When this book first came out 1n 1995 I recall having a phone call with a retired Marine friend, it seems in 1995 this book was plastered all over television, radio, school campuses – literally everywhere. It was a book I told my friend during the call that I would “not” read – now I believed I had to after having read “Last Stand at Khe Sanh” by Gregg Jones. After reading it, I feel none-the-better that I have. This book is book #2 of my personal trilogy that I decided to undertake. There were parts in this book that made me question his truthfulness, that in other words McNamara was not coming to full disclosure with. There were even less parts that I could accept his accounting with; mostly, I was disappointed that he did not outright dedicate this book to memory of lost service men and women who died fighting his war, that there was no apology within the overall framework to the parents and loved ones of these service members and no reference what so ever to the mental anguish the combat survivors had to endure years afterwards. The repetitive internalized questions he presents to the reader are useless to which he provides no answer (and make no mistake, this arrogance is directly tied to no apology); and, therefore makes no sense. The obvious questions he fully ignores. To add insult to injury, when he left the Defense Department on 29 February 1968 the battle of Khe Sanh was more than a month old, the Tet Offensive was nearly 30 days old, and by this point there had been more than 30,000 KIA or MIA in the Republic of Vietnam – he acknowledges only Khe Sanh and Tet once on page 314 as an almost *asterisk* to his departure – one word “disgusting” and totally unacceptable. (For the record he does the same thing earlier on with the Battle of Ia Drang of October/November 1965 - a hidden battle buried in a sentence another point I found repulsive.) Thousands of families bore the brunt of the losses incurred based on the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution of August 1964.
I came away from this book with a complete emptiness and disappointed he didn’t have the dignity to do what was right within this work. Overall, I speculate that Mr. McNamara (with this book) was able to put his mind at ease before he passed away, because he certainly didn’t provide any written sorrow for all that was lost within the "Betrayed Generation" of "McNamara's War." The “whiz kids” should have stayed at Ford Motor Company; the weren't the "Best and Brightest" - the "Best" died on the battlefields of Vietnam, the "Brightest" tried to stop this idiocy or attempted to sway a micromanaged administration toward an outright win over the Communist North.
I bought this book used for few dollars online – I intend to burn every page with some Vietnam Veterans I know that were all injured, maimed, or made otherwise injured in some form mentally as a result of this war. I give two stars to this book only because there were parts reflected of his family that were “truthful” – full disclosure was never his forte and this is obvious.
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