No event since the Civil War has pulled harder on American memory than our war in Vietnam. It, too, spawned complex and conflicted legacies, and has dragged in its wake a long train of reactions--grief, denial, dissent, recrimination, pride, guilt, cynicism, myth-making, nostalgia, sentimentality, and an evasion of the war's darkest meanings and consequences.
We (finally) now know the basic facts of the war--what decisions were made, who went where and with what ammunition and to what end. Appy probes a different narrative of the war--the images that we had before we went in (spun by books like Tom Dooley's Deliver Us From Evil, a massive bestseller in 1956 and an almost wholly fictitious account), the prejudices that we brought out of the century's other wars (hot and cold), the fantasies we propagated about both the enemy and our allies during the entire war, the morass of military goals and metrics and the politics embedded in them; how the war was managed, reported, packaged, and consumed; the myths that began to be created about the war while it was still going on, and then in the years after about why we lost, why decisions were made, who (if anyone) got left behind, our accountability for atrocities and for the wounds inflicted on our own soldiers, and how the real "Vietnam syndrome" has played out in our popular culture--and our foreign policy. He trolls across newspaper accounts, TV coverage, Pentagon stats and position papers, memoirs, movies, novels, and more to create a completely fresh account of the meaning of the war, asking the hard questions.
Did it reflect our strongest ideals or our basest ambitions, or something in-between? Are we a force for good or evil? Are we the good guys or the bad guys?
The critically acclaimed author of Patriots offers profound insight into Vietnam’s place in America’s self-image
How did the Vietnam War change the way we think of ourselves as a people and a nation? In American Reckoning, Christian G. Appy—author of Patriots, the widely praised oral history of the Vietnam War—examines the war’s realities and myths and its lasting impact on our national self-perception. Drawing on a vast variety of sources that range from movies, songs, and novels to official documents, media coverage, and contemporary commentary, Appy offers an original interpretation of the war and its far-reaching consequences for both our popular culture and our foreign policy. Authoritative, insightful, and controversial, urgently speaking to our role in the world today, American Reckoning invites us to grapple honestly with the conflicting lessons and legacies of the Vietnam War.