tonight i'd like to start by giving you a brief sense of my ambition in writing this book what its some of what its main arguments are and then read a few passages to give you some sense of the style in the content the goal i said i set out to achieve is really easy to describe not so easy to carry out it really was simply to try to understand the impact of the vietnam war on our national identity that is how we think of ourselves as a nation and and a people and how that how vietnam entered american consciousness in the one nine hundred fifty s and how it shaped identity from really the dawn of the cold war all the way to the present and at the heart of my argument is the idea that i  think no other event in our history so profoundly shattered the idea of american exceptionalism this broad faith in the idea of national superiority the idea that we are forever and always a force for good in the world a defender of freedom and democracy despite invincible and indispensable nation this was a concept of course that goes way back to the roots of our history but achieved its heyday i believe in the fifteen to twenty years after world war two we came out of that war better off than any other country in the world by far the economy took off during the war pulling us out of the great depression we did lose nearly half a million people of course but compared to other nations that left us relatively unscarred and our factories immediately converted from the production of tanks and airplanes to cars and refrigerators and led to a period of economic boom that really lasted until the one nine hundred seventy s so you can't really understand how profoundly the  affected americans without really understanding that broad faith in america as the greatest nation on earth because the sixty's really was a profound identity crisis kind of american reckoning and it takes many forms and some of which i allude to here but just to give you a quick sense of it a there was a poll in one nine hundred seventy one that found that not only did seventy one percent of americans conclude that the war had been a mistake a remarkable fifty eight percent of full majority concluded that the american war had been immoral so you know i think that part of my effort here is to is to recover history of dissent and questioning that is remarkably lost to us is remarkable when you think of to mazing fact apparently some thirty thousand books have now been written about one or another aspect of the the vietnam war so one of the things one of the moments of self doubt at the beginning this project was you know how can i you know really contribute anything new to this is what you know exhausted subject but sometimes you know particularly academic historians are are often likely to pick very smalls small specialties small subjects and so what i quickly discovered is there actually were not books had that had taken on this seemingly obvious question of how the war had affected us from beginning to the present and then so you have this movement from brod consensus and faith in america to fundamental questioning and resistance and then going into the decades after the end of the vietnam war in one thousand nine hundred seventy five there isn't an odd thing happens we really tried to cobble back together again this faith in america american exceptionalism and to a large extent it was pretty effective i mean when you think about it it seems impossible to run for higher office in this and this country without paying homage to that  creed i remember pretty vividly when obama ran for the first time in zero eight some journalist asked him whether or not he believed in american exceptionalism and he said oh yeah but you know if i were british or dutch i would probably believe that that was the greatest country to clearly that was not going to wash that he was really really beaten up over that response and in subsequent years he's expressed a more kind of equivocal faith in american american exceptionalism but i  do argue in this book that it's takes a different form it's much more fragile it's much more brittle it's much more defensive and it's really it's underwritten by a kind of bizarre  notion of american victimhood that we have in the years beginning with vietnam big and after become the victims of these in explicit explicable forces from countries or sub national america americans have the capacity to be pretty self critical about specific things in our nation if you ask your neighbors what do you think of american schools i mean you're going to have your full you know it is terrible what you think then when you ask them what's the greatest country on earth still a sizable majority of americans and here to it and some of that might be you know explained simply by the desire that we live up to our highest ideals but i honestly think we need to get rid of it as a concept i don't think first of all it it holds up to the historical record record i don't think historical record really bears it out and second of all i think it does more to make enemies rather than friends who wants to be constantly told you know that we're the greatest and you're not and the the the  international military establishment that it helps to foster which continues to include more than eight hundred for foreign bases american military bases on foreign soil i think is simply unsustainable for economic reasons alone so that's that's the sort of overarching ambition and argument of the book and i want to give you some of the content because i really care a lot about the writing and i'm very committed to trying to reach an audience beyond my academic colleagues and i began when the first chapter with a figure who is now long forgotten his name was tom dooley dr tom dooley dr thomas dooley most americans might have heard the song hang down your head tom dooley an old kingston trio song  which had nothing to do with the tom dooley i'm writing about it's about a nine hundred centuries ballad but you know if i guess if you're over fifty five particularly if you were raised a catholic you may you may remember him but he died in one thousand nine hundred sixty one that's part of why he's now long forgotten that died of cancer at age thirty four just before you know in the first year just before kennedy actually took office and that's an interesting connection because kennedy often invoked him as a model for the peace corps he was considered to be the epitome of kind of american missionary even in those old magazine polls and they probably still do this you know where they ask you what are the top ten most revered people in the world tom dooley often ranked third in the fifty's behind the pope and white eisenhower so he was a really well known figure and he became famous because he was a navy doctor had who participated in something called operation passage to freedom which helped move more than eight hundred thousand northern vietnamese into south vietnam between the one nine hundred fifty four and fifty five and he wrote a book about it called deliver us from evil and i think that book really gives us even though now it's long it's a forgotten bestseller it gives you a very vivid sense of one nine hundred fifty s culture and the sense of america as the good guys who were going out and the world to save and rescue suffering people and it was a kind of view that by the way had very broad bipartisan support it was not just you know just one party both you know democrats and republicans liberals and conservatives highly invested in this view so this is the beginning of chapter one the first popular american book about vietnam was a love story written by a young navy doctor named tom dooley it showed how big hearted americans could save a small infant nation with christian compassion lieutenant message carried the weight of personal experience he participated in operation passage to freedom the navy mission that helped transport more than eight hundred thousand northern vietnamese to the south between august one thousand nine hundred sixty four and main one nine hundred fifty five dually gave medical care to the quote hordes of refugees from terror ridden north vietnam and vividly described their exodus to free vietnam in the south despite widespread illness and frailty many refugees drew strength and solace from their catholic faith long before most americans could find vietnam on a map duly convinced millions that the us role there was nothing less than a holy mission to rescue poor and tortured christians from godless communism now it turned out to be a brilliant piece of propaganda and many of the stories that he told were either utterly misleading  even implying that the and i was a catholic country when of course only about five at most ten percent had converted under french colonial rule mostly a buddhist country but more significantly he told a slew of atrocities stories about communist torturing catholic school children and priests literally he claimed jamming chopsticks into the ears of young catholic children as they were learning the lord's prayer in their catechisms and none of this could be substantiated it's interesting even the u s government you know was thought man it's really happened and they you know they investigated could find no evidence for it course this was such good propaganda they didn't bother to tell the american people that you know these stories didn't weren't weren't born out but there were all kinds of other omissions from the book deliver us from evil that came to light but only slowly and that's worth remembering the anti war resistance of that era really did take years and years and years to develop and and really only starts to peak in the late sixty's years after all very very important early history is being formed for example this idea that dooley's that we were helping stablish a democratic country in the south what americans didn't realize is that well yes a number of those catholics would have moved of their own free will but the cia was really had an operation in the north encouraging northerners to move south particularly catholics because they wanted a constituency most of the catholics lived in the north and they wanted a catholic constituency for the man they wanted to put in place as a permanent president of south vietnam a man  so they circulated propaganda suggesting such things as the fact that the united states was thinking about nuclear bombing the north vietnam get out while the getting is good even saying that the virgin mary herself is moving it's true i'm not making this up and this idea of course that we were supporting of a fledgling democracy in the face of communist aggression eventually americans began a growing number of americans anyway thanks to teach ns on campuses and small little newsletters before the internet you had to have these things like i have stone weekly and  ramparts and viet report and now all these obscure publications that you have to go to archives to find but one of the things that americans are slowly learning is that we in fact had not supported democracy in south vietnam in fact there had been after the vietnamese successfully defeated the french colonial rule in one thousand nine hundred fifty four an international conference in switzerland and the geneva accords that were formulated coming out of that conference stipulated that vietnam would be temporarily divided between north and south but just temporarily was never intended to be a permanent political and geographic division between north and south and that in two years time there would be an internationally sanctioned election and to reunite vietnam under one government while those elections were never held why because the united states and its allies note in z m decided not to hold those elections they blocked them and they did so because every intelligence report they had and eisenhower by the way admits this fully in his memoir every of every intelligence report indicated that the men would almost certainly win an overwhelming victory perhaps eighty percent of the vote in north and south in vietnam and therefore the communists would come to power democratically that was an intolerable result from for from  war washington so the goal became to build a herman it noncommunist permanent country called south vietnam that would be noncommunist that what that was the clear goal it was here to for twenty one years and of course it failed primarily it failed because the government won that first z m but then a whole string of governments after that never gained the broad political support of their own people it was never really a question of you know are not trying hard enough militarily that was really irrelevant to the military side of the failure to have the political support necessary to achieve that objective and the other thing is in addition to blocking elections it's clear that the regime set up by noti was hardly a democracy almost immediately after taking power he was going around the countryside executing people who had been part of the movement to overthrow the french people who were in fact widely regarded as patriotic heroes in the south as well as the north they actually literally had these roving tribunals going around the countryside in the south in the late fifty's having these summary trials in executions all within a day they had made no bones about it they published pictures of it in the paper just as as a kind of terror tactic this what's happened if you if you were considered to be a threat to the state how did any guesses as to how they executed these people and you think of the french tradition of good teams actually had  good team going around the countryside executing so that was the that again part of the awakening of the sixty's was to recognize that we are supporting these regimes and not just in vietnam but many many places around the globe that are repressive in fact of democracy but it takes time and you know well through the early sixty's there is a kind of idealistic under pending of it i have a lot i have a sizable section on the image of the green berets which i don't have time to read from but the green berets were really iconic figures in the early sixty's sixty's magazines almost competed to see who could lavish the most praise on these american heroes they were sort of represented as kind of peace peace corps armed kind of an armed peace corps that was going to go out and defeat the reds at their own game you know  guerrillas gradually of course though america became aware that the political story about democracy had many questions about it after our very guy we had supported for eight years was overthrown in a military junta we learned eventually that america had given the green light to the overthrow of the m and even more significantly we're gaining a greater sense of the brutal and often very indiscriminate way in which we conducted that war and sometimes that evidence appears in sort of likely sources so i want to read one passage the beginning of a chapter two called aggression ram really sort of aggression was such a key term in this period and usually of course it was paired with the word communist communist aggression for example i did a search on the new york times that a base which is you know nice really interesting you can you can search that going all the way back to its founding in the hundred fifty s you know key terms so i just typed in the term communist aggression and there are only about eight mentions of that term up until one thousand for the beginning the cold war really in other every other day and you know the phrase american aggression appears you know a hand relative handful of times and it's always you know from a communist source so immediately disparaged as you know complete complete propaganda so this is the power of the chapter aggression begins movie star adri hepburn is smiling and radiant dressed entirely  white white top white slacks white shoes a white jacket is draped over one shoulder and she is looking at us from the cover of ladies home journal january one thousand nine hundred sixty seven a banner across the top asks would you believe she's thirty seven the inside story says hepburn is not too old to change her once pure and inviolate image all convention is rigid a fine she declares in an upcoming film two for the road she will wear miniskirts vinyl shorts and also are you ready has a love scene with albert finney in which she wears nothing even away from the s journal that featured the hepburn story ran a disturbing article by martha gellhorn a searing account of vietnamese refugees war orphans and wounded children it may have been the most damning expos of the civilian suffering caused by the american war in vietnam yet to appear in a mass circulation us magazine she was fifty eight years old at the time she went to vietnam and she really had to struggle to get  there gellhorn went to one publisher after another pleading in vain to be sent to vietnam it is the only work i want to do she wrote a friend but nobody wants it i am plainly too old whether it was her age her gender her public criticism of the war or all three no american publisher would hire her finally the manchester guardian and britain agreed to publish her articles if she would pay for the trip to vietnam she went it did not matter to these resistant publishers that martha gellhorn was one of the most distinguished war correspondents of the twentieth century and had been covering wars beginning with the spanish civil war of the one nine hundred thirty s she covered d day three days in when  was still very chaotic scene on the beach she was that doco and a guy liberated she can she covered a lot of wars she did go over and her articles were published only in a smattering of places but amazingly she persuaded ladies home journal to publish one of i think her most troubling and political politically tough criticisms of the war and she somehow managed to convince them that her approach was merely humanitarian not not political that she was just going to focus on the children and so let me give you just a sense of it here's how this amazing article begins we love our children it begins we are famous for loving our children and many foreigners believe that we love them unwisely and too well in fact we might be too busy loving our own children to think of children ten thousand miles away or to understand that the parents there who did not who do not look or live like us love their children just as deeply but with anguish now and heartbreak and fear and she goes  travels around to a lot of civilian hospitals and she documents the fact that many many refugees from the countryside are being forced from their ancestral lands by explicit american policy we engaged in the for relocation of at least this is a very conservative estimate at least five million south vietnamese out of a population of seventeen million and the short answer for why is that we couldn't control those villagers out in the countryside and they were all too willing many of them to offer support intelligence food hiding and recruits to the local and the local communist led insurgency that came to be known as the viet cong so part of the plan was to put them on trucks helicopters move them into refugee camps or just sort of do so much bombing that they would have to be forced on their own to move into the cities and this was in a way actually thought of as a positive thing a positive metric of success how many refugees were generated was thought to be a good thing in command chronologies and by social scientists at harvard like samuel huntington who thought that this would actually lead to proven of modernisation that people would come from the countryside and learn urban life in urban values and consumer culture and and find new opportunities i mention this refugee thing because it's an interesting contrast isn't it to this idea of dooley's that were in vietnam saving all these poor suffering refugees from from communism which indeed was a huge migration eight hundred thousand but it's dorf by the the more than five million refugees that we were creating so she's documenting some of that and then there is she's also she's also writing about the american use of one of the most indiscriminate weapons of the war along with cluster bombs napalm the  gasoline howley highly inflammable that was first invented during world war two to fire bomb some european cities like dresden but sixty six cities in japan and burning out these cities constructed largely of wood and paper by the time of the one nine hundred sixty s the napalm had thanks to companies like dow chemical have been vastly improved to burn much hotter and deeper and longer the gel that sort of snotty like joel that it throws out with the huge fireballs if it lands on your skin cannot be wiped away it burns ten times hotter than boiling water it's just a devastating weapon and it was dropped on south feet and knees primarily in south vietnamese villages come back to that but four hundred thousand tons of it many more many more times than were dropped on japan in a hospital she offers this description before i went to vietnam i had heard and read that napalm melts the flesh and i thought that nonsense because i can put a roast in the oven in the fat will melt but the meat stays there when i went and saw these children burned by napalm and it is absolutely true the chemical reaction of this napalm does melt the flesh in the flesh runs right down their faces onto their chest and it sits there and it grows there these children can't turn their heads they were so thick with flesh and when gang green sets and they cut off their hands or fingers or their feet the only thing they cannot cut off is their head so this appears in ladies home journal early one thousand nine hundred sixty seven this is even two years before the revolution revelation for example of the me lie massacre in which an american company enters a south vietnamese village and murders at close range roughly five hundred non resisting an armed civilians most of them women older men and children a massacre that was successfully covered up by the american military for some twenty months and  i also want to emphasize the fact again that the sheer bombing in vietnam was unprecedented and most of it fell on south vietnam the land we claim to be defending for a million tons of bombs were dropped on south vietnam one million on north vietnam and i stress this because you know you often hear this argument that we and we did hear this argument particularly from reagan and from  george w h w bush that we fought a restrained war in vietnam that we fought to quote bush with one arm tied behind our back or to quote reagan that we denied our troops permission to win well there is actually just sort of one grain of truth in that argument the best the best evidence that they can rest that case on is that there were some limits on the bombing of north vietnam j did kind of micromanage the bombing of the north why because he really was very alarmed by the possibility that china if bombing were too aggressive in the north might draw end of the war as as china came into the war during the korean war and so i'm not saying it the bombing wasn't significant it was in the north but the bombing was far more indiscriminate and ruthless in the south and i have again not time to read these passages but i'm particularly interested in the use of b fifty two bombers i mean we have we think of vietnam as the helicopter war and there's good reason for thousands of helicopters always circulating overhead but we also starting in one thousand nine hundred sixty five and continuing throughout through one nine hundred seventy two in the south we were flying b fifty two bombers those huge strato fortresses designed initially to drop the top nuclear hydrogen bombs from guam as far away as guam in the middle of pacific a twelve hour round trip flight to drop each plane thirty tons of bombs over house and then uncontested there were no surface to air missiles in the south the most dangerous part of the mission was the mid flight refueling became so routine the pilots call it a milk run and from our sanctuary in guam we were flying this ruthless carpet bombing of south vietnam again this is an example of some of the things that started to come to light during the one nine hundred sixty s now i'd like to turn my attention though  what happens in the decades after vietnam how is it that a war that had been so profoundly challenge to and that created the most vibrant and diverse anti war movement in our history suddenly got kind of repackaged in a way that was palatable enough so that this idea of american exceptionalism could be recovered the simple answer  i would offer is that we managed to transform the war into an american tragedy so that instead of thinking about and remembering all the damage and destruction we had done and to vietnam we began to worry about what how would it hurt us and it was easy to come up with some ideas reagan and others would say you know it it was a devastating blow to our pride our national pride and our our patriotism and indeed our power and it is therefore incumbent on us to rebuild all of those things even jimmy carter earlier was once asked you think we should pay some reparations to vietnam is no i don't think so i think the damage was mutual between two countries one country that lost nearly sixty thousand that's out of a population of two hundred million and another that lost  roughly three million out of a population of thirty five million if we had lost a proportionate number the vietnam veterans memorial in washington would contain the names of at least eighteen to twenty million people and at least half those names would not be former combatants but women children and other civilians so that we have forgotten you know that so we push that aside in the other so that so there's this let's think of it as an american tragedy and then more specifically the release i think a way of effectively burying a lot of the most troubling memories was to say let's focus on one of the key maybe the key victims of the vietnam war and that is the american vietnam veteran by the one nine hundred eighty s and i know this because i've taught generations of students who have come up believing that probably and somehow they've been convinced that the most shameful thing about the vietnam war is how our veterans were treated and you know there is of course a basis of truth again that can sustain these arguments vet veterans were horribly mistreated but you know i would argue the chief observed you get a chief abuser was the government that lied to this generation of soldiers about the origins and the history and conduct of the war and how they would be received in vietnam and when they returned did not and this continues to the present did not provide them with the kind of services and support that had been accorded earlier generation of veterans so too does corporate america deserve blame for the shabby treatment of vietnam veterans very few of them went out of their way to hire train veterans many of them were scared off by the images produced by another big corporation the mass media which created these gross stereotypes of veterans wacko drug addled violence prone this is very much a kind of seventy's stereotype so by and i would even say the traditional veterans organizations the american legion and veterans of foreign wars are also failed to lend a welcoming hand to vietnam veterans and and in fact very few vietnam veterans joined those organizations created their own but i here's the odd part who in our post vietnam history and culture was saddled with the most blame for mistreating vietnam veterans not the government not corporate america anti war movement we have we've been and many of us have been persuaded that veterans returning to this country were almost inevitably met you know at the airport by massive will groups of protesters who would scream at them and call them baby killers and spit upon them and it's become a kind of article of faith now i would say there is a little complexity the subject i do think there was some tension between many soldiers in the anti war movement and i would say that but those tensions were really based less on political differences then on experiential differences in class differences a lot of veterans understandably felt hell i went over there and it was brutal experience and you were able to get on with your your lives and you know advance your careers i you know and and those of you who are in the anti war movement you know you can be pretty sanctimonious and i sometimes feel like you're judging me as an individual rather than you know really as you say you do focusing on the war makers in washington and the general so there were those tensions but the idea that it was a war between the woman the soldiers really doesn't hold up to scrutiny but it serves a very important political function it demonizes entire anti war movement for one thing and it also makes us forget that a very important component of the anti war movement were soldiers and veterans themselves by the end of the by the end of the vietnam war the resistance among active duty troops again in another part of the forgotten history was extraordinary unprecedented and i really do believe was one of the major reasons why the government the military realized that they could no longer sustain the war at least in terms of large troops on the ground maybe they could continue the bombing but not the troop levels desertions were were skyrocketing soldiers were turning on their own officers at least the most aggressive of them some of the officers were not that agree even the even they were even also officers returning against the war there were many instances by sixty nine seventy seventy one of combat avoidance even flat out combat refusal so that history has on underground i would say however that resistance does continue in past vietnam into the even in reagan's eighty's on into the present and that too is another important history to be recovered i have quite a few pages just for an example of a vietnam veteran who became politically awakened by the vietnam war came home and became active in the movement against american support and its death squads that were trying to crush their own insurgency his name is brian wilson many of you know who he is in one thousand nine hundred seven september first he set down on a railroad track at concord naval weapons depot to try to block the movement of munitions down to the harbor where they would be transported well to various american clients around the world but he was particularly trying to block the arms going to the contras this was an act of peaceful civil disobedience that had been going on for years all the way back to the one nine hundred sixty s during the vietnam war and in ordinarily the train would stop they'd arrest you know the protesters and they would do some time in jail that was the drill everybody knew it that's exactly what brian wilson expected would happen he was even willing to do up to a year in jail which he might have faced and typically these trains were ordered to stop if there's any absurd obstruction at all while they're carrying explosives so if you know an animal anything gets in the way you should stop but on that day they didn't stop in fact they went to the speed limit five miles an hour and the escalade accelerated to seventeen miles an hour the two other veterans who were on brian's side managed to jump off the tracks as brian tried to get up and out he was sitting on a kind of legs folded couldn't get away so he was hit by the train tumbled underneath like a rag doll and miraculously survived he lost both his legs his cranium was crushed and he broke about seventeen bones woke up in the hospital four days later thought he was in prison that he noticed all these sort of flowers and plants around and realized he was in a hospital room so he's got his own important story that illustrates the persistence of resistance but really the  aftermath of his has attempted really murder and it did by the way through court proceedings strong evidence surfaces that the base commander had ordered the train to run over  him based on the assumption that he was a don't mess to terrorist we're using that term even then by the way and earlier he was a terrorist and attempted to say he was going to try to seize the train well in the after he jumped up on it somehow and see that in the aftermath of that  there was an occupation a kind of supreme allied movement occupy movement where twenty four seven for more than two years people block trains every one of them and more than two thousand people went to prison so resistance continues but it was an obviously much covered in the mainstream mainstream press and so and there is an explanation for  get i think it has to do with this very powerful conservative effort to restore this notion as madeleine albright put it you know so it's democrats and republicans like madeline albright sec for clinton that we are the indispensable nation that if we if we don't assert our power disorder and anarchy will reign where the only people that can do it and  i just don't think history bears this up i think more often and not when we are certain our military power we create more animosity than friends we do more repressing than liberating  it's unsustainable economically and i think it degrades democracy at home so with that i will stop and i welcome your questions thank you i'd like to hear your idea who wants to have these wars we had the korean war we had the vietnam war who is the deep state actor or who is it who organizes these wars president and unaccountable military industrial establishment were left out of that debate and i would add that i think the american public in general has almost always been far more reticent to use military power  than the government i mean we polls indicate for example that since two thousand and six the majority of americans have wanted to get out of iraq and afghanistan and yet just as in vietnam the war is prolonged long after most  americans object so i don't think it's the right people to blame in part though i would quickly add i say say in the final paragraph this book was partly to blame to the extent that we continue to buy in to this idea of american exceptional m because i do think that provides the underpinning that allows the office of the president and all these even more unaccountable people in the military industrial congressional think tank  complex so you know it's complicated it's not that somebody at halliburton just picks up the phone and calls dick cheney and says you know let's go to war in iraq it's a lot of the sort of thing personal it's just not it's not that easy and it's not that kind of conspiratorial but there is such a sort of a shared ideological commitment to american military supremacy and this is been with us really since world war two this idea that we want to be so damn strong that no one would dare to confront us directly they call it full spectrum dominance that's the goal we want to be dominant on  those really those are the deep roots of war it's the you know the effort to the the sense that both that that we need to assert american power because we are the greatest nation on earth and yes there are you know the rhetoric of that we don't want nothing in it for ourselves we have no self interest i think that the people in power understand that that is merely rhetoric and they understand that resources are at stake and yes the understand that oil is going there's a reason why we are intervene intervening so much in that region over the last fifteen years and occasionally it even gets admitted greenspan the former head of the national of the federal reserve actually admitted in his memoir of course is that of course it's about oil he said even in vietnam i have a chapter where i try to argue the economic underpinning of that war which is a little bit more complicated and in a little tedious to explain because it is true that vietnam itself didn't have anything like the oil reserves of sudden you know iraq but it was part of a whole pacific set of markets that we were very concerned about particularly countries like indonesia  i my father was in the south vietnamese military and he and many of his friends were in the south vietnamese military and we're very thankful i feel like i was raised i'm so confused because i was raised to almost view this as being a just because these people were pro freedom pro democracy and very thankful to veterans for coming and trying to help and and i feel like you know more recently the more i learn about this war and the more i learn about the suffering of people in my homeland you know most of my family they're still there my family was split you know we had family members who fought with the nationalist family members who were in the vietcong and i'm so confused because i'm still trying to figure out like where does the south vietnamese perspective confusions and there are many people like you so it is a complicated story i will say that this book is not doesn't much attention to the vietnamese side of the war there's more of it among the greatest victims were the people your relatives because they were drawn into a cause in part that they believe there were there were there were anti communist in vietnam  vietnamese south vietnamese officer i met and interviewed years ago said to me yeah you know i would go to my neighbors and i would say you shouldn't trust a communist you know they're full of all this great rhetoric about equality and justice and liberation but you know you shouldn't trust them because once they get in power you know they're going to be as repressive as anything we've seen in our government and he'd say well so my neighbors would say things like you know you might be right but at least the communists are vietnamese unlike those people that you're supporting the americans and of course you know deep in vietnamese history is a long tradition stretching back at least two thousand years to uphold as the greatest national patriots those who had fought off for foreign invaders  and the truth is more vietnamese perceive the americans as really no different from the french maybe a different kind of they're not for old fashioned colonials but they're bringing a kind of neo or new colonialism and they're used they're trying to put in place people that they can control as it turns out they couldn't really control all those you know governments that the communist call puppets they weren't really puppets perfect perfect puppets but they were they were there and i would argue for no other reason than american power and america was drawn in fifty four had withdrawn in one thousand nine hundred sixty three sixty five as i wish they had if our leaders had the moral courage to do so a lot of this bloodshed recrimination and even maybe some of these post war reprisals would not have been as bad i mean the post war thoughts were experienced for people that alive themselves with you know the south and these govern military suffered terribly there's no question about it i wouldn't justify it for a second other than to suggest that it doesn't offer a retro specht of justification for our initial intervention indeed i would say our intervention exacerbated that post war experience for the vietnamese and indeed had a role in making things worse in cambodia and in helping to plant the seeds that led to that genocide so in a way it is it is a complicated subject and the vietnamese who came to this country often have very mixed feelings understandably field one way deep patriotism but also a real sense of betrayal because they've lost not only a war they lost a home and many vietnamese and that really have a longing for that you know to recover those connections and so i don't know if that's an adequate answer but i really appreciate the questions that the contacts make you ok i just want to say soup like there's sort of a culture within the i don't know it's the cia or the military or where they come from that they're looking for the next problem before it was the domino theory or communists they were terrible then it was terrorists someplace and like you said come use aggression all of sudden we're hearing isis you know we didn't hear about isis what a year or two ago and everything so it's like they're searching something out and so our leaders get information that says i got to do something because i'm in because the media is on and i guess i'd be curious in terms of what do you think of the training and what do you think of the media and then thank you  i'm not sure that's really address your question but i really troubled by the deep divide between what is talked about and debated beyond our access in secret and then how those same people talk to us about you know the world and you know to go back to vietnam one of the most basic facts of that war that still is not widely known is that the policy makers themselves with a few odd exceptions like walt rostow had very little confidence that the united states could achieve its objectives in south vietnam at least not in any time soon you know even the most optimistic predictions were five ten fifteen years off and that was really just to establish some more stability not to really achieve the goal which was to put in place a government that could stand on its own without massive american military intervention so in private l b j and mcnamara saying things are going to hell in a handbasket and the best we can do is delay or avert defeat and only if we add an extra hundred way home in the plane he calls back to ellsberg the back of the plane to sit with them and says listen i've just been talking to these guys and it's my view that things this year in one thousand nine hundred sixty six are worse now than they were a year certain because we've added a hundred thousand troops and nothing's improved so even if we think it's the same it's actually worse what do you think dan well i agree that makes that makes perfect sense a few minutes later a plane lands defen secretary robert mcnamara steps out on to the tarmac in front of a group of journalists and microphones and says gentleman just returned from saigon and i'm happy to announce that isn't every by every measure are better this year than they were last year and that that that is you know you could just pile up the examples of that flat out contradiction between the public public optimism in the private skepticism as you know but perhaps many in the audience don't know the department of finance is leading an effort to come commemorate vietnam as beginning this year or last year for thirteen years celebration of the nominee and its  people have called it a whitewash but that's what that looks like it's happening and you comment on it thank you yeah i do think it's a whitewash if you go to the website where the pentagon has put this up this by the way has been funded in approved by congress to the tune of sixty five million dollars and it's designed to have a series of events starting this specially starting this memorial day lasting through veterans day twenty seventeen but really it's a thirteen year project that will continue to go in some form until twenty twenty five that's how you had to commemorate a long war you got to have stretch over a long time but how do you commemorate a war that most people at the time thought was an unmitigated disaster even the people who supported it the answer is simple you block out all the troubling memories all the troubling history and focus on one thing and this is the number one goal if you go to the web site number one goal for the fiftieth year commemoration of the vietnam war honor the service and sacrifice of american veterans and their families or to go on or hometown home front contributions to the war effort goal number three recognize and honor the advances in medicine and science and technology that were brought about because of the vietnam war and that's but that's about it and they have an interactive website and sort of date by date cavalcade of dates and that has the sense it's not a total whitewash i mean they they know they have to  actually mention not as a massacre but as an as an event that killed i think they say hundreds but it's only three lines long and it really focuses on william calley and doesn't say anything about how something like that might happen and then on that same page there are they honor seven american recipients of the highest military award the medal of honor and when you click on those you get not just a name but the full official citation of what they did so the way it's pre packed framed you know it is to my mind yeah a whitewash so thank you very much it's