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God of war betrayal booklet11/8/2022 Kovic, who had enlisted in the Marines in 1964 and was a self-styled patriot and a strong supporter of the war, served two tours in Vietnam before suffering a catastrophic injury in 1968, which resulted in paralysis from the chest down. Ron Kovic was among the first veterans to write a major memoir of the war, Born on the Fourth of July, published in 1976. Those who had done the fighting, suffering, and dying, and those who had been left behind, were emerging as a crucial part of the story of the war itself. In books by Tim O’Brien, Larry Heinemann, Michael Herr, and Ron Kovic among others, war writing progressed beyond frontline journalistic accounts to give voice to the soldiers themselves. As Philip Caputo has written, “By the mid-1970s, the public had heard enough about Vietnam from journalists, commentators, and analysts of every kind.Vietnam was considered a legitimate subject for journalism, but as a subject for literature it was almost as taboo as explicit sex had been to the Victorians.”įitzGerald was the first to argue that the Americans had limited real knowledge of the country they were invading and a generally poor conception of the Vietnamese people. Important though these books were, they did little to help veterans and their families to cope with the personal consequences of the war. FitzGerald, Halberstam, and a number of other writers helped to generate a new kind of interest in a subject so many wanted to leave behind. Both books were widely praised, paving the way for a more historically nuanced understanding of the political moment, the key players, and the reasons behind the many mistakes that came to define the war. Halberstam, by contrast, set out to understand American leadership, and particularly how the “best and the brightest” could have been so wrong in Vietnam. In providing a deep historical and cultural reading of Vietnam, FitzGerald was the first to argue that the Americans had limited real knowledge of the country they were invading and a generally poor conception of the Vietnamese people-who saw the conflict not as a means of liberating them from the yoke of communism, but rather as another effort at colonial subjugation. FitzGerald, who received the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Bancroft Prize for her book, wrote that it was intended to be a “first draft of history.” Two of the most successful of these works, both published in 1972, were Fire in the Lake by Frances FitzGerald and The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam. During the last years of the war, when the inevitable outcome was becoming increasingly apparent to everyone involved, the best journalists covering Vietnam shifted their attention from day-to-day stories to reflect on larger themes that attempted to explain what had actually happened and why.
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