"There It Is": Narratives of the Vietnam War. Tom Burns

Vietnam Policy: A Study in French-American Relations (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978), pp. 51-54.

19 Qtd. by Butterfield, The Pentagon Papers, p. 13.

20 Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (1969; New York: Ballantine, 1992), p. 339. The term “containment” is attributed to the US Ambassador to the Soviet Union George F. Kennan.

21 Smith, Hedrick, Pentagon Papers, Chapt. 3, “The Kennedy Years: 1961-1963,” p. 79.

22 Pentagon Papers, p. 91.

23 Herring, America’s Longest War, p. 75.

24 Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, p. 60.

25 Herring, America’s Longest War, p. 113.

26 Morganthau, Hans, “We Are Deluding Ourselves in Vietnam,” in: The New York Times Magazine (April 18, 1965), rptd. in: The Vietnam War: Interpreting Primary Documents, ed. Nick Treamor (New York: Greenhaven Press, 2004), pp. 176.

27 Smith, Hedrick, Pentagon Papers, Chapt. 4, “The Overthrow of Ngo Dinh Diem: May-November 1963,” pp. 158-159.

28 Pentagon Papers, pp. 158-159.

29 Cable, Larry, Conflicts of Myths (New York: NYU Press, 1986), p. 225.

30 Butterfield, Pentagon Papers, Chapt. 2, “Origins of the Insurgency in South Vietnam,” p. 67.

31 Butterfield, Pentagon Papers, pp. 69, 73.

32 Sheehan, Neil, Pentagon Papers, Chapt. 5, “The Covert War and Tonkin Gulf: February-August 1964,” p. 235.

33 Sheehan, The Pentagon Papers, p. 238.

34 Sheehan, The Pentagon Papers, p. 239.

35 Sheehan, The Pentagon Papers, p. 242.

36 Sheehan, The Pentagon Papers, p. 243.

37 Vlastos, Stephen, “America’s ‘Enemy’: the Absent Presence in Revisionist Vietnam War History,” in: Rowe, John Carlos, and Rick Berg (eds.), The Vietnam War and American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), p. 66.

38 All the quotes are cited from James Bamford’s review of Matthew M. Aid´s The Secret Sentry: The Untold Story of the National Security Agency: “Who’s Who in Big Brother’s Database?” in: The New York Review of Books (November 5, 2009), p. 30. The second quotation is taken from Aid’s text.

39 Schulzinger, The United States and Vietnam, 1941-1975, pp. 152-154.

40 Karnow, Vietnam—A History. 1983. (Revised Edition, New York: Viking Penguin, 1991), p. 432.

41 Boettcher, Thomas, Vietnam—the Valor and the Sorrow (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1985), p. 212.

42 Karnow, Vietnam—A History, p. 412.

43 Fussell, Paul, Wartime. Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 16. Fussell notes that 14% of the bombs dropped turned out to be duds.

44 Boettcher, Vietnam—The Valor and the Sorrow, pp. 209-212.

45 Boettcher, Vietnam—The Valor and the Sorrow, p. 262.

46 Cf. Chapter 12, below, for journalistic commentaries on this operation.

47 Schmitz, David F., The Tet Offensive: Politics, War and Public Opinion (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), p. xiii.

48 Bowman, John S. (ed.), The Vietnam War Day by Day (Hong Kong: Mallard Press, 1989), p. 120. For a detailed description of how the Tet Offensive failed as a military operation, see Chapter 10 of Victor David Hanson, Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power (New York: Doubleday, 2001), pp. 349-439.

49 Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, p. 379.

50 Herring, America’s Longest War, pp. 221-223.

51 Qtd. in Pratt, John Clark, Vietnam Voices (New York: Penguin,1984), p. 551.

52 Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, p. 436.

53 In a review of the 2017 documentary “The Vietnam War” by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, Frances Fitzgerald writes that Burns was asked why he had undertaken the project: “Burns said that more than forty years after the war ended, we can’t forget it, and we are still arguing about it.” Novick added that we are all “searching for some meaning in this terrible tragedy.” Fitzgerald, “The Pity of It All,” The New York Review of Books, November 23, 2017, p. 30.

54 Schulzinger, A Time for War, p. 285.

55 Young, The Vietnam Wars 1945-1990, p. 319. There seems to be an erroneous perception that World War II was also fought by teenagers, as reflected, for example, in the title of Paul Fussell’s memoir, The Boys’ Crusade: The American Infantry in Northwestern Europe, 1944-1945 (New York: Modern Library, 2003). As stated above, the average age of American soldiers in that