The prisms through which this new hatch of correspondents saw the war were shaped by their being the first generation reared in a nuclear age, with television, amid the civil rights movement, and during the early years of space travel. Like a speeding newsreel, the two volumes of their work race ahead, flashing back to America's most controversial military adventure. Careful selection has resulted in almost nothing from those 16 years being left out. South Vietnam's President Ngo Dinh Diem is present, losing the support of his people despite receiving ever more aid in money, guns and manpower from the United States. Monks burn themselves alive in the center of Saigon.
Soldiers bleed and die on the hills and in the jungles.
Other accounts tell of efforts by three presidents to win support for the war in the States and the ever-growing opposition that spilled into the streets in the 1967 march on the Pentagon and again during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. There are mournful reports from cemeteries and small towns, where a death 12,000 miles away affects every aspect of life. There are pieces in which you can smell the cordite and see the blood. My Lai, Cambodia, Kent State, Hamburger Hill. They are no longer jagged pieces falling into an uncertain puzzle, but elements in a completed picture.