Review by Bill Doughty My preteen grandkids know who Thomas Edison is. Their grandkids will know, in the same way, about J. Craig Venter. Venter is a Navy Vietnam Veteran who faced challenges in life, made mistakes in and out of uniform, turned his life around, and eventually became one of the foremost experts in genetics. He mapped the human genome, created synthetic life in this century and is now working on ways to support life on Mars.
I read a passage to my grandsons from a chapter in Venter's autobiography, "A Life Decoded - My Genome: My Life" called "University of Death." The boys were fascinated by his capture of a deadly poisonous snake while Venter swam in the warm waters off China Beach. Two species of poisonous snakes in the South China Sea, Venter says, "travel in large herds measuring miles long and up to a half-mile wide." Venter, a former Navy Corpsman who spent a lot of his off time swimming in the sea, felt the snake bump into his leg and reached down to grab it, fortunately getting it near the head and not the flattened tail:
"I knew I could not let go. Its jaws were wide open, and it was trying to bite. Sea snakes are strong swimmers, and it was all I could do to hang on. Swimming with one arm while being tumbled by ten to twelve-foot waves and holding on to a writhing snake is not something I would recommend. Finally I was able to stand and started to run but was knocked down by a wave once more. Stumbling breathlessly toward the beach I saw some driftwood and used it to hit the snake on the head until it stopped moving. A friend took a photo of me holding my trophy, recording one of those crossroads in life that, with the wrong luck, could easily have led to death. I did not want to forget what had just happened. I took my knife, skinned my attacker, and back at the hospital, pinned it with hypodermic needles to a board to dry in the sun. I still have the snake skin hanging in my office as a reminder of the encounter."
Venter, who says he always felt a need to race – bicycles, boats, people – and take chances, describes his childhood and early adulthood in "A Life Decoded" through a deep understanding of the mind and effects of the Y chromosome, now that he's literally in touch with his genes. I didn't read to the grandkids about his suicide attempt (which also involved the sea) or the time his girlfriend's dad held a gun to his head or some of his other risk-taking behaviors. A turning point came from an English teacher in high school who introduced him to "The Catcher in the Rye" by J.D. Salinger, but Venter admits to being a lousy student overall. A major turning point came in the mid-60s when he was drafted.
"I was very conflicted. I was personally against the war but had a long family history of military service. One ancestor was a fifer and medic during the Revolutionary War. My great-great-great-grandfather served in the cavalry during the War of 1812. My great-grandfather was a sharpshooter in the Confederate Army during the Civil War. My grandfather was a private in World War I, serving in France, where he was badly wounded and had to crawl for miles to safety. And, of course, both my parents had been Marines." (Venter's parents were in the Marine Corps in World War II, serving on "different shores of the Pacific." They met at Camp Pendleton, California.)
Venter, front row, fourth from left, on his high school swim team.
Venter chose the Navy rather than be drafted into the Army. He hoped to be named to the Navy Swim Team, but those hopes were dashed when President Johnson amped up American involvement in Vietnam and Venter got his orders. As a skilled corpsman he faced war and devastation in Da Nang, caring for injured Marines, civilians, enemy soldiers and other casualties of the war in a Quonset hut intensive ward. He helped at an orphanage, and he provided triage during the TET offensive of 1968. "Vietnam would teach me more than I ever wanted to know about the fragility of life," he writes. "Death is a powerful teacher." No doubt the snake skin reminds him of overcoming fear, facing death, choosing to live and dealing with snakes along the way.
Venter is lauded by Clinton in 2000.
In "A Life Decoded" Venter lays bare the science, politics, setbacks and glorious achievements in his life and the various human egos he encounters as a scientist. He tracks in detail his race to understand the building blocks of life and his pursuit of the human genome. But the narrative returns to the biggest turning point and moment of insight: Vietnam.
After Venter mapped the human genome, he was invited to the White House June 26, 2000 by President Bill Clinton. Clinton compared the human genome map to the Thomas Jefferson-commissioned map by the Lewis and Clark expedition that "forever expanded the frontiers of our continent and our imagination." Clinton called Venter's and others' work "the most important, most wondrous map ever produced by humankind." "Decoded" includes Venter's remarks from that day, as well as the deep emotion he felt as his watershed discovery was explained to the world.
"... in Vietnam I learned firsthand how tenuous our hold on life can be. That experience inspired my interest in learning how the trillions of cells in our bodies interact to create and sustain life. When I witnessed firsthand that some men lived through devastating trauma to their bodies, while others died after giving up from seemingly small wounds, I realized that the human spirit was at least as important as our physiology. We're clearly much, much more than the sum total of each of us. Our physiology is based on complex and seemingly infinite interactions among all our genes and the environment, just as our civilization is based on all the interactions among all of us. One of the wonderful discoveries that my colleagues and I have made while decoding the DNA of over two dozen species, from viruses to bacteria to plants to insects, and now human beings, is that we're all connected to the commonality of the genetic code in evolution. When life is reduced to its very essence, we find that we have many genes in common with every species on Earth and that we're not so different from one another."
Venter transcended and redeemed himself after his near-death experiences. "Life was my gift," he writes. He chose to understand life at the most fundamental levels. Today, he chooses to make a profound difference to help others. "We're all connected." A good lesson for everyone's grandkids. (This is part I of essentially a two-and-a-half-part series of posts related to the life and work of Dr. Venter, the Thomas Edison of our time.)
Review by Bill Doughty J. Craig Venter is transforming our understanding of the world and life itself.
The man who mapped the human genome first became fixed on understanding life at the cellular level (and beyond) as a Navy Corpsman in Vietnam. In 2013's "Life at the Speed of Light: From the Double Helix to the Dawn of Digital Life," he writes:
"As a young corpsman in Vietnam, I had learned to my amazement that the difference between the animate and inanimate can be subtle: a tiny piece of tissue can distinguish a living, breathing person from a corpse; even with good medical care, survival could depend in part on the patient's positive thinking, on remaining upbeat and optimistic, proving a higher complexity can derive from combinations of living cells."
The book follows "A Life Decoded" and continues to explain how the field of genomics is "blending biology and engineering approaches" in gene-splicing, recombinant DNA and creation of synthetic life. Venter explains how and why he continues his "empowering extraordinary journey," including when he and his team announced the first functioning synthetic genome, May 20, 2010:
"We also discussed our larger vision – namely, that the knowledge gained in doing this work would one day undoubtedly lead to a positive outcome for society through the development of many important applications and products, including biofuels, pharmaceuticals, clean water, and food products. When we made the announcement, we had in fact already started working on ways to produce vaccines and create synthetic algae to turn carbon dioxide into fuel."
Venter says his team's work was built "on earlier work and ideas that had originated from a range of talented teams, stretching back over many decades." In "Life at the Speed of Light," he carefully maps the history of his science, starting with a seemingly simple question posed by the father of quantum mechanics, Erwin Schrödinger: "What is Life?" He explains the work of James Watson and Francis Crick, Motoo Kimura, Lucy Shapiro, Barbara McClintock, Robin Hook, Frederick Sanger, Arthur Kornberg and dozens of other scientists, all within the context of thinkers and philosophers like Aristotle, Francis Bacon, Descartes, Erasmus and Charles Darwin, Pasteur, Einstein and Isaac Asimov.
Venter reminds us of when the first DNA virus was sequenced and artificially copied and activated by Kornberg, recognized publicly in 1967 by President Lyndon B. Johnson, who said the work, "unlocked a fundamental secret of life ... It opens a wide door to new dimensions in fighting disease, in building much healthier lives for all human beings." Venter missed the quote and the news at the time because he was serving in Da Nang, Vietnam. That was nearly 50 years ago. After Vietnam, Venter "became convinced of the direction my future my life should take," as he writes in "A Life Decoded." He used the G.I. Bill to pursue his education and he has not looked back. In fact, he has continued to look within – literally examining his own life. And he has looked forward into the future: considering metagenomics, biological teleportation and support for life on Mars. He promises the future "will be as empowering as it is extraordinary." The dawn of digital life, he says, has the potential for unlocking evolution and creating "a new era of biological design," where vaccines can be sent anywhere in the world at the speed of light during a pandemic and where climate change and other manmade problems can be countered with help from artificial and enhanced intelligence. (I became interested in reading more by and about Dr. Venter after reading "Abundance" by Diamandis and Kotler.)
Review by Bill Doughty In the face of Islamic State (ISIL/ISIS), ebola, overpopulation, poverty and global climate change is there reason for optimism? Yes, according to the authors of "Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think."
The first thing to do is determine how far we've come – from the stone age to what Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler call the new "Cooperation Age": from millions of years as hunter-gatherers and nomads – to thousands of years as farmers – to hundreds of years in the industrial age – to decades in the information age – to now, a new age of cooperation. The book opens with "The Lesson of Aluminum" and the recounting of a story by Pliny the Elder (b. AD 23 – d. AD 79). Pliny was a naval and army commander in the Roman Empire who became a philosopher and author of "Naturalis Historia." He tells about a goldsmith who presented Emperor Tiberius with an unnaturally light and shiny plate that had been extracted from plain clay (bauxite) through a secret technique known only to himself and the gods:
"Tiberius, though, was a little concerned. The emperor was one of the great generals, a warmonger who conquered most of what is now Europe and amassed a fortune of gold and silver along the way. He was also a financial expert who knew the value of his treasure would seriously decline if people suddenly knew the value of his treasure would seriously decline if people suddenly had access to a shiny new metal rarer than gold. 'Therefore,' recounts Pliny, 'instead of giving the goldsmith the regard expected, he ordered him to be beheaded.'"
Of course, aluminum would be rediscovered and, through technology, would become plentiful and cheap, certainly nothing to lose one's head over. Times have changed, at least in most parts of the world. Over time people have become, in general, less superstitious, more accepting of new technology and more willing to cooperate. Can we continue to evolve beyond our reptilian amygdala part of the brain and move away from cognitive biases of the mind? The authors of "Abundance" think so, despite obvious challenges. Diamandis and Kotler show in dozens of charts and through examples from Ray Kurzweil, Google and the U.S. Air Force that the rate of change in the world is moving exponentially. Some examples of future technology or innovation changing the world: artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, 3D printers, genetic engineering, the Cloud and smartphones.
Venter is awarded the National Medal of Science by President Barack Obama
Energy: Craig Venter, the scientist who sequenced the human genome, created synthetic DNA and hopes to create a new kind of algae that can make fuel from carbon dioxide and water. Venter served a tour of duty as a Navy Corpsman in Vietnam from 1967 to 1968 before beginning his formal education at the University of California at San Diego. Water: Self-taught physicist and entrepreneur Dean Kamen developed a distiller capable of recycling its own energy. "The current version [of Slingshot] can purify 1,000 liters (250 gallons) of water a day using the same amount of energy it takes to run a hair dryer." Communication and connectivity: Vint Cerf, a father of the internet, foresees a future of networks and sensors that will be a "central nervous system for the planet." Food: Former futurist Sir Winston Churchill foresaw synthetically grown food:
"In 1931 Winston Churchill said, 'Fifty years hence, we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.' As it turns out, it took a few extra decades for biotechnologists to deliver on Churchill's promise, but more and more, it looks like it was worth the wait. Cultured meat (or in-vitro meat, as some prefer) is meat grown from stem cells."
The U.S. military pioneered modern development of hydroponics at the end of World War II on Ascension Island in the South Atlantic, later on Iwo Jima and in Chofu, Japan in the western Pacific, and even in Iraq and Bahrain in the Middle East, where troops guarded the oil supply. The idea was to grow food locally regardless of the availability or viability of soil and not to have to rely on transportation logistics. The future of agriculture lies in rediscovering hydroponics, refining aquaculture, using aeroponics and developing vertical farming, including extensively in cities. Hackers, do-it-yourselfers, garage biologists and techno-philanthropists – people inspired by the counter-culture movement of the 60s – are sharing ideas for how to tackle problems. They are committed to a world of sustainment, cooperation and hope and away from consumption, destruction and greed. As always the key to the future lies in education and freedom, which is "both an idea and access to ideas." The authors postulate that freedom and the need to make a difference is at the hierarchy of needs for people. Freedom to educate and be educated is tied to good health:
"Recent research into the relationship between health and education found that better-educated people live longer and healthier lives. they have fewer heart attacks and are less likely to become obese and develop diabetes. We also know that there's a direct correlation between a well-educated population and a stable, free society. The more well educated the population, the more durable its democracy. But these advances pale before what's possible if we start educating the women of tomorrow alongside the men."
Two-thirds of the 130 million children who are not in school are girls. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) concludes that educating these girls is "the key to health and nutrition; to overall improvements in the standard of living; to better agricultural and environmental practices; to higher gross national product; and to greater involvement and gender balance in decision making at all levels of society." A quality education empowers women and reduces fear, poverty and birth rates. Last Friday, Malala Yousafzai, 17, became the youngest winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. Malala, a muslim from Pakistan, along with children's rights activist Kailash Satyarthi, a hindi from India, were awarded the prize. According to Nobel.org: "The Nobel Peace Prize 2014 was awarded jointly to Kailash Satyarthi and Malala Yousafzai "for their struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education." "Abundance" presents the ideas of dozens of thinkers, inventors and philanthropists, including Arthur C. Clarke, Stewart Brand, Margaret Mead, Catherine Mohr, Martin Luther King Jr., Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Salman Khan (Khan Academy), Matt Ridley, Bill McKibben and Ray Kurzweil: "Kurzweil learned that human ideas were all powerful. DaVinci's ideas symbolized the power of invention to transcend human limitations. Hitler's ideas showed the power to destroy." In WWII, the free world cooperated to defeat Imperial Japan and fascist Germany. Both nations are now globally connected democracies, educated and free. Of note, the nation's Maritime Strategy for the Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard is called "A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower." The idea of cooperation growing in an interconnected world comes together in a chain equation: new technology creates specialization that increases cooperation that leads to more capability that generates more technology, and the cycle continues – an engine of change and a reason for hope and optimism in "Abundance."
Although science says there is no such thing as race, that doesn’t mean there is no “racism.”
Under a guise of racism, a dominant class can subjugate, discriminate, and try to control a subordinate class, including by suppressing or subverting their right to vote –– based on superficial differences.
Isabel Wilkerson
Isabel Wilkerson makes the case for recasting, so to speak, “racism” as “casteism” in her indispensable book for our time: “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents” (Random House, 2020), an Oprah’s Book Club selection.
As for “no such thing as race…”
Scientists call ‘race’ an artificial construct. Wilkerson writes this, citing a great Navy veteran scientist:
“Two decades ago, analysis of the human genome established that all human beings are 99.9 percent the same. ‘Race is a social concept, not a scientific one,’ said J. Craig Venter, the geneticist who ran Celera Genomics when the mapping was completed in 2000. ‘We all evolved in the last 100,000 years from the small number of tribes that migrated out of Africa and colonized the world.’” (Venter is a former Navy corpsman and Vietnam War veteran; we have featured his work and his autobiography several times here on Navy Reads.)
Now DNA kits ordered by mail show “that race as we have come to know it is not real,” Wilkerson says. “It is a fiction told by modern humans for so long that it has come to be seen as a sacred truth.”
Wilkerson interviews a Nigerian-born playwright, who says, “You know that there are no black people in Africa. Africans are not black. They are Igbo and Yoruba, Ewe, Akan, Ndebele. They are not black. They are just themselves. They are humans on the land. That is how they see themselves, and that is who they are.”
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who embraced the nonviolent teachings of Mohandas Gandhi, saw the issue of racism framed as casteism. Sixty-three years ago, in February 1959, he and his wife, Coretta Scott King, traveled to and within India, where MLK self-identified as “an untouchable.” The Kings visited the grave of Gandhi, laid a wreath, and prayed.
In India, people are born into castes that are supposedly divinely dictated. Discrimination against people considered part of the lower classes was acceptable, lawful, institutional. While civil rights laws in India in the 1940s (and in the United States in the 1960s) have made it illegal to discriminate, "both countries still live with the residue of codes that prevailed for far longer than they have not."
Casteism in the U.S. began more than a century before we became a nation.
Actions
Beginning in 1619, Europeans brought Africans to the English colonies as property and to the very bottom of a social hierarchy. Confronting the morality of the institution led eventually and with great upheaval to the Emancipation Proclamation and American Civil War nearly 250 years later. But like it or not, racism, constructed within a framework of casteism, had been already institutionalized.
“In the decades to follow, colonial laws herded European workers and African workers into separate and unequal queues and set in motion the caste system that would become the cornerstone of the social, political, and economic system in America. This caste system would trigger the deadliest war on U.S. soil, lead to the ritual killings of thousands of subordinate-caste people in lynchings, and become the source of inequalities that becloud and destabilize the country to this day.”
“After the Civil War, Confederates blamed the people they had once owned for the loss of the war,” Wilkerson writes. There was a backlash to “take our country back.” The Lost Cause. The Big Lie.
South Carolina's Hammond
Wilkerson contends, “Caste, along with its faithful servant race, is an x-factor in most any American equation, and any answer one might ever come up with to address our current challenge is flawed without it.”
She presents dozens of examples of the horrors inflicted by the dominant class in America over previous centuries, including torture, riots, and lynchings.
We learn of the horrid senator of South Carolina James Henry Hammon, who said, “God created slaves for us.” Hammon raped women, including his own daughter, and sexually assaulted four of his nieces. We also read the crushingly sad story of Willie James Howard, a 15-year-old black boy who made the fatal mistake of having a schoolboy crush on a white girl in 1943 in Grand Gulf, Mississippi. And, we hear of ludicrous practices under endogamy, miscegenation, and eugenics laws and theories.
A eugenics book published in 1916 by an American, Madison Grant, titled “The Passing of the Great Race,” became popular with white supremacists.
Adolf Hitler called it his bible.
The Nazis were inspired by how the American upper class treated blacks and especially indigenous peoples. But, fascist Germans of the 30s and 40s escalated and intensified the evil when they exterminated millions of people based on eugenics and claims of Aryan supremacy.
Hitler and Nazi casteism
A caste system set up by Hitler and the Nazis justified the torture and deaths of millions of Jews, homosexuals, Roma people, and people with disabilities. To the Nazis, it was “obvious Jews were a separate race.”
When Einstein, a Jew, escaped Germany as an immigrant to the United States, he was shocked to discover he had moved from a country of castes to another country where, this time, people of color were considered a subordinate class.
Once we accept the reality of caste systems, it helps us understand the point of view of others.
That includes many people in the privileged dominant class who feel fear and resentment when they start to lose their privileged position. “A caste system builds rivalry and distrust and lack of empathy,” Wilkerson contends.
Will the dominant class –– through fear, anger, and resentment –– do anything, accept anything, to try to retain the power hierarchy? Think: sedition, treason, secession.
This week, the U.S. Department of Justice announced the indictment of members of the Oath Keepers, including the far-right group’s Texas-based founder, on charges of seditious conspiracy related to the January 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol insurrection.
Oathkeepers stack into the U.S. Capitol, along with other Trump supporters, during the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2022.
Reactions
People confronted with scenes of outright violence respond in different ways. Some –– like those who attended lynchings of black people in the American South, or German citizens who swooned when Hitler’s stormtroopers returned from invading Poland –– react with joy. Other people may be outraged at first but later find justification for ignoring or even condoning the violence.
For example, despite being an advocate of slavery Secretary of the Navy James K. Paulding reacted strongly after he witnessed what Wilkerson describes as “barefoot men and women locked together with the weight of an ox-chain in the beating sun, forced to walk the distance to damnation in a state father south and riding behind them, ‘a white man on horse back, carrying pistols in his belt, and who, as we passed him, had the impudence to look us in the face without blushing.’” Paulding said he was outraged to see “such flagrant and indecent outrages upon humanity … a villain, in thus marching half naked women and men, loaded with chains, without being charged with a crime but that of being black…” [Paulding, SECNAV from 1838 to 1841, was a contemporary of David Dixon Porter, Isaac Hull, and John Rodgers, serving with them on the Board of Navy Commissioners. Paulding was an ardent defender of slavery and called abolitionists “satanic.” He is also remembered for being opposed to steamships and engineers in the Navy.]
The armed services have come a long way in promoting equality and dignity, especially since the 1960s; nevertheless, military readers will cringe at some of the lack of empathy and outright prejudice and bigotry in the past.
MA1 Laymoun Ferguson lights a candle on National Holocaust Remembrance Day at Commander, Fleet Activities Sasebo. (MC3 Mackenzie P. Adams)
Wilkerson reminds us that during World War I, black soldiers were segregated not only from their fellow white warfighters but also from their European counterparts in uniform.
“American military command informed the French of how they were to treat the black soldiers, clarified for them that these men were ‘inferior beings,’ no matter how well they performed on the front lines, that it was of the utmost importance’ that they be treated as inferior.
“The fact that military command would take the time in the middle of one of the most vicious wars in human history to instruct foreigners on the necessity of demeaning their own countrymen suggests that they considered adherence to caste protocols to be as important as conducting the war itself.”
Black American heroes like Pvt. Burton Holmes and Cpl. Freddie Stowers, both killed in action, were blocked from receiving the Medal of Honor, despite nominations by their white officers who witnessed their bravery and “broke with caste” to nominate them. [Holmes was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross posthumously in 1919; Stowers’s sisters accepted the MoH on their brother’s behalf in 1991, presented by Navy/WWII veteran President George H.W. Bush.]
Veterans of both world wars came back from the warfront to confront Jim Crow racism and the construction of more monuments to losing leaders of the Civil War.
The 90-foot tall, 17,000-square-foot carving at Stone Mountain, Kennesaw, Georgia, honoring the Confederacy. Carving began in 1964, the year of the Civil Rights Act and a year before the signing of the Voting Rights Act. The carving was dedicated by Vice President Spiro Agnew in 1970. It was completed in 1972.
Retractions
Confederates lost the war but won the peace, according to Wilkerson, especially when thousands of monuments, symbols, and namesakes to traitors who fought to defend slavery were set up throughout the United States.
Local governments removed statues of Robert E. Lee, including in Charlottesville and Richmond, Virginia, last summer, and in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 2017 after public hearings. In New Orleans:
“At one hearing, a Confederate sympathizer had to be escorted out by police after he cursed and gave the middle finger to the audience. A retired lieutenant colonel in the Marine Corps, Richard Westmoreland, came at it from the other side. He stood up and said that Erwin Rommel was a great general, but there are no statues of Rommel in Germany. ‘They are ashamed,’ he said. ‘The question is, why aren’t we?’”
Germany looks at its history “without blinking,” highlighting the shame of what the Nazis did –– and what good people failed to do; but, the Germans are neither ashamed nor too proud to confront their history. They reject the hate of the Nazis and honor the victims of the Third Reich.
Wilkerson notes that U.S. Confederacy monuments on pedestals such as those honoring Robert E. Lee –– as well as Georgia’s Stone Mountain, bigger than Mt. Rushmore, featuring Lee, Jefferson Davis, and Stonewall Jackson –– are up high so everyone has to literally look up at them. But in Germany, where there are numerous monuments to the victims but none to Nazis, people see stolpersteine, stumbling stones embedded in the cobblestones, each denoting a victim of the holocaust or other Nazi horrors. “Leaning over to read the names on the stumbling stones forces you to bow in respect,” Wilkerson observes.
Stolpersteine commemorate the victims of the Nazis, who receive no monuments in Germany for their lost cause.
Traction
Sailors raise the flag on MLK Day in Yokosuka, Japan, Jan. 17, 2011. (PO2 Devin Dow)
MLK’s famously said, “We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.” He marched in Selma for voting rights. He realized that voting rights in a full and open democracy were key to ending casteism.
Some of Wilkerson’s own personal first-hand examples of dealing with casteism, particularly in a restaurant, dealing with a plumber, or while flying first class, seem petty and unnecessary in the context of the moral universe presented in the bulk of her book. However, I can understand if others feel differently.
On the other hand, Wilkerson’s conclusions at the end of this great book are as big as an arc can be, and her optimism is inspiring:
“We look to the night sky and see the planets and stars, the distant lights as specks of salt, single grains of sand, and are reminded of how small we are, how insignificant our worries of the moment, how brief our time on this planet, and we wish to be part of something bigger than ourselves, to magnify our significance, to matter somehow as more than the dust that we are.
“Even the longest lived of our species spends but a blink of time in the span of human history. How dare anyone cause harm to another soul, curtail their life or life’s potential, when our lives are so short to begin with?”
A view of our galaxy. (NASA)
Wilkerson concludes that the answer is in our hands: “We are responsible for our own ignorance or, with time and openhearted enlightenment, our own wisdom. We are responsible for ourselves and our own deeds or misdeeds in our time and in our own space and will be judged accordingly by succeeding generations.” Isn’t the answer truly in our hands when we hold a good book –– or a ballot?
Wilkerson, author of “The Warmth of Other Suns,” is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize. In 2016 President Barack Obama presented Wilkerson with the National Humanities Medal for "championing the stories of an unsung history."
Former Lt.Cmdr. Ed Vezey, a Pearl Harbor survivor who was aboard USS Oklahoma (BB-37) during the attack of December 7, 1941, told me recently his favorite author is James D. Hornfischer. Among the books on Vezey's Kindle are "Neptune's Inferno," "Last of the Tin Can Sailors" and his top pick, "Ship of Ghosts." "That book had the most impact on me," Vezey said. "The thing I like about it is how it goes from civilian life to what they did despite the inhumanity they witnessed. Hornfischer really knows how to show the brutality of naval combat. [USS] Houston ran right into the buzzsaw." For Vezey, who is reportedly the last USS Oklahoma Pearl Harbor survivor living in the State of Oklahoma, "The Guadalcanal Campaign was worse than Pearl Harbor. During the war, instead of hour after hour, it was weeks and months, every day and every night." Vezey recalls "no good torpedoes" against the enemy, waters "teeming with submarines," and the effects of a battleship's ferocious guns targeting smaller ships. "Sixteen-inch guns would go right through a destroyer, and they would try to hit below the water line." Vezey is expected to speak at the USS Oklahoma Memorial Ceremony on Ford Island next weekend during the Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day. The memorial is located adjacent to Battleship Row, where USS Oklahoma was berthed in 1941 and where Battleship Missouri Memorial sits today. Vezey helped make the USS Oklahoma Memorial a reality. The memorial, dedicated Dec. 7, 2007, is in tribute to 429 Marines and Sailors who lost their lives aboard the USS Oklahoma during the attack. In an interview with Brandice J. Armstrong at Tinker Air Force Base in 2010, Vezey, who had reported to USS Oklahoma in April 1941 as an ensign, said, "It's hard to convey to non-Sailors how important this ship is when you're a Sailor. It's your mother, your home and if you spend a lot of time at sea like we did, it's the fundamental island [of] security." Today, Vezey exercises daily and lives a healthy lifestyle. He has two 'themes' in life.
A USS Oklahoma Sailor uses nap time to read. Courtesy USSOklahoma.com.
"The first is that life is one whale of an adventure, but don't let go when it tries to throw you off," Vezey said. "The second is to keep pedaling, or else the bike will fall over. This is fundamentally true in your health, your job skills, your marriage. If you stop pedaling, all of a sudden you discover life is passing you by." "Life can be great if you don't quit." That attitude is reflected in Hornfischer's "Ship of Ghosts" (see the next blog post) and, a generation later, in Craig Venter's autobiography, "A Life Decoded."
On this "Day of the Dead" reading books is still alive and well. Recent Navy Reads posts about Thomas Jefferson, Susan B. Anthony, Thomas Paine and Craig Venter – and on subjects like Jihad-Fatwa, hope vs. fear, the meaning of life, and history in context – led to the discovery of these delectable excerpts from related reads.
from "Burqas, Baseball, and Apple Pie: Being Muslim in America" by Ranya Tabari Idliby: "Fear is not the American way, I remind my children. So although feel America's fear, and on some days even share its contempt or disdain, I do not believe that doing so reflects America at its best. As we strive for a better American union, it is knowledge and compassion, rather than fear mongering and ignorance, that must reign supreme. Today more than ever, America's hope, vision, and exceptionalism are needed as an inspiration for those who are aspiring and struggling to gain the freedoms and rights we already have. Banning imagined threats such as Sharia in an America that has had centuries of safeguarded and absolutely secular courts only serves to infringe on the equality and rights of Muslims as Americans, making them feel targeted and persecuted. It reflects a less than honest America, lacking in confidence, insecure in its mission. Let our conviction not be fear but knowledge and power – this has always been the American Way..."
from "The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation" by Matt Ridley: "The roots of social order are in our heads, where we possess the instinctive capacities for creating not a perfectly harmonious and virtuous society, but a better one than we have at present. We must build our institutions in such a way that they draw out those instincts. Pre-eminently this means the encouragement of exchange between equals. Just as trade between countries is the best recipe for friendship between them, so exchange between enfranchised and empowered individuals is the best recipe for cooperation. We must encourage social and material exchange between equals for that is the raw material of trust, and trust is the foundation of virtue."
from "The Underground Girls of Kabul: In Search of a Hidden Resistance in Afghanistan" by Jenny Nordberg: "Perhaps someday in our future it will be possible for women everywhere not to be restricted to those roles society deems natural, God-given, or appropriately feminine. A woman will not need to be disguised as a man to go out, to climb a tree, or to make money. She will not even need to make an effort to resemble one, or to think like one. Instead, she can speak a language that men will want to understand. She will be free to wear a suit or a skirt or something entirely different. She will not count as three-quarters of a man, and her testimony will not be worth half of a man's. She will be recognized as someone's sister, mother and daughter. And maybe, someday, her identity will not be confined to how she relates to a brother, son, or father; instead, she will be recognized as an individual, whose life holds value only in itself. It will not be the end of the world, the nation-state, or sexuality. It will not solve all the world's problems. But it is an exciting promise of how we might continue to evolve, through small bursts of individual greatness alongside a slow overhaul of civilization."
from "The Meaning of Human Existence" by Edward O. Wilson: "The advances of science and technology will bring us to the greatest moral dilemma since God stayed the hand of Abraham: how much to retrofit the human genotype Shall it be a lot, a little bit, or none at all? The choice will be forced on us because our species has begun to cross what is the most important yet sill least examined threshold in the technoscientific era. We are about to abandon natural selection, the process that created us, in order to direct our own evolution by volitional selection – the process of redesigning our biology and human nature as we wish them to be." "Science and the humanities, it is true, are fundamentally different from each other in what they say and do. But they are complementary to each other in origin, and they arise from the same creative processes in the human brain. If the heuristic and analytic power of science can be joined with the introspective creativity of the humanities, human existence will rise to an infinitely more productive and interesting meaning."
from "The Origins of Crowd Psychology: Gustave Le Bon and the Crisis of Mass Democracy in the Third Republic" by Robert A. Nye: "The great historian of Victorianism G. M. Young has written 'The real, central theme of history is not what happened, by what people felt about it when it was happening.' No doubt Young does not mean to say that what happened has no bearing in assembling a version of the historical past; but he hopes to stress that contemporaries in any epoch only rarely grasp the nature and significance of the historical forces shaping their lives. Marx, Tocqueville, Weber, and other giants of nineteenth-century social thought notwithstanding, it seems safe to say that most observers of the process and consequences of European industrialization and urbanization suffered from a manifest incongruence between what actually occurred and how they perceived it. And it seems equally safe to say that very often the illusory perception of a generation will refuse to die with it, but will live on, barely transformed, to haunt later generations. It follows that the historian must take these perceptions seriously insofar as they served as truisms that influenced men and women's attempts to make sense of a complex social reality."
from "Conversations with Kennedy" by Benjamin C. Bradlee: "The helicopter took off in a dark overcast for the jump across the bay. Halfway across, the president spotted the crew of a carrier lined up at attention along the deck, presumably in his honor, and asked the chopper pilot to circle low over the carrier to show that he was aware and appreciative of their respect. The Navy has a special hold on him, irrespective of his rank as commander in chief. We landed on the lawn of Hammersmith Farm, in a scene that was half space-age pomp and half 'Wuthering Heights.' The wind whistled from the helicopter blades, but the light was that dark yellow light of a New England fall evening, and that barn of a house could have been brought over intact from the Bronte moor. This was the first time we had seen Jackie since the death of little Patrick, and she greeted JFK with by far the most affectionate embrace we had ever seen them give each other. They are not normally demonstrative people, period."
By Bill Doughty Seventy-five years ago we were in the middle of a war that changed the world for good, bringing democracy and freedom to most of the Pacific and Europe. For the United States the Second World War lasted just over 3 1/2 years. Today, thinking people know WWII was necessary (just as America's Civil War was regrettable but necessary to end slavery). Then, 25 years later and 50 years ago, the United States fought in a war that, at the time, we weren't supposed to call "war." The "Vietnam Conflict" lasted for more than a decade. Now that half a century has passed since the height of the conflict, is it possible to evaluate the war and confront the reality of its aftermath? In "The Vietnam Reader" (Routledge, 1991) editor Walter Capps recounts:
"More than 58,000 Americans died as a result of the military hostilities. Hundreds of thousands more were wounded. Approximately twenty percent of those who serve have experienced deep and persistent emotional distress and psychological trauma. More than twice the number of those who lost lives there have taken their own lives since returning home. Huge percentages of America's homeless are veterans of the war. And when the Vietnamese people are included in these demographics, the statistics are even more alarming. Approximately 2 million Indochinese lost their lives from 1961 to 1975, and millions more were victims from the carnage that followed, principally, in Cambodia. The more we learn of the war, the heavier the burden becomes."
Was the Vietnam War necessary? How did it start? Why didn't it end sooner? What were the effects on the world, nation and the young Americans who served? The following list of 50 books for 50 years – remembering the Vietnam War – is not meant to be all-inclusive or in any perfect order, but many of these titles are listed in the top books to read on the subject. If readers have recommended additions to this list, please feel free to send suggestions via "comments." There are reportedly already more than 30,000 books published, and new books will continue to be published about the Vietnam War. That's especially true in the next several years as we continue to commemorate the sacrifice, remember the tragedy, and understand how and why it all happened 50 years ago. Broad Sweep "A Bright and Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam" by Neil Sheehan. Random House, 1988. Opens with a funeral for one of the architects of the war, John Vann, and the book follows his involvement in perpetuating the war until his death in a helicopter crash. "Good intentions gone awry." "In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam" by Robert S. McNamara with Brian VanDeMarr. Times Books, Random House, 1995. "Yet we were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why." "Vietnam: A History" by Stanley Karnow. The Viking Press, 1983, 1991. "The names of the dead engraved on the granite record more than lives lost in battle: they represent a sacrifice to a failed crusade, however noble or illusory its motives." "A Rumor of War" by Philip Caputo. Henry Holt and Company, 1977, 1996. "This book does not pretend to be history. It has nothing to do with politics, power, strategy, influence, national interests, or foreign policy; nor is an indictment of the great men who led us into Indochina and whose mistakes were paid for with the blood of some quite ordinary men." "The Best and the Brightest" by David Halberstam. Ballantine Books, 1972. "They had turned to the bombing out of their own desperation, because what they were doing no longer worked and because bombing was the easiest thing. It was the kind of power which America wielded most easily, the greatest technological superpower poised against this preposterously small and weak country." "America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975" by George C. Herring. Temple University Press, 1979. "The tonnage of bombs dropped on Indochina during the Nixon era exceeded that of the Johnson years, wreaking untold devastation, causing permanent ecological damage to the countryside, and leaving millions of civilians homeless... The war polarized the American people as had no issue since slavery a century before." "About Face: The Odyssey of an American Warrior" by Col. David H. Hackworth and Julie Sherman. Touchstone, Simon & Shuster, 1989. "The United States ... is a great country with a great heritage; it has set a good example in the past and it can do so in the future, if only it begins to choose its battles carefully and makes sure its causes are right." "The Pentagon Papers: The Secret History of the Vietnam War" by E.W. Kenworthy, Fox Butterfield, Hedrick Smith and Neil Sheehan. New York Times, Quadrangle Books, 1971. "The Pentagon papers, despite shortcomings and gaps, form a great archive of government decision-making on Indochina over three decades. The papers tell what decisions were made, how and why they were made and who made them." "The World Almanac of the Vietnam War" edited by John S. Bowman, introduction by Fox Butterfield. "It was the first war the United States lost, though because of superior U.S. firepower and mobility it won virtually every battle... For the soldiers who fought it, it was a war maddeningly without front lines, against an enemy who often wore civilian clothes, and had no clear objective other than 'body count.'" New, Fresh Insights "Vietnam: A New History" by Christopher Goscha. Basic Books, 2016. Sweeping in scope. "The United States was hardly the first 'great power' to send their warships into the waters off Vietnam's coastline. Indeed, if Vietnam is recognizable to so many today, it is largely because this small country is located in one of those coveted parts of the world where the 'treat powers' repeatedly collide." "Enduring Vietnam: An American Generation and Its War" by James Wright. Thomas Dunne Books, St. Martin's Press, 2017. "Absent tangible military goals, it was hard to produce tangible military results." "Vietnam: A History of the War" by Russell Freedman. Holiday House, 2016. A young adult book that synthesizes in words and pictures a wide swath of history, with chapters including "Ho Chi Minh: The Making of a Revolutionary," "The French War in Vietnam: The Elephant and the Tiger," "Tumbling Dominoes," "From the Tonkin Gulf to Rolling Thunder," "The TET Offensive," "The Fall of Saigon," and "Reconciliation." "Walking Point: From the Ashes of the Vietnam War," a memoir by Perry A. Ulander. North Atlantic Books, 2016. "I would like to dedicate this book to all the people who, having put their faith and trust in social, political, or religious institutions, discovered that their faith had been misplaced and their trust betrayed." "Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War" by Viet Than Nguyen. Harvard University Press, 2016. "Perhaps some things will never be remembered, and yet also never forgotten. Perhaps some things will remain unspoken and yet always heard... This is the paradox of the past, of trauma, of loss, of war, a true war story where there is no ending but the unknown, no conversation except that which cannot be finished." "By Honor Bound: Two Navy Seals, The Medal of Honor, and a Story of Extraordinary Courage" by Tom Norris and Mike Thornton with Dick Couch and a foreword by Bob Kerrey, Medal of Honor recipient. St. Martin's Press, 2016. "This is the incredible story of two Navy SEALs who went back. One for a buddy, the other for a brother warrior he had never met. The actions of both represent the pinnacle of courage and selfless service." More History "Hunters and Shooters: An Oral History of the U.S. Navy SEALs in Vietnam" edited by Bill Fawcett. William and Company, 1995. "Though numbering less than 150 men in-country at any one time, the SEALs had an effect on the enemy far out of proportion to their numbers. Using the most conservative numbers, the SEALs accounted for 50 enemy dead for each SEAL lost." "We Were Soldiers Once... and Young: Ia Drang – the Battle that Changed the War in Vietnam" by Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore (Ret.) and Joseph L. Galloway. Random House, 1992. "So this is the story about ... the first American combat troops, who boarded World War II-era troopships, sailed to that little-known place, and fought the first major battle of a conflict that would drag on for ten long years and come as near to destroying America as it did to destroying Vietnam." "Brown Water, Black Berets" by Thomas J. Cutler. Naval Institute Press, 1988. "In proportion to the other services, the in-country participation of the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard was very small: a peak strength of 38,000 Navy men compared with more than half a million total American servicemen in Vietnam at the height of the war. But those 38,000 grow to 1,842,000 when stretched over the years of the war, and those Navy and Coast Guard men [and women] who served do not deserve to be forgotten." "Vietnam: The Naval History" by Frank Uhlig Jr. Naval Institute Press, 1986. "Before we engage in any similar war we must be sure, among other things that we can use our sea power properly. If for any reason we find that we will be unable to do that, or even are in doubt about it, we owe it to ourselves to find a solution to our problem other than war." "The Vietnam Wars: 1945-1990" by Marilyn Young. HarperCollins, 1991. "Veterans felt spat upon, stigmatized, contaminated. In television dramas, veterans were not heroes welcomed back into the bosom of loving families, admiring neighborhoods, and the arms of girls who loved uniforms; they were psychotic killers, crazies with automatic weapons. It was as if the country assumed that anyone coming back from Vietnam would, even should, feel a murderous rage against the society that had sent him there. The actual veteran – tired, confused, jet-propelled from combat to domestic airport – disappeared." "They Marched Into Sunlight: War and Peace, Vietnam and America, October 1967" by David Maraniss. Simon & Schuster, 1999. "Soldiers in Southeast Asia, student protesters in the United States, President Johnson and his advisers at the White House – they lived in markedly different worlds that were nonetheless dominated by the same overriding issue, and they all, in their own ways, seemed to be marching toward ambushes in those bright autumn days of 1967." "The Nightingale's Song" by Robert Timberg. Simon & Schuster, 1995. Profiles the "ascent" of five U.S. Naval Academy graduates: "madcap midshipman who rises to the U.S. Senate" John McCain, "Marine who becomes the kickass troubadour for a generation of Vietnam veterans" James Webb, "brave, resourceful but flawed Marine" Oliver North, "introverted foreign-policy intellectual": Marine Bud McFarlane and "model midshipman" John Poindexter. "Crucial to their ascent is Ronald Reagan, who called Vietnam 'a noble cause.'" "Where the Domino Fell: America and Vietnam, 1945-1990" by James S. Olson and Randy Roberts. St. Martin's Press, 1991. "Even when American policymakers began to see Vietnam for the quagmire it was, disengagement was excruciatingly difficult... The war was a colossal blunder born of an odd mixture of paranoia and arrogance." "Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies that Led to Vietnam."HarperCollins,1997. (Please see recent Navy Reads review for excerpts.) "The Ten Thousand Day War: Vietnam: 1945-1975" by Michael Maclear. St. Martin's Press, 1981. "The Vietnamese, South and North, had against all odds endured and fought the century's longest war, and before that a century of foreign rule – and history must judge them foremost in terms of human fortitude and courage..." First Person "Everything We had: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Thirty-Three American Soldiers Who Fought It" compiled by Al Santoli. Random House, 1981. "This is a book by thirty-three veterans of the Vietnam War. We have tried to put into honest words the raw experience of what happened to us... Until the broader public fully comprehends the nameless soldier, once an image on your television screen, the nation's resolution of the experience called Vietnam will be less than adequate." "Dispatches" by Michael Herr. Everyman's Library, Alfred A. Knopf, 1968, 2009. "There were times when the whole war itself seemed tapped of its vitality: epic enervation, the machine running half-assed and depressed, fueled on the watery residue of last year's war-making energy. Entire divisions would function in a bad dream state, acting out a weird set of moves without any connection to their source. Once I talked for maybe five minutes with a sergeant who had just brought his squad in from a long patrol before I realized that the dopey-dummy film over his eyes and the fly abstraction of his words were coming from deep sleep." "Beyond Survival: Building on the Hard Times – A POW's Inspiring Story" by Gerald Coffee. G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1990. (For excerpt, please read the Navy Reads review.) "Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War" by Wallace Terry. Random House, 1984. "For me the thought of being killed in the Black Panther Party by the police and the thought of being killed by Vietnamese was just a qualitative difference. I had left one war and came back and go into another one. Most of the Panthers then were veterans... We had already fought for the white man in Vietnam. It was clearly his war. If it wasn't, you wouldn't have seen as many Confederate flags as you saw. And the Confederate flags was an insult to any person that's of color on this planet." "Legend" by Eric Blehm. Crown Publishers, 2015. The story of Green Beret Staff Sergeant Roy Benavidez's rescue of a special forces team behind enemy lines. "His body – a torn-up canvas of bullet holes, shrapnel wounds, bayonet lacerations, punctures, burns, and bruises – painted a bloody portrait of his valor that day." "Steinbeck in Vietnam: Dispatches from the War" edited by Thomas E. Barden. "I had always thought of East Asia as old, old in the sense of being tired and worn out, and second of being unbearably overpopulated. Neither preconception is true. The people are young and fresh and inventive, the lands are huge ... Conquest is no longer possible or desirable but cooperation is not only necessary but inevitable." "In Love & War: The story of a family's ordeal and sacrifice during the Vietnam Years" by Jim and Sybil Stockdale. Harper & Row, 1984. "Washington's second thoughts, the guilt, the remorse the tentativeness, the changes of heart, the backout. And a generation of young Americans would get left holding the bag." "The Soldiers' Story: Vietnam in Their Own Words" by Ron Steinman. TV Books, 1999. "One marine says he and his buddies lived only for 'Semper Fi,' always faithful to the basic precept of one for all, all for one. Every man in the book echoes that thought. Soldiers helped each other because they knew they could get help in return." "...And a Hard Rain Fell: A GI's true story of the war in Vietnam" by John Ketwig. Source Books, 2002. "I love to go to the Vietnam Memorial on the mall in Washington, D.C., and I believe I can 'read the writing on the wall.' I find it difficult to assimilate the realities of Vietnam with the American 'truths we hold to be self-evident.'" Aftermath "American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity" by Christian G. Appy. Viking, 2015. "It was still unimaginable to most Americans that their own nation would wage aggressive war and justify it with unfounded claims, that it would support antidemocratic governments reviled by their own people, and that American troops would be sent to fight in countries where they were widely regarded not as liberators, but as imperialist invaders." "Last Men Out: The True Story of America's Heroic Final Hours in Vietnam" by Bob Drury and Tom Clavin. Free Press, Simon & Schuster, 2011. "The long Vietnam War was over. There was a sadness to the moment, a sense of loss. Yet at the time, each Saigon MSG (Marine Corps Security Guard) felt buoyed by the knowledge that he had helped to secure one small triumph in the war's final crucible. Their country may have lost something that it might never recover. But they had persevered with dignity and courage. It was all the Marine Corps could have asked of them. It was all that they could have asked of themselves." "Chickenhawk Back in the World: Life After Vietnam" by Robert Mason. Viking Penguin, 1993. "Finally, I have come to realize that the most significant thing I lost in that war was peace. When Polynesian sailors sail their canoes for weeks at a time on boundless seas without charts or compasses, they believe that they are sitting still, on a vacant earth, and that by moving their paddles correctly, by setting their sails properly, an island, their destination will arrive on the horizon and come to them." Mason is author of the classic work of "fiction," "Chickenhawk," his personal narrative. "The Father of All Things: A Marine, His Son, and the Legacy of Vietnam" by Tom Bissell. Pantheon Books, 2007. "War is a force of influence above all else – the most purely distilled form of partisanship ever devised. Yet war's energies and dark matter are too complicated to allow anyone the certain physics of right and wrong." "Stolen Valor: How the Vietnam Generation Was Robbed of its Heroes and its History" by B.G. Burkett and Glenna Whitley. Verity Press, 1998. "Still, the popular perception of Vietnam veterans as victims tortured by memories – drug abusers, criminals, homeless bums, or psychotic losers – did not fit me or anybody I knew who had served in Vietnam." "The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam" by James William Gibson. Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986. "A new war will not redeem U.S. defeat in Vietnam. There is no such thing as 'new, improved' technowar that will produce more value for the investment... Instead, another major war against a popular insurgency only offers the prospect of more death and destruction. The insurgents will suffer the most, but American soldiers will die, too... To finally understand the American defeat in Vietnam is to understand how the United States both created and became entrapped by a mythology and a war-production system." Northern Exposure "Fire In the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam" by Frances FitzGerald. Atlantic Monthly Press; Little, Brown and Company, 1972. "For the Americans in Vietnam it would be difficult to make this leap of perspective, difficult to understand that while they saw themselves as building world order, many Vietnamese saw them merely as the producers of garbage from which they could build houses." "The Girl in the Picture: The Story of Kim Phuc, the Photograph and the Vietnam War" by Denise Chong. Viking, 20000. "In the voiceless cry of the girl in the picture is the silence of guilt, of public and private flaws. War, any war, not just the Vietnam war, has dimensions of moral ambiguity." "Ho Chi Minh: A Life" by William J. Duiker. Hyperion, 2000. "For Americans, the debate over Ho Chi Minh arouses passions over a war that is now past. For Vietnamese, it conjures up questions of more fundamental importance, since it defines one of the central issues in the Vietnamese revolution – the relationship between human freedom and economic equality in the emerging postwar Vietnam." "PAVN: People's Army of Vietnam" by Douglas Pike. Presidio Press, 1986. "The Vietnam War represented something new on the world scene, a different concept of war, one involving a radically new grand strategy... That perhaps is the moral to be drawn: we must disenthrall ourselves about Vietnam. We must look anew and come to see clearly what happened to us there and what that means for our future." "Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered From All Sides" by Christian G. Appy. Viking, 2003. "What might happen to our conception of the Vietnam War if we simply began to hear the accounts of American veterans alongside the memories of the Vietnamese who fought with and against them? What if we witnessed those distant jungle firefights through the eyes of the people who regarded the battlefield as home and called this epic struggle 'The American War'?" Fiction "The Things They Carried" by Tim O'Brien. Broadway Books,1990; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009. Unabridged audiobook read by Bryan Cranston; Audible, 2013. The weight of Vietnam. "They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing—these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight. They carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of cowardice barely restrained, the instinct to run or freeze or hide, and in many respects this was the heaviest burden of all, for it could never be put down, it required perfect balance and perfect posture. They carried their reputations. They carried the soldier's greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing." O'Brien is also the author of the acclaimed novel "Going After Cacciato." "Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War" by Karl Marlantes. Atlantic Monthly Press, 2010. "The light died. Voices were silenced. Darkness and fear replaced light and reason. The whisper of a leaf scraping on bark would make heads turn involuntarily and hearts gallop. The surrounding blackness and the unseen wall of dripping growth left no place to run. In that black wet nothingness the perimeter became just a memory. Only imagination gave it form." Marlantes is also author of "What It Is Like to Go to War." "Fields of Fire" by James Webb. Prentice-Hall, 1978. "Hodges sat against a wet, grassy paddy dike and lazily stirred a can of Beef and Potatoes with a dirty plastic spoon. Raindrops popped and sizzled as they pelted the tiny stove in front of him, which he had made by punching holes in another C-ration tin. His eyes were sunken, his face gaunt and bearded. He dragged mechanically on a muddy cigarette, mindless of the stream of water that was pouring off his helmet down the back of his neck. There was no way to avoid the rain. His body was crinkly from it and he didn't care anymore." "Close Quarters" by Larry Heinemann. Penguin, 1977. "The war works on you until you become part of it, and then you start working on it instead of it working on you, and you get deep-down mean. Not just kidding mean; not movie-style John Wayne mean, you get mean for real." "The Sorrow of War: A Novel of North Vietnam" by Bao Ninh. Riverhead Books, 1991, 1993. "My life seems little different from that of a sampan pushed upstream towards the past. There is no new life,no new era, nor is it hope for a beautiful future that now drives me on, but rather the opposite. The hope is contained in the beautiful prewar past."
Bogged down: Marine PFC J.L. Collins keeps a battery pack dry as he wades through a muddy hole while on a search mission with "I" Company, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, 12 miles south-southwest of DaNang Vietnam, ca 1968. (Photo by USMC, courtesy National Archives)
Missing in this list are the books about the French experience in Vietnam in the 1950s, which is connected to the war in the 1960s and early 70s. Historians and writers like Fredrick Logevall, author of "Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam," show a thread from WWI through WWII through the Korean War through The Cold War that leads to the war in the 60s and early 70s. Another book from that era is frequently cited as a top read: Graham Greene's "Quiet American." As a Navy read, "From Pearl Harbor to Vietnam: The Memoirs of Admiral Arthur W. Radford,"edited by Stephen Jurika, Jr, is indispensable. Radford's memoirs were published by Hoover Institution Press, Stanford University, in 1980 (with excerpts printed as early as 1949 by various publishers). Radford's memoirs gives a first-person account and insight on how Indochina continued to be a glowing ember after WWII and through the early 70s. Another candidate for the "50 for 50" is J. Craig Venter's biography, "A Life Decoded - My Genome: My Life," reviewed previously on Navy Reads. And for a far-out future perspective based on his Vietnam experience, read Joe Haldeman's highly recommended "The Forever War."
