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Summary: A lotus in a pond of murky water.
Review: As a Vietnamese reader, this book is a precious one about a dark period of our country's history. Ms. Fitzgerald says for us what we've tried to say that American values differ from Vietnamese values. As one wise man said: The West has democracy and liberty, the East has morality and honor. People who disagree with this book are obviously still under the murky water of ignorance.
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Summary: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Natl. Book Award
Review: As a writer for the Atlantic Monthly, Vogue, New York Times Sunday Magazine, and the Village Voice Francis Fitzgerald visited Vietnam in 1966, a critical year in the U.S. involvment in Vietnam. From this visit, Ms. Fitzgerald developed an interest in Vietnam that culminated in what is generally considered to be one of the preeminent texts on the U.S. involvment in Vietnam. The text, Fire In The Lake, provides astute historical, cultural, and political analysis of the war for those who wish to understand how the United States lost the 'hearts and minds' of the Vietnamize people, and thus ultimately the war. Fire In The Lake, along with Dispatches (by M.Kerr), A Rumor of War (P.Caputo), Going After Cacciato (by T.O'Brien), A Bright Shining Lie (by N.Sheenan), and The Sorrow Of War (by B.Ninh) form the essential elements of any library on the Vietnam war. I should add, Fire In The Lake won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Bancroft Prize for History. Please do not be dissuaded from reading this important work by other reviews posted here.
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Summary: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Natl. Book Award
Review: As a writer for the Atlantic Monthly, Vogue, New York Times Sunday Magazine, and the Village Voice Francis Fitzgerald visited Vietnam in 1966, a critical year in the U.S. involvment in Vietnam. From this visit, Ms. Fitzgerald developed an interest in Vietnam that culminated in what is generally considered to be one of the preeminent texts on the U.S. involvment in Vietnam. The text, Fire In The Lake, provides astute historical, cultural, and political analysis of the war for those who wish to understand how the United States lost the 'hearts and minds' of the Vietnamize people, and thus ultimately the war. Fire In The Lake, along with Dispatches (by M.Kerr), A Rumor of War (P.Caputo), Going After Cacciato (by T.O'Brien), A Bright Shining Lie (by N.Sheenan), and The Sorrow Of War (by B.Ninh) form the essential elements of any library on the Vietnam war. I should add, Fire In The Lake won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Bancroft Prize for History. Please do not be dissuaded from reading this important work by other reviews posted here.
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Summary: A Great Document of Human History
Review: I bought my first copy of FIRE IN THE LAKE from a used book seller on the streets of Saigon in 1974. It was and is the finest look in to the workings of the Vietnamese mind available in the english language.A must read for anyone who has any plans to deal with Vietnamese before they do so. Even after seven years in the country working at the grass roots level and a Vietnamese wife, I still learned something from this book. I still reread it often.
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Summary: A powerful assessment of why the US could not win in Vietnam
Review: In my opinion, this work is a must read for anyone interested in studying American and Western involvement in Vietnam. This book studies the influence and power Ho Chi Minh and suggests that the US ignored the will of the Vietnamese people, who looked to Ho as 18th century Americans looked to George Washington - as the acknowledged leader of their country. By supporting dummy regimes that encouraged Western Market Capitalism, but did not have the support of the Vietnamese population, America failed to learn from the mistakes of the French and ended up backing the losing side in the Vietnamese civil war. Fitzgerald's work is an articulate study of Vietnamese society and culture. "Fire In the Lake" elucidates the problems with America's "black and white" assessment of Cold War International Politics and also underscores our inability to look at things from a perspective other than our own. A significant piece of work!
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Summary: East is east and west is west and never the twain shall meet
Review: Like the Kipling saying, this book portrays the tragic collision of two cultures unable to understand one another. Arguing that American values of freedom, democracy and optimism were inconsistent with Vietnam's values, culture, and above all, its bloody history and essentially agrarian existence, the effort was doomed from the start. THe Vietnamese's sense of government, history,politics and even conflict is completely different from our own, as is their cultural tradition of ancestor worship and their belief in what constitutes effective government (i.e. the mandate of heaven) and we never took these differences into account. Whether this is the fault of the military or the U.S government is really irrelevant, either way it was a crucial factor in the tragedy. Fitzgerald's book is of course an incomplete picture of the reasons we failed there, but is one of the most important and overlooked. While other books focus on the flawed military strategy of endless bombing, destruction and body counts, or the corruption of both Vietnamese regimes, or the arogance of the US military establishment, this book hones in on the cultural issue. Its also one of the best written books on the subject, regardless of the message, one written with passion and insight, and one that clearly shows that there are parts of the world that operated and still operate very differently from what we understand. While the world might be glowing with the promise of democracy i nthe new milennium, in the 60's and 70's it was still a place where ideological differences could sink even the best-intentioned efforts. Highly recommended, along with The Best and the Brightest, A Bright Shining Lie, and Stanley Karnow's Vietnam. This quartet of books would give you the most complete picture of the war and its history.
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Summary: Mostly true, except for the information from McNamara
Review: People were looking for a book that could grab them about Nam when this was a best seller in 1972, and this book has details that people were not getting from television or the front page of newspapers in those days. Magazines that published book reviews typically had a view of Nam that was tuned more to the nuance of individual points of view than the geopolitical justifications which failed to consider the nature of the situation in Nam itself as a primary consideration. Portions of this book originally appeared in `The New Yorker,' so the author was becoming widely known as this book was being prepared. Frances FitzGerald's original trip to Vietnam was in February to November of 1966, and resulted in articles for the `Atlantic Monthly,' the `Village Voice,' `Vogue,' etc. People who read fashion magazines were particularly interested in what a nice girl might think of a situation like Nam, where large numbers of young Americans were being subjected to a military view of the situation on a personal level so intense that most publications would refrain from printing the kind of expressions which naturally describe the emotional shock of being shot at or booby trapped in some more surprising fashion.
This book is not perfect. The only listing for `Tonkin Gulf Resolution' in the index is for the page on which President Johnson's use of the Resolution is questioned by Senator Fulbright in 1966. That was the time this book is mainly concerned with, but it gives an enormous amount of background information. It is possible to find a listing in the index under ` GVN' for `and U.S. entry into the war, 354' which gives the page that reflects Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's testimony to Congress that:
"It was in response to an amphibious sabotage raid by GVN forces that North Vietnamese PT boats attacked the U.S. destroyer Maddox, mistaking it for one of the South Vietnamese vessels." (pp. 352-353).
Actually, the OPLAN 34A attacks along the Gulf of Tonkin coastline were operations planned and approved in Washington, D.C., and McNamara lied about South Vietnamese operations to maintain the secret status of U.S. operations, during which the North Vietnamese PT boats were responding to recoilless rifle fire from a small boat when American intelligence informed the Maddox that it was about to be attacked. Radio intercepts of North Vietnamese naval messages on August 4, 1964, were used to convince LBJ and Senators that an attack had occurred when two American destroyers were picking up radar ghosts and sonar readings off the reflection of a hard-turned rudder, as shown by subsequent tests. Edwin E. Moise's book, TONKIN GULF AND THE ESCALATION OF THE VIETNAM WAR has much more information about that secret circus stunt.
Jeffrey Kimball's recent book, THE VIETNAM WAR FILES: UNCOVERING THE SECRET HISTORY OF NIXON-ERA STRATEGY, contains a reference to the author of this book in a Memorandum by Dwight Chapin to Haldeman, January 18, 1973, about a month after heavy bombing near or in Hanoi to get some ceasefire agreement signed, hoping it could be called `The Peace Announcement' (p. 288) and attempting to describe a point of view different from what intellectuals were expecting.
"The FitzGeralds and the Fondas, the Halberstams and Harrimans, the Clarks and Ellsbergs and Baezes are poised in the wings just waiting to treat the end of the war as their victory and to so opine from coast to coast." (Kimball, p. 291).
I have the First Vintage Books Edition, August 1973, which was after Dwight Chapin's Memorandum, but I am not sure if American bombing in Cambodia had ended when the actual paper in this book was printed on. There are only six lines of listings in the index for Cambodia, mostly on general issues, but the week I spent there was hardly earth-shaking. Of more interest to me was the report in FIRE IN THE LAKE about the An Lao valley, where the battalion 1/12th Infantry from the 4th Infantry Division spent the months from September, 1969 to January, 1970. I believe this was our first free fire zone, with a base high above a village that had been destroyed, surrounded by paddies in which elephant grass was growing instead of rice, but enemy soldiers were found harvesting highland rice on the hillsides. Enemy contact was the only kind we had, after all other possibilities had been eliminated in the manner described in this book.
"In Operation Masher/White Wing alone--a multi-regimental sweep through the north of Binh Dinh province--the Allied forces, by the estimates, destroyed an entire enemy division. In the process they left hundreds of civilians dead and wounded and `generated' so many refugees as almost to depopulate the fertile An Loa valley." (p. 405).
"While the American troops opened roads and `cleared' great stretches of territory, the Front guerrillas came back into every area except those heavily garrisoned by U.S. troops. By the end of 1966 the NLF continued to govern the An Lao valley as well as the suburbs of Da Nang, Hue, Nha Trang, and Saigon." (p. 406).
There is only one line in the index for Frantz Fanon, but anyone who is interested in how FitzGerald saw a link between revolution against colonial powers in African and Arab countries and the situation in Nam, "including the belief in Fate and the symbolic killing of self, which he called `the behavior patterns of avoidance. . . . the sudden crime waves that spread through the cities, the tribal warfare, and the fierce, irrational feuding of the native sects. As he explained them, . . ." (p.509). You wouldn't want to believe how true the stuff in this book could be today.
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Summary: A moving book whatever your politics
Review: This book had a huge impact on me as a young man. It describes American involvement in Vietnam. While my position about Vietnam has changed considerably as the years pass, the impact of this book still leaves me with fond feelings for the skillful way the writer describes the ever-deepening quicksand that Vietnam became for our country. The writer describes the horrible descent-into-hell Vietnam became as the rural population flooded into urban areas, turning them into pits of filth and degradation for all that lived there. Fitzgerald describes the mistakes and bad luck, line by line, until, as one Vietnamese official of the time described it, America had fallen into a �downward spiral.� A tragic and moving book.
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Summary: revisit the recent past
Review: This has got to be one of the most important books i've read in my life. It's 1972 or 1973, i've finished several years of college, VietNam dominates our thinking and hangs like a cloud over life, i eventually joined the Army in Jan 1973. I had a favorite and influential uncle who served in VietNam 1966-1970, and as a result i read everything that i could on VietNam.
This was the very best. Cool writing, but passionate underneath, scholarly but committed, historical but with the present always in mind. The best of writing and reading. Now as i review the book it looks so dated, for those memories although vivid are aged. But the book is still well written history done during the time with a political goal in mind, to inform the American public about the real issues of VietNam. As such it still bears reading, students who want to learn what those years were all about, or their elders wanting to revisit and re-evaluate long forgotten passions. In either case, this is a good place to start. For history may appear to be gone, but it is carried by those who were around, and as the years past, held ready for the inquirer in books such as these.
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Summary: Still One of the Very Best Books on Viet Nam
Review: Twenty-eight years after publication, and 25 after the war's end, Fire in the Lake remains one of the very best books on the Viet Nam war. Sadly, Americans are woefully ignorant of the rest of the world. We have little real knowledge of our own history; but for the rest of the world's history and culture, we have neither knowledge nor regarad. We do not even do the Vietnamese people the courtesy of respecting the name of their country--Viet Nam, not Vietnam; Sai Gon, not Saigon. FitzGerald helps to correct some of this ignorance and arrogance. She begins examining the U.S. in Viet Nam from the perspective of Vietnamese history and culture; and in the process, demonstrating the tenacity and courage of the Vietnamese people, as well as their determination to rid themselves of any foreign invaders, even if, as with the Chinese, it takes 1,000 years. Another great strength of FitzGerald's book is, with her attention to Viet Nam's history and culture and their 20th century struggle against the French, she demonstrates, in an almost matter of fact way, a fundamental tenent of U.S. foreign policy which has been repeated numerous times in the post World War II era. That central tenent is to support thugs over patriots, to elevate to power those who will sell out their people for 30 pieces of silver rather than work with those committed to the well being of their people. Ho Chi Minh was our ally during WWII; his hero was Thomas Jefferson, not Karl Marx or Stalin. He was very pro-American; yet he was a nationalist and a patriot first, which meant, from the perspective of the U.S., he was not only unreliable, but someone who had to be destroyed. And though FitzGerald does not carry her analysis beyond Viet Nam, an informed or a curious reader quickly can draw the parallels between U.S. policy in Viet Nam and U.S. policy in Africa, the Middle East, the Pacific rim (Indonesia specifically), South America, the Caribbean, and most obviously of all, Central America. Thus FitzGerald gives us not only the means of understanding the war in Viet Nam, and why we were doomed to lose, but also a point of departure for understanding the travesty of U.S. foreign policy for the last 100 years. Simply stated, the United States is an (economic) empire which cares nothing about democracy, self determination in other countries, which sees other people's patriotism and love of country as a threat to U.S. imperial interests. We can learn a lot from what FitzGerald has to say, about the Vietnames, and especially about ourselves.
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