Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam

This was published the year I entered the world. It is so g*ed depressing that it seems to not have made a whit of difference in changing the trajectory of my country's foreign policy & conduct. There was never going to be a different outcome in Afghanistan or Iraq, just wasted lives, fear, and suffering.

Rarely have I felt so low finishing a book - which is superb, and must have had a dramatic impact upon publication. Of course those that most needed to read the book were free to ignore it.

Frances Fitzgerald was reporting with Sheehan and Halberstam when it became clear that the U.S. had know idea who their enemy was and that napalm was not going to defeat these people. This book goes int ot he social history of the Vietnamese explaining that for the Vietnamese this was just another period of fighting.They had defended themselves against the Chinese, we were nothing compared to that struggle. In our efforts to win over the population (hearts and minds) we showed or total misunderstanding of their social structure (the village) by creating fake villages in which we placed people from multiple villages in which they had no conenction. The French warned us that the Vietnamese were not a timid fo. Reading this book you show more realize the west has failed to understand those it has militarily tried to conquor, to our demise. show less

Seriously eye opening history of the cultural, political, and diplomatic relationship between the U.S. and South Vietnam in the war years. A truly damning account that could almost be about what is happening now in Iraq and Afghanistan, it's almost eery in that respect.

It's pretty dense too, but not dry. Just a whole lot of info and a whole lot of pages. Be prepared.

This is the only widely available English language account of the Vietnam conflict that portrays events from the Vietnamese perspective. The book discusses how social, cultural and religious factors impacted on how the indigenous population viewed the war, and shaped their involvement in it.

Although these subjects are complex, the text is unnecessarily verbose and at times repetitive. However, there is much detail in `Fire in the Lake' that is not covered in any of the other heavyweight histories of the conflict and I would recommend it to anyone already familiar with the more prevalent, US-focussed history of the war.

The edition I am reading is 1972, so it is chiefly the background of the culture and politics of Vietnam about which I had no previous knowledge so I cannot verify how true this information is. That said it seems to be an amazing collection of information about a country completely different from the US and incomprehensible to people who go there expecting things to work the way they do here. In that vein it sheds light on other and more recent conflicts in whech we have been involved.

A famous (and excellent) introduction to the Vietnam War, from the Vietnamese side. One of the few great books about the war to be published while the war was still in progress.

Very interesting work. It reviews the Vietnamese side and the American side of the war. If you served in Viet Nam I think you are going to feel really bad about the whole experience.