Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam

Rating:
Summary: what nice people we were, to be against the war!
Review: When I read this book, I thought: "A war with Ms FitzGerald against it can't be all bad." Re-reading it years later, I wasn't quite as harsh, but FitzGerald struck me as impossibly naive. She paid a visit to Vietnam and spun a mountain of history and speculation out of that molehill. You will seek in vain for the term "Viet Cong" in this book, finding only the mereticious terms "Front" or "NLF" or "National Liberation Front." As much as anything, that tells you where FitzGerald was coming from: the conviction that the war in Vietnam was being prosecuted by the United States against an honest band of local amateurs, quite independent of Ho Chi Minh and the communist party.

Rating:
Summary: what nice people we were, to be against the war!
Review: When I read this book, I thought: "A war with Ms FitzGerald against it can't be all bad." Re-reading it years later, I wasn't quite as harsh, but FitzGerald struck me as impossibly naive. She paid a visit to Vietnam and spun a mountain of history and speculation out of that molehill. You will seek in vain for the term "Viet Cong" in this book, finding only the mereticious terms "Front" or "NLF" or "National Liberation Front." As much as anything, that tells you where FitzGerald was coming from: the conviction that the war in Vietnam was being prosecuted by the United States against an honest band of local amateurs, quite independent of Ho Chi Minh and the communist party.