Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides

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Christian Appy’s Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides is an oral history that serves as a "final public record" from many who have struggled publicly with the war for 20 or 30 years. The book is also a monumental effort to capture voices long unheard and ensure that the words are not lost to a new generation.

He includes statements from significant political and military figures from both sides of the conflict, including William Westmoreland, Alexander Haig, Nikita Kruschev's son Sergei, and Vice President Nguyen Thi Bihn. But he tempers these with the voices of a World Airways stewardess who accompanied troops out of the war zone, of the widow of the immolated Norman Morrison, and of numerous Vietnamese and American non-combatants whose lives were torn by the conflagration. These tales, and the contributions from poets, writers, and activists transform the book into a epic dialogue. Indeed, Appy says that he chose the title Patriots not out of a presumed understanding of how that word should be defined, but rather because it served as a locus for so many of the inner struggles of his interviewees: "In what ways might patriotism be a force for good or inspire noble sacrifice, and when does it become a club for stifling dissent and a rallying cry for unjustifiable destruction."

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"Christian Appy's oral history is the first work to probe the war's path through both the United States and Vietnam. The testimony in this book, sometimes detached and reflective, often raw and emotional, allows us to see and feel what this war meant to people literally on all sides - Americans and Vietnamese, generals and grunts, policy makers and protestors, guerrillas and CIA operatives, pilots and doctors, artists and journalists, and a variety of ordinary citizens whose lives were swept up in a cataclysm that killed three million people." "The accounts of 135 men and women span the entire history of the Vietnam conflict, from its murky origins in the 1940s to the chaotic fall of Saigon in 1975. Their memories take us from deafening jungle firefights to Oval Office policy debates, from the underground tunnels of Cu Chi to Kent State, from press briefings in Saigon to dogfights in the skies over North Vietnam, from POW tiger cages to the Paris peace talks. There are famous people here - William Westmoreland and his North Vietnamese counterpart, General Vo Nguyen Giap; Alexander Haig, Walt Rostow, and John McCain; Oliver Stone, Tim O'Brien, and "Country" Joe McDonald. But some testimony also comes from the less well known - an American who parachuted into Vietnam in 1945 to train Ho's guerrillas; a Playboy playmate who visited in 1965; the widow of the Quaker who burned himself to death in front of the Pentagon. We hear from eyewitnesses at My Lai and Kent State, and meet the original campaigners for MIAs; we see how the war bled into other aspects of the 1960s and 1970s - the women's movement, the civil rights movement - and how it unexpectedly changed the lives of people who never came within ten thousand miles of Vietnam." By turns harrowing, inspiring, and revelatory, Patriots is not a chronicle of facts and figures but a human history of the war. It makes clear what made the Vietnam War one of the most significant conflicts of the twentieth century and w

SYNOPSIS

Having written two previous books about the Cold War, Appy here assembles recent perspectives on the Vietnam War from veterans, prisoners of war, peace activists, journalists, policymakers, generals, US and Vietnamese government officials, Vietnamese on both sides, those who were children then, and others. Annotation ©2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

FROM THE CRITICS

The Washington Post

Christian G. Appy does not tell us when precisely he hit upon the idea of producing a full-fledged oral history of the Vietnam War, but an inspired moment it was. Five years in the making and based on hundreds of interviews with Americans and Vietnamese, Patriots is a gem of a book, as informative and compulsively readable as it is timely. — Fredrik Logevall

The New York Times

"One of the virtues of oral history is its capacity to encompass a wide range of individual experiences and viewpoints," Christian G. Appy writes in the preface to Patriots, his collection of 135 interviews chronicling the Vietnam War. … With the barest of introductions, Appy allows each of his chosen voices to offer an unvarnished recollection -- painful, conflicted, occasionally beautiful -- of an extraordinary time. — Katherine Zoepf

Publishers Weekly

When Appy (Working-Class War) says "all sides" he is not exaggerating. It's difficult to think of any group of people who were involved in the many and varied aspects of the American war in Vietnam not represented in these oral history pages. Appy's testifiers include war hawks; peace activists; former Vietcong guerrilla fighters, Vietnamese Communists, Vietnamese anti-Communists; American veterans of many stripes, from privates to generals, medics to infantrymen; POW/MIA activists; poets, novelists, journalists; entertainers; and former government officials from all sides. Appy amply fulfills his goal of presenting a "vast range of war-related memories" in this massive, valuable book. He spent five years traveling around the country and in Vietnam, interviewing 350 people, and included about half of their stories. Oral histories often suffer from loose organization or from voices that pop up confusingly again and again. Appy takes a different approach. Each person appears only once, and Appy gives the participants plenty of room to tell their stories. He also provides on-the-mark, often insightful introductions to each entry, along with brief but to-the-point chapter introductions to set the historical context. The book contains the remembrances of some well-known people, including Gen. William Westmoreland, Gen. Alexander Haig, Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, Walt Whitman Rostow, Julian Bond, Ward Just, Oliver Stone, poet Yusef Kumunyakaa and writer-activists Todd Gitlin and Jonathan Schell. There are others known mostly to Vietnam cognoscenti (Chester Cooper, Le Minh Kue, Rufus Phillips, Wayne Karlin and Nguyen Qui Duc), as well as many of the voices of just plain folks who experienced the war in myriad ways. It all adds up to a solid contribution to the primary source background of the longest and most controversial overseas war in American history. (May 26) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

The Vietnam War has been portrayed through many oral histories over the last three decades, but this superb volume is quite possibly the best in a crowded field. Most oral histories draw primarily on the stories of servicemen and -women, but as the subtitle claims, this compilation presents 135 one- to five-page interviews with American and Vietnamese veterans and conversations with journalists, antiwar protestors, doctors, nurses, government officials, and many others whose lives were altered by the war. The book is distinguished by historian Appy's (Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam) skillfully conducted interviews and his excellent introductory essays on all periods of the war, beginning in 1945, when the first Americans parachuted into northern Vietnam, and concluding with the conflict's present uncertain legacies. The author notes that 40 percent of all Americans were born after the war ended in 1975, and his book is ideal for this audience as well as anyone else who wants readable personal accounts of how the war permeated all aspects of society, culture, and politics. An excellent complement to the Library of America's two-volume Reporting Vietnam; highly recommended for all public and academic libraries. [BOMC main selection.]-Karl Helicher, Upper Merion Twp. Lib., King of Prussia, PA Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

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