Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

"Fire in the Lake" could have been written by Albert Camus or Hannah Arendt, but instead it was written by a 31-year old journalist Frances Fitzgerald, who in writing the book channeled all her society's fears and anger into passion and urgency to write this powerfully disturbing account of a young empire lost and corrupted.

The author analyzes the war through the viewpoints of its participants, and presents a sobering and poignant account of each player. There are the disciplined and organized North Vietnamese, who in knowing the righteousness of their cause have absolute faith in their victory. There are the hapless and hopeless South Vietnamese - the government, the military, the Buddhists, the Catholics, the sects, and political opportunists -- who at first struggle against each other, and then struggle against the Americans before finally resigning themselves to the destruction of their society, culture, and history. But Ms. Fitzgerald focuses her most critical eye on the American empire - the government at home who will sacrifice 45,000 American soldiers to "save face," the military who internalize "Heart of Darkness" and decide that to save the Vietnamese they must first kill every one of them, and the diplomats who in trying to democratize Vietnam end up turning it into a corrupt tyranny that disgusts even the corrupt tyrants who ran it. In the end, Ms. Fitzgerald's verdict is stunning in its absoluteness and in its objectivity: America corrupted and destroyed Vietnam, and America corrupted and destroyed itself.

"Fire in the Lake" is above all prescient. The Pentagon Papers had not yet been released, and Frances Fitzgerald had already expressed to the American public why the war was being fought: not for liberty or to stop Communism or to save the Vietnamese, but simply because powerful men in omnipotent positions had petty egos. Even before the American withdrawal and even as the Tet offensive devastated and depleted the ranks of the Viet Cong, she could already declare that the war was over, and the North Vietnamese were triumphant. Even before there was a full accounting of the war, she could already indict the American military and government for genocide against the people they were ostensibly trying to save. During the book Ms. Fitzgerald would continuously allude to "The Tempest," and she could have just as easily allude to "King Lear": how one man's pride blinded him into unleashing a tragedy where good must die at the hands of evil.

It will be difficult for another work as powerful and passionate as "Fire in the Lake" to appear in the American landscape. Today, there is the War on Terror, and Jane Mayer in "The Dark Side" could indict the Bush administration for crimes greater than the Nixon administration in Vietnam - but it's clear from her nuanced and well-crafted arguments that they're just nuanced and well-crafted arguments. American society is not involved in the War on Terror the way it was involved during the Vietnam War. At that time, the young could sincerely and powerfully feel their future disappearing into a black void, and it was only natural and necessary for one of their own to channel this urgent and passionate fear and hopelessness into "Fire in the Lake." That no one can do that today - despite what's happen at Guantanamo Bay, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan - does not speak well for the fate of America and of humanity.

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.

The condition of the book was as advertised and it arrived in the time frame as expected.