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Judging from the books that come out, it sometimes seems that the Vietnam War, two decades after its ending, remains more alive and contentious to those who did not fight in or serve during it than it does to those who did. As an Army veteran of 1966-69 who spent 10 months in infantry training but never, thank God, had to go to Vietnam, I rarely read about the war. Perhaps I avoid reading about it, but, if I do, then so do most of my veteran friends.
That's a highly audacious generalization, I realize, and probably based on knowing the wrong people. Besides, as someone has said, the Vietnam War is like malaria, always awaiting a new moment. The newest moment has arrived in the form of a book in which that anonymous someone is quoted: The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War by Paul Hendrickson.
The author is not himself a veteran. In the year on which much of his book centers -- 1965 -- he was struggling with his decision to quit the seminary and his training for the priesthood. For many years now he has been a writer for the Washington Post, where he seems to have honed his reportorial skills well, because this is an exhaustively researched, extremely compelling book.
It is also an extremely angry book. In fact, I might say it is mostly an angry book. Hendrickson's anger is directed at Robert Strange McNamara, for his deceit and dissembling as secretary of defense during more than seven years of the long war -- and, moreover, for never having apologized for that deceit. Not so the other characters of his subtitle. Of the five lives of a lost war, only one is or was angry at McNamara -- an unnamed artist who once tried to throw him off the Martha's Vineyard ferry on a drizzly Friday night in 1972.
Of the remaining four, one is dead: Norman R. Morrison, a Quaker pacifist who burned himself to death outside McNamara's Pentagon office window November 2, 1965, to protest America's growing involvement in Vietnam. His widow told Hendrickson she didn't think he had especially hard feelings toward McNamara himself.
Similarly with the other three -- an ex-Marine, a former Army nurse, and a member of a Vietnamese family whose ties to the United States during the war brought the family terrible troubles. All of their lives were severely damaged by the war, but none of them has any particular animosity toward the former secretary of defense.
But the author's anger toward McNamara drives this book. Not just for the deceits he practiced (the largest being McNamara's pushing on with the war despite his early realization that it was unwinnable), but for betraying himself, for having the ability to do, finally, what you don't believe. For being -- Hendrickson quotes Walker Percy in another context -- the kind of fellow who got all A's but flunked life.
This is all right -- an author needs a point of view -- though a little less of it might have been more. Four-fifths of the way through he is still hammering the point home with superfluous reminders to us that a whirling war minister once ran a war, ran it badly.
Still, it's a minor weakness. The great strength of the book is its meticulous, I might even say exquisite, research, which took years. Hendrickson went to great lengths to track down witnesses. He spent hours, days, and sometimes weeks interviewing the principals. He traveled to sites and cities and hometowns to get the feel of what his characters experienced. All of which is pulled together by solid writing into five sections that closely examine how a dubious war affected six lives. Only the section on the former nurse, where his engaging and provocative style begins to verge on the rococo, is sometimes confusing or disorienting.
At the end, a personal note:
The Vietnam War will not go away until the generation that fought, or fought against, it does. My daughters, both intelligent women in their twenties, are supremely uninterested in the war -- and, as far as I can judge, so are their friends. It certainly won't go away as long as journalists like Hendrickson turn out irresistible books that even guys like me -- who avoid now the war they couldn't avoid then -- can't avoid reading.
Roger Miller is a freelance writer in Lopez, Pennsylvania. He can be reached at roger_miller@bookpage.com.
©1996, ProMotion, inc.