Book Time #14: Vietnam

Vietnam: A History, Stanley Karnow

The theme of this edition of Book Time is wisdom. There is no period in history tougher to write about than Vietnam. The best writing contains not just facts but wisdom. How do you write wisely about a period so lacking in wisdom?

I have read a lot about the Vietnam War. As a rough approximation, I’m probably pushing 5,000 pages on the subject, either in books solely dedicated to the conflict or ones more broadly about 20th Century U.S. foreign policy, the 1960s/70s, or individual biographies about subjects who intersect with the war. I am, it is fair to say, fascinated by it. Not just the war itself, but the challenge of writing about it.

Which is to say, if I spot a book on Vietnam, I will almost certainly read it. This was how I came to pick up a used copy of Vietnam: A History. I was dropping off a library book when my eye caught the spine on the library’s $1 used book rack. The book, I later learned from the introduction, was a companion project to a PBS documentary aired in the 1990s. I haven’t watched the documentary, but I was unimpressed with the book.

The best books on Vietnam—The Best and the Brightest and A Bright Shining Lie immediately come to mind as not only titans of the field but also among the greatest non-fiction books ever written—were written at the time of the conflict. This is atypical for great historical works, which usually require distance in both space and time to free up the mind (and the archives). Indeed, those two books might not be considered “historical” at all. 

But there is something peculiar about Vietnam, something I think films like Apocalypse Now really get at, which is the way the conflict itself—through all its contradictions and paradoxes—warped people’s brains. The further writers get away from it, both in time and place, the less insight they can offer. 

Historically, Vietnam occupies a place in our collective psyche like a bad dream. It is all flitters and visions now, passing behind the eyelids in ways we can describe but never actually see. It is the clear inflection point in modern U.S. history, irrevocably altering the political landscape, and is almost never mentioned. I suspect Vietnam: A History suffers because it was written in an attempt to provide a rigid factual history about a time and place defined by anti-fact. Vietnam, more than perhaps any other historical incident, cannot be captured by the recitation facts and events. Because the facts alone do not cohere. They make no sense.

The book has its virtues. It contains more background on Vietnam as a place and the wars that came before America’s intervention than the works mentioned above. But it also suffers from the completist’s mentality. The book reads like Karnow couldn’t decide whether to write a narrative or a catalog of events, a challenge he acknowledges in the introduction. He says he didn’t try to do both, but that isn’t evident from the text. And he dedicates far too much space to Henry Kissinger, a person he perceives as a shaper of events rather than a barnacle riding along the belly of them. Facts, not wisdom.

Ultimately, the completist mentality yielded an incomplete work, which is at least a fitting paradox for a subject matter filled with such things. As a result, it is missing the most important element any book about Vietnam must contain. Despite its nearly 700-page length and countless observations, we never actually learn anything important.

War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals, David Halberstam

Speaking of books that contain wisdom, I don’t think anyone has ever asked me who my favorite non-fiction author is, but if someone did, the first name that would come to mind is David Halberstam. I haven’t read all of his works. His sports books remain a blind spot. But every time he writes about something it is one of the iconic works on that subject. You already know what I think of The Best and the Brightest. The Reckoning is one of the best books about business and industry ever written. The Powers That Be remains one of the must-read works on American media.

War in a Time of Peace is no exception. It is a postscript of sorts to The Best and the Brightest, about a military and political establishment still haunted by the mistakes of Vietnam and the surprisingly fragile American psyche at the conclusion of the Cold War. It is primarily about the Balkans, but Halberstam’s books do not read like books about events.

No one does it like Halberstam. When I read him, I am reminded that historical facts are temporary. They are revised as more information comes to light, generations ease into different points of view, and changing contexts alter perceptions. I am not reminded of this because Halberstam gets things wrong, but because he operates on a different plane altogether. His writing exudes permanent wisdom. War in a Time of Peace is about a pre-internet, pre-9/11 world, yet contains a staggering amount of wisdom about how changing media and political landscapes have irrevocably altered U.S. domestic and foreign policy in ways that are still reverberating today. You can read Halberstam writing about how cable television news and learn a lot about the internet. It takes a special writer to speak across eras so consistently. Halberstam accomplishes this because he writes about people who think they have control over events but don’t.

One of the paradoxes of my love for Halberstam is that I consider him a brilliant writer, but there are very few Halberstam sentences I would highlight as brilliant writing in and of themselves. The brilliance is in the wisdom each sentence contains, and how each artifact of wisdom coheres into a more profound insight throughout an entire work. Even his separate works speak to one another in the same language. Few non-fiction writers operate on this level. Reading Halberstam makes me feel sober and grounded, like the world is as complicated and terrible as I fear but also, despite it all, somehow possible to live in.