Customer Reviews

Winners and Losers: Battles, Retreats, Gains, Losses, and Ruins from the Vietnam War

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Gloria Emerson's early loose calculation of the closing costs of Vietnam remains extraordinarily valuable. When our government leaps before it understands/examines, then insists upon continuing long after many bright people have recognized a sequence of policy errors, this is what can happen. Episodic/impressionistic, widest possible scope, home & away. Strikingly even-handed, though Emerson developed a very strong set of opinions. Wonderful book. Terrifying war/time.

While this book is not a military log of each and every battle on the Vietnam front, it is a very valuable book. It offers an honest, heart-felt, even heart-wrenching view of the EFFECT of the war on American, Soliders, and the Vietnamese

The system of rating books by the number of stars which a reader is willing to bestow is perfect for this book. In a section called "Odd Things, But Not Forgotten," the reader is thoroughly informed of how a general was awarded a silver star, how the New York Times sent a reporter named Gloria Emerson to the Awards and Decorations Section to see why the men had made up the perfect dream when they didn't have the kind of documentation normally associated with acts of valor, and how newspaper readers responded to the story. The high point for me was a poem by a draftee, which ended with the perfect attitude for a military mind. "Let me go into battle, / a hero I shall be. / I'm forty-four, I'm still alive, / and the army's mind is me." It made me glad that I served out in the bush, and not as a clerk in some headquarters.

I love this book. And I love Gloria Emerson for having written it. As a time capsule, it is a gem.

In the chapter "Odd Things Not Yet Forgotten", Emerson wrote:

"The younger Americans found comfort in mocking the war, as if they were not to be held to account for something so clumsy and going so wrong. It was the Vietnamese who wrote the wild and sad laments, the poem-songs not meant to make you laugh. The finest of them came from a young Vietnamese from Hue - the haunting and beautiful city in the south - name Trinh Cong Son.......

Tapes of his songs were played in the little coffee shops of Saigon and in the nightclubs where the young Vietnamese officers went in bunches if they were able to afford one or two soft drinks apiece. All wanted to hear his earlier songs about the war. On a Saturday night in October 1970, Luong and I, with three American men, went to the Queen Bee nightclub to hear a girl named Khanh Ly - a famous name in that city - sing his songs. No one sang them as she did, knowing so well what he meant them to say.....

[Song]
...I had a lover who died at Ashau,
I had a lover whose twisted body lies in a valley,
Who died under a bridge, naked and voiceless.
I had a lover who died at the battle of Ba Gia,
I had a lover who died just last night, a sudden death,
With nothing to say, feeling no hatred,
Lying dead as in a dream.

...Saigon was never a gay city during the war: it was malignant, cruel, crowded, costly and furtive, but never gay. That night in the Queen Bee, when a twenty-three-year-old woman sang in Vietnamese and finished the song of the mad woman, no one clapped. It was not a song to applaud, not that night in that year when all of us feared in the shadow side of our minds the war would go on forever, be such a long and greedy war there would be no one left to smile if it ever came to an end."

IF A READER IS LOOKING FOR A SERIOUS COMPILATION OF THE BATTLES, ORDERS OF BATTLE, MAPS, DESCRIPTIONS, CASUALTIES, WINNERS, LOOSERS ETC., THE READER WILL BE DISAPPOINTED. IF ONE WANTS TO REVISIT THE ANTI WAR EMOTIONS OF THE TIMES, HE MAY FIND THE BOOK INTERESTING.