Vietnam: A History by Stanley Karnow
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
There a few things using the Dewey Decimal System that, IMHO, positively affected my thinking. One is where to file books on the Vietnam War, or any war. It's not in the United States section, it is in the Vietnam section since a war is something that happens to a country, it is not perpetrated by a country. It doesn't matter if one participant is a superpower. A war happens at a place, to a people. This long view that ends with the fall of Saigon starts way back with Vietnam on the fringes of Napoleon III's empire and on through post-WW II France handing over a struggle to a United States espousing its domino theory. Well, we left Hitler and Mussolini unmolested and look what happened? At least, that's how the argument went but over all those decades into centuries, really, an internally inconsistent Vietnam struggled to shake off foreign power. Well, at least the part struggled that was ideological, not so much the corrupt and craven leadership of Southern Vietnam...
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