It had all the ingredients of a great novel: a tragic plot of almost Shakespearean proportions, a fascinating cast of characters, and some wonderful writing. It sounds unspeakably dull and ponderous it was not. The book was a 700-page study of how the US came to be mired in the disastrous war in Vietnam. To understand these events, a friend recommended I read David Halberstam’s book, The Best and the Brightest, published a couple of years before to great acclaim. Nevertheless, with the media full of graphic images of desperate Vietnamese scrambling to climb over the wall surrounding the US embassy and of marines dumping helicopters into the sea lest they fall into communist hands, one could not help talking about Vietnam. I was not especially politically engaged. A few months after I arrived in the US, Saigon fell to the communists. The war in Vietnam was no longer a bitter political issue on campuses. After college in England, I arrived in the US in the autumn of 1974 to go to graduate school.
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