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Nonfiction

The Vietnam War Then and Now

The book features hundreds of photos, including this 1968 shot of an Army crew enjoying a beer.Credit...Chuck Riddle

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THE VIETNAM WAR
An Intimate History
By Geoffrey C. Ward
Introduction by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick
Illustrated. 612 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $60.

On Sept. 17 PBS begins airing Ken Burns’s new 10-part Vietnam War documentary, co-directed by Lynn Novick and written by Geoffrey C. Ward, Burns’s longtime collaborator. Although Burns’s team has produced many epic histories — on jazz, baseball, the American West — his 1990 Civil War series made him into the nation’s most laureled documentarian. Clocking in at 18 hours, “The Vietnam War” is Burns’s most anticipated work since that magisterial feat.

As before, Ward has written a weighty companion book to the series. “The Vietnam War: An Intimate History” tells once again the painful tale of America’s protracted, divisive and (most would now agree) futile involvement in the fight to keep South Vietnam unconquered by the Communist North. After filling in the historical background, the book ranges over two decades, from Dien Bien Phu in 1954, when the French left their former colony in defeat, to the 1975 fall of Saigon, when the United States left. It’s all here: the Gulf of Tonkin and the Tet offensive, the Perfume River and the Ho Chi Minh Trail, napalm and draft notices and teach-ins and My Lai, P.O.W.s and fragging and Kent State and the Christmas bombing, and much more.

Numerous historians, of course, have already written exemplary histories of the war. To distinguish this book, Burns and Novick, in their introduction, proclaim their intention to do what few have done: recount the war from not just the American viewpoint but from that of the North and South Vietnamese too. (One pioneering academic work offering such perspective is Lien-Hang Nguyen’s “Hanoi’s War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam.”) This intention is laudable; more than a century ago Lord Acton called for a history of Waterloo “that satisfies French and English, German and Dutch alike.” In the end, though, apart from a few sections — including an oddly starry-eyed sketch of Ho Chi Minh — Ward pursues this goal of a multinational account in only a desultory, sporadic way.

The introduction also tries to differentiate the book by spotlighting stories of “ordinary” participants in the war: “grunts and officers in the Army and Marines, prisoners of war, a fighter pilot and a helicopter crew chief … a nurse, college students, reporters” and more. Ward and Burns did something similar in “The Civil War,” relying on soldiers’ letters from both sides, and in their 2007 series on World War II. Once again, the personal testimonies effectively capture the ground-level experience of the conflict. Memorable vignettes and arresting details abound in “The Vietnam War,” like the scene of American prisoners deciding to skin and eat the camp commander’s cat, or the reminder that eight of 10 servicemen never saw combat.

And yet to those who’ve read in the existing literature, many of these soldiers’ stories will sound awfully familiar. We hear from Lt. Col. John Paul Vann (featured in Neil Sheehan’s “A Bright Shining Lie”), Philip Caputo (the author of “A Rumor of War”), W.D. Ehrhart (the poet and memoirist) and others already famous from well-known books. Besides, the recollections in “The Vietnam War,” though often moving or insightful, don’t always advance the book’s narrative. In “The Civil War,” epistolary excerpts from soldiers like Elisha Hunt Rhodes and Sam Watkins were brilliantly employed to convey the grunts’ experiences while simultaneously providing needed exposition. Here, the individuals’ anecdotes tend to stand alone as set pieces, disconnected from what follows.

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Undercutting the narrative thrust further is the layout — sumptuous to behold but unfriendly to readers. The main text is laced through a gallimaufry of maps, photos, captions and sidebars, and rendered mostly in flat prose. The result is a coffee-table book aspiring to be a history book that reads like a textbook. In literary grace, it ranks behind another companion book to another PBS documentary, Stanley Karnow’s “Vietnam: A History,” from 1983.

One major problem for any narrative account of the Vietnam War lies in the nature of the conflict. The Civil War ground on from clash to clash, place to place, progressing relentlessly and suspensefully toward its culmination, with key battles like Gettysburg and Vicksburg providing dramatic pivots. The Vietnam War played out differently, in countless skirmishes that lacked strategic consequence. Questions of who was winning and losing were forever murky, and not only because Presidents Johnson and Nixon deceived Americans about the prospects for victory. In the face of implacable North Vietnamese resolve, even successful military campaigns simply didn’t do much. Thus, when recounting some of the important battles — Ap Bac early in the war, the fighting at Hue during the 1968 Tet offensive — Ward’s writing comes alive, but only for a short spell. And he’s chosen to cover so many topics that after each combat tale, the reader is inevitably diverted elsewhere.

In “The Civil War,” priority went to the military story, then to politics and last to society and culture. That ordering may have been old-fashioned, but it made sense given how crucial combat was to determining the war’s outcome. By contrast, with Vietnam, especially by the late 1960s, the political narrative — not the battlefield developments — most compelled Americans’ interest. Readers of this volume, like Americans in the 1960s or ’70s, won’t be waiting for a game-changing victory like Ulysses Grant’s hard-won 1865 triumph at Petersburg. Rather, they will look to the political dramas: Lyndon Johnson’s decision to forsake re-election in 1968, the Moratorium protests of October 1969, Henry Kissinger’s exhaustive Paris peace talks. We wait expectantly not for a victory at the front lines but for the moment when America consents to withdraw.

Over all, this political history is well told, though Ward makes one big error. In 1968, Richard Nixon, the Republican presidential nominee, secretly worked a back channel to the South Vietnamese to undermine Johnson’s diplomacy. That subterfuge was illegal and immoral, but there’s scant evidence that it alone led the South Vietnamese president, Nguyen Van Thieu, to reject Johnson’s terms. Ward wrongly asserts that Nixon “scuttled the negotiations.”

One highlight of the book is the five brief stand-alone essays that seek to examine a single question about the war in depth. In particular, the meditations by the Harvard historian Fredrik Logevall, on whether John F. Kennedy would have become embroiled in the war, and by the onetime antiwar activist Todd Gitlin, on the movement’s legacy, offer original assessments in the kind of personal voice that’s mostly missing from the book. However, one otherwise evocative rumination by the novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen is marred by a surprisingly blinkered dismissal of not just the entire corpus of American films about the war, but also most of the “American books about the war, fiction or nonfiction.” So much for “Apocalypse Now,” “Full Metal Jacket,” “The Best and the Brightest,” “Dispatches,” “Fire in the Lake,” “The Things They Carried” and other filmed and written works that provided source material for this very volume.

Perhaps the most worthwhile contribution of “The Vietnam War” is its compilation of hundreds of astonishing photographs. Ward and Burns reproduce now-famous images like Eddie Adams’s picture of a Vietcong prisoner being shot in the head at close range and Nick Ut’s shot of a naked Vietnamese girl fleeing a napalm raid. But they also include powerful and less familiar scenes of rubble-strewn streets, desperate villagers, bewildered squadrons, and Americans and Vietnamese alike who are wounded, maimed, dying or freshly killed.

If “The Vietnam War” falls short as scholarly or even bedside reading, though, it remains a vivid and often captivating volume — and, construed literally as a companion to the television series, a valuable resource. Twenty-seven years after it aired, the “Civil War” documentary is now streaming on Netflix, as gripping as ever, still a spark for conversations and learning and discovery. The companion volume is not what people remember.

David Greenberg, a professor of history at Rutgers University, is the author, most recently, of “Republic of Spin: An Inside History of the American Presidency.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 16 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: The War That Never Ends. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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