The Library of America. Not all have agreed on this point over the years. There is a sense in which that is partly true, perhaps, of all wars, but even those too young to have lived through the losing of the war either on the ground or on television won't have much trouble recognizing defeat when they see it in the 11 pieces recounting the collapse of Saigon's Army and Government in April 1975, and especially in those describing the harrowing scene at the American Embassy on the night of April 30. That night and into the following morning, the last Americans clambered aboard helicopters on the embassy roof and took off for Navy ships in the South China Sea while thousands of Vietnamese who had been promised rescue waited in orderly lines in the embassy compound searching the sky for helicopters that never returned. Who won the war is not a trivial point.
War is painful and expensive for winners and losers alike.
Saar was giving a typically fleeting thought to those on the other side, but his question goes to the heart of the war as a whole. What the war did to people physically was horrific to experience and terrifying to witness. What it did to them psychologically was often just as crippling and just as permament. Forget the money. That is why the Vietnam War occupies a special place in American history and in the American psyche, and why these two volumes reek of pain, anger, sadness, failure and the despair that accompanies the recognition that suffering will never be redeemed.