Monday, September 03, 2007

A healthy democracy

Like Chap sez; one hell of a read; Rereading Vietnam by Robert Kaplan. If for no other reason, read it for the bibliography. Just a taste.
"Protests against the war spawned ideologies ... everything about Vietnam had to be rejected. The result was a shunning of this excellent book. Fashionable journals declined to review it," writes former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger in the preface to a reissue of Bing West's The Village (1972). While the battle in Mark Bowden's Black Hawk Down (1999) lasted a day, and the one in Harold Moore's and Joe Galloway's We Were Soldiers Once...and Young (1992) lasted three days, The Village is about a Marine squad that fought in the same place for 495 days. Half of them died, seven out of 15.

No comments: