The Wars We Took to Vietnam

Book excerpt: "Previous scholarship has established that American storytellers turned Vietnam into a landscape of American myth. Bates's lucid and judicious study . . . is a valuable addition to the conversation regarding the legacy of Vietnam."—John Hellmann, author of American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam "An absolutely stunning achievement. Milton Bates presents an incisively accurate analysis of the attitudes that shaped and controlled Americans' perceptions during the 1960s and '70s. He fuses literary analysis with historical scholarship to offer a comprehensive study of American thought and writing before, during, and after the war years. This is a book to be read carefully—and savored."—John Clark Pratt, author of The Laotian Fragments