Read a Good Book

“War What Is It Good for,

Absolutely Nothing” – Edwin Starr, Motown Records, 1969

A War Tour of Vietnam (McFarland and Company Inc. 2022) author, Erin McCoy

Book Review by Jim McGarrah

I’m a Baby Booming Vietnam veteran, a survivor of combat, and an anti-war activist. I have also been a university professor and an advocate for PTSD victims of war. I say these things so you can understand my interest in all things written about America’s invasion and subsequent occupation of this tiny country about the size of California.

There have been thousands of novels, reports, analyses, journals, interviews, poems, memoirs, and a few travelogues written about America’s involvement in Vietnam that spanned nearly two decades, more if you count the help we got from the Viet Minh during WWII. I don’t know how many of these things I’ve read but having taught a graduate level seminar on the subject that number is well into the hundreds. Some are good. Some are poorly written, biased, or just plain false. A few are brilliant. But most of them have one thing in common. They stick to a singular genre of writing. A memoir is a personal story and not an historical analysis. A poem is not an interview, a novel is not a travelogue, and so on and so forth.

Consequently, I was pleasantly surprised to receive and read a copy of Erin McCoy’s first book, A War Tour of Vietnam, especially since it is written from the perspective of someone much younger than a Vietnam veteran and whose sole agenda is educating an audience to the realities of an important part of American history, rather than sugar-coating or erasing it entirely because parts of it might be very unpleasant. As a result of her passion and discipline, we are privileged to have writing that results in a book greater than the sum of its parts. Where Dr. McCoy shares history with us that historical record is well-documented as any academic endeavor should be. Where she reflects on meaning, the analysis is well-thought and relatable to newer generations of students and family members dealing with the war’s aftermath and life with a veteran who returned home broken by the event. If I needed to pick a thesis for this type of historical exposition and analysis that has accompanied our post WWII military excursions, it would be her words on page ninety-two:

–This glimpse into the ideal American soldier identity reveals a theology that permeates American mythology, and it outlines the cultural values of America that seemed, frankly, out of place in the Vietnam War. American soldiers who died in the Vietnam War did not die for oppressed Americans, nor did they necessarily die in hopes of saving the South Vietnamese. This myth does not signify a cultural truth, nor does it attempt to offer a solution to the conflicting sides of the Vietnam War. As Americans watched the carnage in Vietnam, their opinions concerning the national identity and mythology changed. —

However, like any good piece of writing, this book creates layers of thought. There is more to the book than a reiteration of historical record and a clinical analysis. It is also billed as “a cultural tour” that juxtaposes different aspects of both American and Vietnamese culture with a history of the war. For example, while documenting the first large American engagement with the North Vietnamese Army in the Ia Drang Valley in 1965, we also get an idea of the indifference to it by the American public at the time through her inclusion of music trends and fads among the youth of draftable age in America. Most people, in general, had never even heard of Vietnam, and a young man who got drafted into the military right out of high school didn’t realize this would soon put his life in peril.

Dr. McCoy documents each year of our active involvement in the war and by adding a list of popular songs for each of those years, among other cultural trends, we get to see the reality of the war’s effect on our country’s cultural life through the music we listened to from buoyant romantic melodies and lyrics of lost and found love to a music of social protest and despair. One needs only to compare songs like “Downtown” and “My Girl” to “The Eve of Destruction” and “Paint it Black” to discern this. It helps to remember as well, as she notes, the burgeoning Civil Rights, Feminist, and Anti-War movements developing in conjunction with the war.

One of the most interesting aspects of A War Tour of Vietnam, I think, is the section in each chapter that might be classified as travelogue, though it is much more than a simple category. McCoy spent seven years making a circular journey around the world, basically. She visited war monuments in several countries, most obviously but not exclusively the United States, Australia, and Vietnam. She spoke with veterans in those places, documented sites of interest for fellow travelers, and recorded attitudes from various demographics regarding their understanding of the American war in Vietnam. Interestingly, she included discussions with people of her generation and young students of the present one.

What she discovered in both America and Vietnam was a lack of knowledge, almost as if educational systems controlled by governments in both countries had no desire for succeeding generations to remember what happened, especially considering global corporate interest in the current economic growth of Vietnam. Out of sight—out of mind. Another salient observation from her visits to these museums and monuments revealed the differences in official perspectives from the politicians in power and the use of propaganda on both sides to make the historical results more palatable to the citizenry in both countries  

I was reminded recently by my friend Doug of something that does occurs in this book, and it’s to Dr. McCoy’s credit that it does. Doug wrote that in anthropologic methodology “Thick description means that you cannot understand something by merely describing and documenting what happened; you have to understand the social forces acting on people in that historical moment; e.g.; Vietnam veterans can only be understood in the context of being the offspring of “the greatest generation” and “the domino theory,” “the red threat,” and the particular modes of political lying.” This book does not attempt to dwell on these phenomena as a psychologist or sociologist might, but McCoy does consider this context and its effects on me and other veterans as we enlisted to fight a threat that was not actually a threat at all, and the price we paid for that.

Is this a perfect book. No. There aren’t any perfect books. It does, however, earn a rightful place in the canon of Vietnam War literature that we need to read and study with the hope that someday we will be able to avoid the horrific loss of life caused by our unnecessary and unredeemable preemptive wars. Buy it and then, read it.