Live from Saigon.

Patriots

The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides

Christian G. Appy

Viking, $29.95, 491 pp.

Christian G. Appy clearly has a talent for finding interesting people and getting them talking. For this comprehensive oral history of the Vietnam War he collected the recollections of some 135 people in the United States and Vietnam who were swept up in the whirlwind of the war. The charm of this book is that Appy did not limit his interviewing to obligatory icons like Generals Vo Nguyen Giap and William Westmoreland, or the victims of My Lai and Kent State, or famed POWs like John McCain. He went further. He had the genius to ferret out the offbeat and seemingly marginal participants whose recollections help us understand what a vast and amazingly varied experience the war was. So we hear the story of Bobbie Keith, the weathergirl for Armed Forces Television in Saigon, who became the pin-up darling of a generation of GIs. When weather data were missing for some city in Vietnam, Keith, in the best tradition of American body counts, simply made the numbers up. Appy talked with the singer James Brown who demanded a .45 and fatigues for his concert tour of Vietnam so that he could feel safe and look like a GI. Doung Thanh Phong, a combat photographer for the North Vietnamese Army, spent years in the tunnels of Cu Chi, the vast underground command and supply depots the Communists dug outside of Saigon. He tells Apply of his journey into Saigon on April 30, 1975 as the government in the South collapsed. The road was littered with discarded military boots and clothes.

Appy's book is comprehensive, as promised in the subtitle. We do get the voices of true believers from all sides. There are Westmoreland and Alexander Haig maintaining still that the war was winnable if only the American politicians had been courageous enough to untie the hands of the military. As Haig puts it, in war you need to have guts enough to break a bit of china. Maybe even use nukes. And there is Sergei Khrushchev, Nikita's son, explaining how the Vietnamese were not to be controlled. Says he: "The winner could not be the Soviet Union or China or the United States, it would be the Vietnamese."

Still, for all Appy's efforts at being inclusive, the book's viewpoint unquestionably comes directly from the milieu of the American antiwar movement of the 1960s and 1970s. This gives the book a sharp and interesting edge, but it also makes for an unbalanced picture. It becomes an oral history of the protest movement. Leaving the obligatory true believers aside, many--if not most--of the interviewees conclude with a denunciation of the war as ill-advised, immoral, and mad.

At times the book is a bit like listening to sinners at a revival meeting telling of their evil deeds before they rejoice in conversion. So Appy has pilots describe--and then regret--their bombing missions. GIs talk about free-fire zones with sorrow. Vu Thi Vinh tells of working on the Ho Chi Minh Trail and enduring American bombing. Included are many passages describing American violence and atrocities, along with, it must be admitted, some first-rate descriptions of North Vietnamese torture of American POWs and the grinding miseries South Vietnamese suffered in re-education camps after the war.

As a record of those who opposed the war, the book is an excellent oral history. For those of us who lived through those times, it is poignantly evocative. Joe McDonald of the rock group Country Joe and the Fish recounts how he came to write "Fixin'-to-Die." The major movers of the protest movement give their testimony: Jonathan Schell, Daniel Ellsberg, and Anne Morrison Welsh, the wife of Norman Morrison, who immolated himself outside the Pentagon in 1965.

It is disorienting to read a book about the Vietnam War while newspapers and TV are overflowing with stories about yet another American war in a faraway land. Things keep getting scrambled. True, Baghdad and Saigon have very little in common. No one would mistake the Iraqi desert for the Vietnamese jungles. Even the pace of the two wars was strikingly different. The hot battle phase of the Iraq war turned out to be a three- or four-week wonder, while Americans in Vietnam fought and died in battles spanning more than ten years.

Yet for all the differences between the two conflicts, it's hard not to have deja vu moments in reading some of the recollections. Frank Maguire, for example, was an officer who served three tours in Vietnam and was something of a true believer then, although he's now become disillusioned. He liked Vietnam, which is why he volunteered for extra tours. He honestly thought that Americans tried to improve the lot of the Vietnamese. But in the end, he says, the United States failed miserably to understand them. "I think it's a national trait that we always feel we know better for everybody," remarks Maguire. "It was an attitude of misguided benevolence--that we know what's good for them and they don't really know what's happening." Will we get an echo of this sentiment in the future when the oral history of the Iraqi enterprise is recorded? The Vietnam era started with a period of boundless American optimism and self-confidence. America would set the world right. We can hear this leitmotif from Bush administration operatives now.

The voices Appy recorded in his interviews recount the horrors and disasters of war. Nurses and doctors describe the agony of triage at field hospitals. Soldiers tell of the shock of losing legs and hands--and beloved comrades. And parents lament the loss of children. In another brilliant example of Appy finding just the right people, Helen Tennant Hegelheimer, a flight attendant on World Airways which ferried troops to Vietnam, tells of the fresh, but worried, faces of the boys on the way into Saigon's Tan Son Nhut airport--and the wearied faces of those that leave. This is all as familiar as yesterday's dispatch from an embedded correspondent in Iraq or the reporting coming out of the hospital wards of Bashra or Baghdad. These days the American military may not use napalm and may follow rules of engagement designed--in theory--to inflict fewer casualities on civilians, yet Patriots painfully reminds us that slaughter in war is still depressingly much the same.

Barry Hillenbrand, a long-time foreign correspondent for Time magazine, was based in Saigon from 1972 to 1974, and reported on the Iraq-Iran war from Baghdad in the 1980s. He now writes from Washington, D.C.