure – a very public loss of identity:

The Vietnam War and the history that followed exposed the myth of America's persistent claim to unique power and virtue. Despite our awesome military, we are not invincible. Despite our vast wealth, we have gaping inequalities. Despite our professed desire for global peace and human rights, since World War II we have aggressively intervened with armed force far more than any nation on earth. Despite our claim to have the highest regard for human life, we have killed, wounded, and uprooted many millions of people, and unnecessarily sacrificed many of our own.

American Reckoning is an uneven book almost by design, and there was perhaps nothing even so talented a writer as Appy could do to reconcile the mental and military sections of the story he's trying to tell. The greater dispassion of the cultural critic would inevitably be at odds with the passionate animosities aroused by any historical account of the almost unthinkable atrocities committed by frontline soldiers all through the war; there's almost no legitimate way to shift from U.S. servicemen shooting Vietnamese children for sport to the titillating articles of the Ladies' Home Journal, and it's no fatal criticism of Appy's book that it's much better at the one than the other.