In this unique introduction to the representations of the Vietnam War in American history, literature and film, author Mark Taylor offers a concise, interdisciplinary approach to this most popular ...but complex of subjects. His aim is to show the intricate nature of crucial events in Vietnam, indicate the different ways in which historians and other writers and film makers have sought to make sense of them, and explore the sorts of truths which each claims to be telling - how can we know what is 'authentic'?After a contextualising introduction which outlines the chronology of events during the Vietnam War, the book covers five key episodes during the war - including the massacre at My Lai, the siege at Khe Sanh, and the experience of homecoming for Vietnam veterans - analysing the way they have been treated by historians, by film-makers and by novelists.Films and texts discussed include The Green Berets, JFK, John Newman's JFK and Vietnam, Dispatches, the Peers Report, In the Lake of the Woods, The Deerhunter and the Rambo films.Key Features:*Interdisciplinary approach to this popular subject, in keeping with the way American Studies is taught*Includes a timeline of the Vietnam War*Illustrated with maps and film stills*Courses on Vietnam appear on most American Studies degrees
Over the past century, opinion polls have come to pervade American politics. Despite their shortcomings, the notion prevails that polls broadly represent public sentiment. But do they? InSilent ...Voices, Adam Berinsky presents a provocative argument that the very process of collecting information on public preferences through surveys may bias our picture of those preferences. In particular, he focuses on the many respondents who say they "don't know" when asked for their views on the political issues of the day.
Using opinion poll data collected over the past forty years, Berinsky takes an increasingly technical area of research--public opinion--and synthesizes recent findings in a coherent and accessible manner while building on this with his own findings. He moves from an in-depth treatment of how citizens approach the survey interview, to a discussion of how individuals come to form and then to express opinions on political matters in the context of such an interview, to an examination of public opinion in three broad policy areas--race, social welfare, and war. He concludes that "don't know" responses are often the result of a systematic process that serves to exclude particular interests from the realm of recognized public opinion. Thus surveys may then echo the inegalitarian shortcomings of other forms of political participation and even introduce new problems altogether.
In this account of one of the worst intelligence failures in Americanhistory, James J. Wirtz explains why U.S. forces were surprised by the North Vietnamese Tet Offensive in 1968. Wirtz reconstructs ...the turning point of the Vietnam War in unprecedented detail. Drawing upon Vietcong and recently declassified U.S. sources, he is able to trace the strategy and unfolding of the Tet campaign as well as the U.S. response.
From World War I to Operation Desert Storm, American policymakers have repeatedly invoked the "lessons of history" as they contemplated taking their nation to war. Do these historical analogies ...actually shape policy, or are they primarily tools of political justification? Yuen Foong Khong argues that leaders use analogies not merely to justify policies but also to perform specific cognitive and information-processing tasks essential to political decision-making. Khong identifies what these tasks are and shows how they can be used to explain the U.S. decision to intervene in Vietnam. Relying on interviews with senior officials and on recently declassified documents, the author demonstrates with a precision not attained by previous studies that the three most important analogies of the Vietnam era--Korea, Munich, and Dien Bien Phu--can account for America's Vietnam choices. A special contribution is the author's use of cognitive social psychology to support his argument about how humans analogize and to explain why policymakers often use analogies poorly.
As suggested by the title, this collection of essays focuses upon American involvement in the Vietnamese War. These essays were originally written for a symposium in 1988 in which (for the first time ...since 1975) scholars from both the U.S. and Vietnam met to discuss and debate the war and its impact on their respective nations. Thus, these works (by American authors) though alternately probing and guarded, are always thought-provoking. They display the mind at work in its search for answers, explanations, and meaning. Questions of politics and history (diplomacy, the Tet offensive, Chinese involvement, U.S. war veterans) are considered and reconsidered by such authors as Allen Whiting, Jayne Werner, Nyo Vinh Long, and Paul Comacho.
John Norton Moore, the most prominent legal scholar to defend a position basically in agreement with the present Administration, presents a coherent, well-argued interpretation of the specific legal ...issues raised by U.S. involvement in Vietnam and their implications for international and constitutional law.
Originally published in 1972.
ThePrinceton Legacy Libraryuses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Existing studies of the Vietnam War have been written mostly from an American perspective, using western sources, and viewing the conflict through western eyes. This book, based on extensive original ...research, including Vietnamese, Chinese and former Soviet sources, presents a history of the war from the perspective of the Vietnamese communists. It charts relations with Moscow and Beijing, showing how the involvement of the two major communist powers changed over time, and how the Vietnamese, despite their huge dependence on the Chinese and the Soviets, were most definitely in charge of their own decision making. Overall, it provides an important corrective to the many one-sided studies of the war, and presents a very interesting new perspective.
Between 1964 and 1975, 2.6 million American personnel served within the borders of South Vietnam during the Vietnam War, of whom an estimated 1-1.6 million actually fought in combat. At the tip of ...the spear was the infantry, the "grunts" who entered an extraordinary tropical combat zone completely alien to the world they had left behind in the United States. In South Vietnam, and occasionally spilling over into neighboring Laos and Cambodia, they fought a relentless counterinsurgency and conventional war against the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and Viet Cong (VC). The terrain was as challenging as the enemy - soaring mountains or jungle-choked valleys; bleached, sandy coastal zones; major urban centers; riverine districts. Their opponents fought them with relentless and terrible ingenuity with ambushes, booby traps, and mines, then occasionally with full-force offensives on a scale to rival the campaigns of World War II.This pocket manual draws its content not only from essential U.S. military field manuals of the Vietnam era, but also a vast collection of declassified primary documents, including rare after-action reports, intelligence analysis, firsthand accounts, and combat studies. Through these documents the pocket manual provides a deep insight into what it was like for infantry to live, survive, and fight in Vietnam, whether conducting a major airmobile search-and-destroy operation or conducting endless hot and humid small-unit patrols from jungle firebases. The book includes infantry intelligence documents about the NVA and VC threats, plus chapters explaining hard-won lessons about using weaponry, surviving and moving through the jungle, tactical maneuvers, and applications of the ubiquitous helicopter for combat and support.
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."
