I was born weeks before Tet and some of my first memories might have been Cronkite talking about Vietnam. Around 20 years ago I did a deep dive on the history. I read Karnow’s Vietnam and watched the PBS series several times. I was taken aback by Archimedes Patti’s Why Viet Nam? which gave a somewhat sympathetic account of Uncle Ho and the Viet Minh during the OSS Dear Team mission. Frederik Logevall puts that into better perspective in one of his books, especially the irony of training the Viet Minh as anti-Japanese assets at about the time the idea became obsolete because the two bombs dropped on Japan roughly the same time. The French returned. Greene’s The Quiet American gave a quite biased backdrop to CIA adventures leading into the eventual Giap masterpiece at Dien Bien Phu. The movie with Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser was pretty good. I think the best Vietnam movie was Gibson’s We Were Soldiers though it did not capture Moore’s book well, leaving out the involvement of future 9/11 tragic hero Rick Rescorla at Ia Drang. I read a biography about him which brought me to tears toward the end.

Another guy I was intrigued by was Ed Lansdale who spent time as a spook in Vietnam (allegedly inspiring both The Quiet American and the often misunderstood The Ugly American the popular expression a negative distortion of what the book was getting at), but also in the Philippines and on Operation Mongoose. I just got ahold of Currey’s The Unquiet American which I had read decades ago.

I was of course not in Vietnam and my modicum of knowledge filtered through consuming various media. I talked a bit with a previous coworker who served as a Marine around ‘66 and he was a bit reticent of course but tickled I had a sincere interest.