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Rating: 
Summary: American fantasies explained
Review: As a Vietnamese living in America, I have always been puzzled by different historical accounts of what went on during the Vietnam war. One account was what I learnt while growing up there. Another account was the Vietnam that many Americans know from the media. This book explained some of those differences well. The two Viet Nam (North and South), the gulf of Ton Kin incidence, the liberal press, antiwar activists spitting on returning GI, and the emotionally afflicting POW/MIA myth were the few fabrications concocted by various imperialistic American administrations. With the help of the jingoistic corporate press, they brainwashed the ill informed American public to garner support for the genocidal war in southeast Asia. Four million Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians died from the "good intentions" of the United States.
Americans may have a free press. But are Americans free from the bias, prejudice, and bigotry of men who decide "all the news that's fit to print" and what is fit for us to read? Read the book and make up thy own mind.
Rating:
Summary: American fantasies explained
Review: As a Vietnamese living in America, I have always been puzzled by different historical accounts of what went on during the Vietnam war. One account was what I learnt while growing up there. Another account was the Vietnam that many Americans know from the media. This book explained some of those differences well. The two Viet Nam (North and South), the gulf of Ton Kin incidence, the liberal press, antiwar activists spitting on returning GI, and the emotionally afflicting POW/MIA myth were the few fabrications concocted by various imperialistic American administrations. With the help of the jingoistic corporate press, they brainwashed the ill informed American public to garner support for the genocidal war in southeast Asia. Four million Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians died from the "good intentions" of the United States.
Americans may have a free press. But are Americans free from the bias, prejudice, and bigotry of men who decide "all the news that's fit to print" and what is fit for us to read? Read the book and make up thy own mind.
Rating: 
Summary: More lies from the Left
Review: More BS from a true red commie. One fails to mention the 1950 conference in Moscow with Stalin, Mao, and Uncle Ho where they plotted the war. This imbessile's lies are completely refuted by Vietnam: The Necessary War. This book is selective history. Not all factors that lead into and event are represented, only hogwash from a nostalgic hippie. He is the part of the same group of people that distorted the infamous napalm burned girl picture. That girl was hit by napalm from an aircraft piloted by a South Vietnamese pilot in where also a few ARVN soldiers were killed. But for some reason nuts like this guy called it American barbarism. His ilk also left out the caption the South Vietnamese photgrapher wrote on the bottom of the picture."This never would have happened if the Communists stayed in the North."
Rating:
Summary: Alarming, frightening, but truly revealing
Review: This book provides a gripping examination of how the Right has redefined "Vietnam" (a war, not a country). Franklin reviews the horrors inflicted by the United States on the people of Vietnam, and shows how our culture has made us the victims. He shows how the famous photo of the Saigon Chief of Police executing an enemy prisoner has been reversed in movies showing Americans POWs in cages with the gun to their heads. He reminds those who would blame the anti-war movement for our failure, that every President from Truman to Nixon ran as a peace candidate, knowing the American public would never support the war. He discusses the first American anti-Vietnam-war protests, in 1945. Franklin himself was fired from a tenured position at Stanford for his stand against the University's involvement in making napalm, a truly horrific weapon which has only been used against people of color. He reveals that Nixon's need to prolong the war and declare victory by focusing on the Americans unaccounted for (extremely few though they were) led to the creation of the post-war POW/MIA myth. This myth, never substantiated, has justified our refusal to pay Vietnam the reparations we promised in the Paris Peace Treaty and our longstanding lack of diplimatic relations with the country. This book explains the war and its cultural fallout better than anything I've read. Reading this book made me truly alarmed for the lack of democracy in the United States.
Rating:
Summary: Alarming, frightening, but truly revealing
Review: This book provides a gripping examination of how the Right has redefined "Vietnam" (a war, not a country). Franklin reviews the horrors inflicted by the United States on the people of Vietnam, and shows how our culture has made us the victims. He shows how the famous photo of the Saigon Chief of Police executing an enemy prisoner has been reversed in movies showing Americans POWs in cages with the gun to their heads. He reminds those who would blame the anti-war movement for our failure, that every President from Truman to Nixon ran as a peace candidate, knowing the American public would never support the war. He discusses the first American anti-Vietnam-war protests, in 1945. Franklin himself was fired from a tenured position at Stanford for his stand against the University's involvement in making napalm, a truly horrific weapon which has only been used against people of color. He reveals that Nixon's need to prolong the war and declare victory by focusing on the Americans unaccounted for (extremely few though they were) led to the creation of the post-war POW/MIA myth. This myth, never substantiated, has justified our refusal to pay Vietnam the reparations we promised in the Paris Peace Treaty and our longstanding lack of diplimatic relations with the country. This book explains the war and its cultural fallout better than anything I've read. Reading this book made me truly alarmed for the lack of democracy in the United States.
Rating:
Summary: Experience is your best teacher, unfortunately!
Review: To whom it may concern: As a pacifist and one who was, actually, a participant in the evil and avoidable Vietnam "undeclared" war, a FACT that Mr. Franklin didn't bring out, and the ONLY war that this country ever lost (another FACT that wasn't brought out, either), I still live with the horrors and traumas of that miserable war, even though it has been over 35 years since I was part of the initial invading forces in the spring of '65. Since I had the great misfortune of being drafted, I had really no choice as to whether to serve or not. When the "peace" president, LBJ, specified in his campairgn rhetoric, that as long as he was president, there would be peace for ALL Americans and that he would NOT send American boys to do the fighting that Asian boys ought to be doing themselves, I felt very secure and I was married on these false promises while stuck in the hated army, and as a slave! By being drafted, it violated the 13th Amendment to the Constitution of the U.S. which guarantees freedom from involuntary servitude! So much for those empty words. I returned "home" as a total stranger with an entirely different outlook on life. My "thanks" to the empty words and promises of two "peace" presidents, LBJ and Nixon, and those other leaders, going back to 1945, for making the writing of this superb book possible. I highly recommend it for anyone's library.
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