Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Vietnam War
A wide range of historians, writers, and public figures reflect on “the most important, or interesting, or overlooked way in which America has changed"
A scholar searches across two centuries to discover the main engine of our government’s growth, and reaches a controversial conclusion.
Alexis de Tocqueville observed in 1835 that America had no neighbors and hence no enemies.
The general responsible for remaking the American Army in the aftermath of the Cold War knows a great deal of history, and it sustains him in a very tough job.
It is dawn in Washington as General Gordon R. Sullivan, the Chief of Staff of the United States Army, walks quickly from his helicopter at Andrews Air Force Base to board the jet bound for Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Waiting for him there is a classroom full of the Army’s most successful and promising officers, colonels, and lieutenant colonels newly chosen to command brigades and battalions. Some of these officers will have fought in Grenada, in Panama, in the Gulf War, or all three. It is possible they will have to lead their soldiers in some other conflict before they leave command. Sullivan wants them to know who leads them.
Jan Wollett found herself on the last flight of refugees out of a crumbling Da Nang in 1975.
Early in 1973 a woman named Jan Wollett applied for a job as a flight attendant with World Airways, based in Oakland, California.
After more than 130 years, the fundamental dispute between the American media and the American military has changed hardly at all. The essential argument is still about access. How much should the press be allowed to know and see of the conduct of battle?
The “loser decade” that at first seemed nothing more than a breathing space between the high drama of the 1960s and whatever was coming next is beginning to reveal itself as a richer time than we thought.
That’s it,” Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then U.S. ambassador to India, wrote to a colleague on the White House staff in 1973 on the subject of some issue of the moment. “Nothing will happen.
A civilian adventurer gave us the best artist’s record of America in Vietnam.
“Combat fatigue” and “post-Vietnam syndrome” lost ground to a more sophisticated understanding of the problem of PTSD.
Let’s call him Frank. “He was in the war” is how adults explained Frank’s odd behavior a generation ago. As he walked through the small town then, his gait was clumsy, his clothes disheveled, and he seemed to go nowhere in particular.
He didn’t want the job, but felt he should do it. For the first time, the soldier who tracked down the My Lai story for the office of the inspector general in 1969 tells what it was like to do some of this era’s grimmest detective work.
In the early spring of 1969, I was an Army colonel recently assigned to the office of the inspector general in Washington, and I was not particularly happy about it; I have always disliked living in Washington, and I think that most infantry officers would ra
"Memoirs,” Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter once told young Richard Goodwin, “are the most unreliable source of historical evidence.
When my daughter is old enough to ask about Vietnam, my answer to the question “What should we tell our children about Vietnam?” will include many of the points assembled in Bill McCloud’s article. If she asks what I was doing then, I will tell her that I never fought there.
I was saddened by the responses of so many eminent Americans when asked “What should we tell our children about Vietnam?” Myths about the nature of U.S. involvement predominate and cloud the real lessons that must be learned if we are to avoid another such tragedy.
That was the question an Oklahoma high school teacher sent out in a handwritten note to men and women who had been prominent movers or observers during the Vietnam War. Politicians, journalists, generals, and combat veterans answered him. Secretaries of Defense answered him. Presidents answered him. Taken together, the answers form a powerful and moving record of the national conscience.
Last year, the principal at my school and friend, Rick Elliott, told me that he wanted the Vietnam War to be covered more thoroughly than it had been in the social studies classes at our junior high in Pryor, Oklahoma.
Hard Looks at Hidden History
One of the more unlikely results of the American Revolution was Australia. Most American colonists came here voluntarily, of course, but until 1776 we meekly accepted boatloads of His Majesty’s convicts as indentured servants.
Historians have failed to help Americans understand what the war was all about. So charges this scholar, author, and Vietnam veteran.
Instead of fading away, as some thought it would, interest in the Vietnam War seems to be growing steadily. Last year all three networks devoted hour-long specials to the tenth anniversary of the end of the war, with weighty pronouncements on the meaning of it all.
A veteran reporter looks back to a time when the stakes were really high, and, yet, military men actually trusted newsmen.
One week in August 1942 ,several stories on the British war effort appeared on the wires of the Associated Press, written by an AP reporter based in London named Drew Middleton.
When I was a small boy, about equally obsessed with drawing, history, and comic books, I had a favorite artist.
The first major engagement of the U. S. Army in Vietnam was a decisive American victory. Perhaps it would have been better for all of us if it had been a defeat.
Editor's Note: The author fought in Korea and Vietnam, wrote several books of military history, and was the editor of Vietnam
After a varied career as a soldier, statesman, diplomat, and presidential adviser, Taylor wants to known as someone who “always did his damndest.”
We Americans pride ourselves on our sophistication. We like to think that we are worldly-wise and cynical.
A domino theory, distant wilderness warfare, the notion of “defensive enclaves,” hawks, doves, hired mercenaries, possible intervention by hostile powers, a Little trouble telling friendly natives from unfriendly—George III went through the whole routine
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