Customer Reviews

The Elephant and the Tiger: The Full Story of the Vietnam War

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The Elephant And The Tiger: The Full Story Of The Vietnam War by Wilber Morrison is a stark, comprehensive, straightforward evaluation of the Vietnam War, its military battles and its aftermath. Meticulous and sparing no details, it covers the beginnings of the war with a brief overview of ancient Vietnamese history to the treatment America's Vietnam veterans received upon their return home. The Elephant And The Tiger is a very highly recommended reference about a grave conflict that forever changed nations and a welcome addition to the growing library of American military history in general, and American involvement in the Vietnam conflict in particular.

Altough the book does not use a complex language, you must bear in mind, when going for it, that it's really a HUGE book. It's about 638 pages with SMALL type lyrics, believe me!!

Of course Morrison does his costumary excellent job. If you have only one shot at figuring out what Vietnam was all about, this is the book to get. But remember: be patient while reading it! I can take a long time...

Oh boy, this is heavy reading. The book deals about everything in the Vitnam War. The funny thing is that Morrison is consiedered to be a great military AVIATION writer, but this book delaing with a much more complex subject is very entertaining, objective and complete.

Great read, albeit a hard one.

This ahrd-reading book is really THE FULL STORY OF THE VIETNAM WAR. IT's detailed and very well researched. The author had access to a lot pf previously unseen documents, due to the Freedom Of Information Act.

But a detail amazed terrifically. In page 114, Morrison makes the following statement, about JFK murder:

"Later that day, during a motorcade through the streets of Dallas, President Kennedy was assassinated by a professed communist and former United States Marine - Lee Harvey Oswald"

I almost choked with desbilief. Does Morrison, such an accomplished and veteran writer, really believes in that? Does he really believe in the Warren COmission report that Oswald acted alone??!! I could not believe this. At least he could have written "...was SUPPOSEDLY assassinated by..."

This book was published before Robert S. McNamara started churning out books about Nam. There had been a lot of books about Nam up to that point, and what struck me was how much had been left out of all of them. Since this book called itself the complete story, and listed the author's home town and zip code, I wrote to the author, asking if he could send me any funny Nam bits for MY VIETNAM WAR JOKE BOOK. It was difficult for me to believe that Wilbur Morrison was smart enough to know how much of his book I hadn't read and still write to tell me that Nam had no humor, the American forces in Vietnam entirely lacked anything to joke about, and I should do more reading. Thinking `What does he know?' I then wrote to Robert S. McNamara, promising to give him full credit for any funny Nam bits he could send me, though MY VIETNAM WAR JOKE BOOK wasn't really that kind of joke book, it was more about things that a 19-year-old grunt might say that would never find its way between the covers of any book more historical than DISPATCHES by Michael Herr. I even remembered a joke that I hadn't heard in Nam: What do you call a guy with no arms and no legs when he's swimming? Bob, of course, though you might not call him Bob to his face if he were the Secretary of Defense of the United States of America. Did Bob even know what Nixon was saying when the White House Transcripts book said, "That was national security, because it had to do with the (expletive deleted) Vietnam war" ? (President to John Dean, March, 1973, when a cancer on the presidency was all the rage).

There is a point in THE ELEPHANT AND THE TIGER when I definitely thought that something was left out, possibly because those who supplied the official information thought it was necessary to sanitize it. In November, 1946, something happened in Haiphong which does not get mentioned, but by December, Morrison reports that the Viet Minh were retaliating for something by engaging in open warfare against French troops. If this book was really complete, every reader would be informed what the Vietnamese thought they were retaliating against, and would not be surprised, not even as surprised as some Americans were by the ceasefire Tet offensive in 1968, which was designed to show that if anyone in Nam didn't know what was going to happen, it was sure to be the Americans. That might not be funny in America, but by 1968, I'll bet the French were able to laugh, and they might still be laughing.