Arts of War on the Web

Lisa Lark, the author of All They Left Behind:  Legacies of the Men and Women on The Wall, a tribute to sixty-one American servicemen and women who died in the Vietnam War that she put together in conjunction with the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, is at work on a second book. “This project, scheduled for release in late 2014, will be a photographic history of the Vietnam War as told through the words and photographs of the men and women who served there,” Lark says.

The project will require some 500 photographs, and Lark is looking for veterans who have photos from their time in the military, “whether in training, on leave, or in Vietnam,” and who would be willing to donate them for use in the book.

“I will consider every photograph sent in, and will use as many as I can in this project,” she says. “There are certain visual specifications that must be met, and certain guidelines that we have to follow.  Sending in a photo does not guarantee that it will be used in the project.”

For more info, email: lisaalark@googlemail.com

Gerald Goodwin, a doctoral student at Ohio University, is writing a PhD dissertation that looks at African Americans during the Vietnam War and race relations in the military during the Vietnam War era.

“Much of my research is based on oral interviews and I have interviewed around 50 veterans at this point,” Goodwin told us. “However, I am always looking for more veterans to interview. ”

To that end, Goodwin would like to hear from “African American Vietnam veterans or white veterans who had an interesting experience with racial issues in Vietnam,” he said. “I am looking for veterans who had either positive or negative experiences or some variation of each. The project is not limited to any specific period or any branch of the armed services. ”

If you’d like to help, send an email to gerald_goodwin@hotmail.com

And please mention that you read about his project on The VVA Veteran’s Arts of War on the web page.

Stanley Karnow, the journalist and author best known for Vietnam: A History, his massive 1983 book that won the Pulitzer Prize and was the basis for a 13-part PBS documentary of the same name, died January 26. He was 87 years old and had congestive heart failure.

Karnow covered the Vietnam War for Time magazine and The Washington Post beginning in 1959, well before the American war escalated.

Karnow was born in Brooklyn, and served in the Army Air Forces in World War II. He graduated from Harvard in 1947,  and then began his journalism career in France. In addition to Vietnam: A History, he other books included The U.S. and the Philippines: In Our Image and Mao, China: From Revolution to Revolution, and Paris in the Fifties, a memoir.  He was working on a second memoir when he died.

In the decades following the publication of Vietnam: A History, Karnow often spoke out about the Vietnam War. That included a conversation he had in 2009 with Gen. Stanley McChrystal, then the commander of U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

“He calls me and asks if there was anything I learned in Vietnam that we could use in Afghanistan,” Karnow told a reporter in 2010.

“Well, I didn’t have a long conversation with him, but I did say if we’re going to talk about Vietnam, what we really learned in Vietnam is that we shouldn’t have been there in the first place.”

Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States is the hyped-up title of a new, ten-part documentary series that begins tonight, Monday, November 12, on Showtime. In it, Stone—the often hyperbolic Hollywood director and screen writer who served as an infantryman in the Vietnam War—trains his penetrating lens on big historical events beginning with World War II.

The series is based on the just-published door stopper (784 page) of a book of the same name Stone wrote with Peter Kuznick, an American University history professor. In the book and TV series Kuznick and Stone (Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, JFK, et al.) concern themselves primarily with what they firmly believe the United States has done wrong on the world and domestic stages, rather than noting what America has done right.

In her mixed review of the series in The New York Times, Alessandra Stanley calls Stone “a dramatist of truth who tramples facts to spin alternative histories that may be grandiose and grotesque but can sometimes have a hint of grandeur.”

On the other hand, she says, “it’s too easy to focus on what Mr. Stone does wrong; it’s also useful to focus a spotlight on what he gets right. ” Still, Stanley notes, “in all the overblown rhetoric and self-righteous hyperbole (Mr. Stone is his own narrator) accuracy is sometimes hard to find.”

Mary McNamara, the Los Angeles Times TV critic, had a similar assessment. The series, she wrote, “is a hodgepodge of terrific if often disturbing historical footage and bizarre theatrical asides.

“It seems, more than anything, a response to the notion of ‘American exceptionalism,’ though it’s difficult to imagine that those Americans who do believe, as Stone puts it, that America is the center of the universe and always the good guy, will be swayed by him.”

The series “narrative,” she says, “is too often just as one-note as the versions Stone seeks to replace.” Stone, McNamara concludes, “presents his case with little recognition of the social, political and psychological complexities that dominate much of human development, turning it, intentionally or not, into an alternative mythology that relies far more on broad-stroke storytelling than rigorous analysis.”

John Keegan, the prolific and renowned British military historian, died Aug. 2 in his home in England at age 78. Keegan wrote two dozen books of military history, many of which dealt with various aspects of World War II. But he also wrote about the American Civil War, the Iraq War, Agincourt, Waterloo, and World War I.  His 1993 work, A History of Warfare, is considered a classic of its genre.

Keegan taught at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst (England’s  West Point) from 1960-85. He then went to work for the London Telegraph as its defense correspondent. His last book, The American Civil War, was published in 2009.

Vietnam in HD is the name of a three-part, six-hour documentary that begins tonight, Tuesday, November 8, at 9:00 Eastern time on the History Channel. Much of the in-country Vietnam War footage in the series was shot by American troops. The voices of veterans’ first-person testimony are those of participants, as well as those of some Hollywood actors.
We’ll catch the first episode tonight and give a fuller review later in the week.

It was 40 years ago today, on June 13, 1971, that The New York Times published excerpts from the Pentagon Papers, the until-then secret history of the Vietnam War commissioned by DoD. That set in motion an earth-shattering series of events: the first-ever time the government went to court to stop publication of a newspaper story; the Supreme Court ruling against the government, and the Nixon administration setting up a secret group, nicknamed “the Plumbers,” to try to ferret out who leaked the documents. That latter lead directly to the Watergate scandal that forced Nixon from office in 1974.

Today, June 13, 1971, the National Archives officially declassified the Pentagon Papers and is making all 7,000-pages available on line.
“This was a secret history project to try to figure out why we were in such a national security tangle,” Timothy Naftali, the director of the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum said. “And now with all the material together in one place, you can see how our government wrestled with the problem.

Take a look at the National Archives web page.

PBS announced in March that the noted documentary film maker Ken Burns, best known for his groundbreaking 1990 TV documentary on the Civil War, and his long-time partner Lynn Novick will be producing and directing a mutlti-part documentary about the Vietnam War.

The series, PBS said, “will explore the military, political, cultural, social, and human dimensions of the war. “It will focus primarily on the human experience of the conflict, using eyewitness testimonies of so-called ‘ordinary’ people – Americans as well as Vietnamese – whose lives were touched by the war.”  The series also will give voice to Americans who opposed the war. It will consist of 10-12 parts, and is slated to air in 2016.

“Today, more than four decades after it ended, nearly everyone has an opinion about the Vietnam War, but few Americans truly know its history and there is little consensus about what happened there, or why,” Burns said. “Our series will shed light both on the history of the war, and on our inability to find common ground about it.”

“We feel it is of paramount importance to honor the service and sacrifice of the men and women who did what our country asked of them, and went to Vietnam,”  Novick added. “By providing an opportunity for veterans, their families, and those who opposed the war alike, to bear witness to their experiences, we believe that this series will help heal the deep divisions that have endured in America for decades over this enormously controversial and tragic war.”

Also in the works: an interactive website; an educational component for teachers and students; and community engagement grants that will get local PBS stations involved. There also will be a book.

The Vietnam War series will follow the Ken Burns formula of using on-camera interviews with witnesses, third person narration, archival footage and photographs, music, sound effects, TV news reports, and live cinematography.

We took the name of this web page (and the column in The VVA Veteran where it originated) from the classic book of military strategy, The Art of War, written by the Chinese general and philosopher Sun Wu in the 6th century B.C. That book has been republished in countless print editions over the centuries.

Now, for the first time–according to articles in The New York Times and the web site Graphic Novel Reporter–The Art of War will be published as a graphic novel  by Round Table Companies, in partnership with Smarter Comics.

The 58-page comic book will be released April 11 in an array of formats. You can get it as an online eBook; or as an iPhone, Android phone, Android tablet, or iPad eBooke (for free). Or you can buy the printed graphic book for $12.95.

Corey Michael Blake, the chief executive of Round Table, says the new comic book is aimed at busy professionals who are looking for a fun and educational read, as well as at traditional comic book readers.

The John F. Kennedy Library made some 250,000 documents and 200 hours of audio and video from the library’s archives available on line on January 13.  This batch of information most used by researchers–including office files, personal papers, correspondence, speeches, and recorded telephone conversations–is the first of what the museum promises will be many more digitized document releases.

The goal, library director Thomas J. Putnam said, is to get about eight million of the 48 million pages of documents in the archives on line. That, of course, includeds a treasure trove of Vietnam War-related documents.

You can read a speech Sen. John F. Kennedy made on June 1, 1956, titled “America’s Stake in Vietnam,” or the transcript of a November 12, 1964, oral history interview with William P. Bundy, one of JFK’s best and brightest Vietnam War advisers as Assistant Secretary of State and Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs. It it, Bundy discusses planning the Bay of Pigs invasion, the escalation of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam during the Kennedy Administration, and Robert S. McNamara’s role in developing Vietnam War policy.

And that’s just the tip of the Vietnam War iceberg. To search yourself, go to the main Digital Archive page.