Word: vietnams
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...what a story it is. Thompson's subject is Charles Sobhraj, alias Charles Gurmukh, alias Charles Gurmukh, alias Alian Passaint, alias Lobo, alias Alain Gauthier. Conceived in Vietnam and raised in France, the young Charles is shuttled back and forth from his native Asia to the French countryside. As a youngster, he learns the tools of his trade quickly, throwing the blame for his own plots on others and magically convincing those around him to do what he asks. By the age of 24, Sobhraj is a man disowned by both father and nation, befriended only by a lone Frenchman...
Shaplen emphasizes the United States' failures in any number of Asian revolutions, offering candid assessments of people and policies that contributed to our mistakes. His chapters on the Indochinese nations, particularly Vietnam and Cambodia, are especially effective. He reminisces colorfully on Saigon under siege and the atrocities of Pol Pot's regime but does not limit himself to narrative. In the section entitled, "Why the Americans Failed," he writes...
...PAINFUL TO HEAR, this uncompromising faith in the inviolability of life. It was almost unbelievable that any man alive today could utter the word 'truth' or 'God' in America after Vietnam, after Jimmy Carter's human rights campaign, after the eviscerating of an environment--in a land where God, in a 'practical sense', has been hewn into a bare symbol...
This book, however, is more than just a reflection of that myth; it is an attempt to shore up its sagging walls. So Mandelbaum revives in over 200 pages a picture of American government that no longer plays even in Peoria. The Vietnam War happened for the rest of us, if not for Mandelbaum, and some of the basic ideas handed to generations of Gov. 40 veterans no longer ring true...
...would be nice if they did, for our own self image if for nothing else. But after Vietnam it is hard to argue that America's foreign policy or military strategy were ever the untainted products of American liberal values. It is a testament to Mandelbaum's naivete that it is only eight pages short of the end of the book that he realizes that while "Americans regarded their own intentions as self-evidently peaceful...the Soviets may not have shared this view...