Word: vietnam
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...those interviews, tucked in among her recollections of the American presence in Vietnam, when Emerson describes a meeting with a North Vietnamese diplomat in Paris, or a Vietnamese soldier, that form the most moving parts of the book. These people, and others like Don Luce, the American reporter who revealed the existence of Saigon's tiger cages, or an American deserter on his way to Sweden, struggled to bring an end to the war. They are the heroes in a book dominated by sadder characters, American veterans and their families whose lives have been destroyed by death or mutilation...
Throughout the book, Emerson is driven by a missionary's fury at the thought that Americans have done their best to forget Vietnam and to relegate to the status of a mistake a war that lasted more than a decade, cost more than a million civilian South Vietnamese lives, generated more than ten million South Vietnamese refugees, left the Vietnamese countryside pockmarked with craters, and cost the lives of 50,000 American soldiers. A former CIA agent Emerson knew in Vietnam who lives now in New York told her, "It bores me, it's ancient history," adding, as he turned...
WINNEPS AND LOSERS is a book for those Americans, like the CIA agent, who have tried to forget. When Emerson first visited Saigon in 1956, when Vietnam was still a French colony, the streets were quiet, lined with trees and women in silk and parasols. When she returned there in 1970, Saigon had become a city of refugees and prostitutes catering to the American army. Vietnam needs no reminders of the American experience in Indochina. But America, apparently, does, and the detailed portraits of individuals Emerson gives us are far more moving than statistics could be. It is the small...
...Losers is not perfect, of course. At times the detail grows tedious and redundant, at times Emerson's fervor obscures the gray areas in between those who have lost and those who have won by the war. She makes no effort to analyze the causes of the war in Vietnam; that is not her mission. Her goal is that of a reporter, to describe what has happened, and she makes little attempt to move beyond that limited role. In some ways that omission is unfortunate: the reader is left curious about the meaning of Emerson's experience about just what...
Perhaps Emerson's final point in Winners and Losers is that very few winners at all emerged from the war in Indochina. One of the veterans she talks to suggests that if there are any, they certainly aren't the people who fought on either side in Vietnam. And for everyone else, it is easier to forget the war ever happened than it is to worry about veterans' rights or about amnesty for draft resisters or people with less than honorable discharges or about reparation payments to Vietnam. In a time when America seems to be trying hard to leave...