MEYERSON : Vinh Long (fülszöveg)
This report is unique. Harvey Meyerson, a journalist, elected to search for an understanding of our involvement in Vietnam by focusing entirely on Vinh Long, a province in the Mekong Delta southwest of Saigon. He became intimately acquainted with its bustling capital, its villages, its tiny hamlets, its remote outposts.
"We were trying to inject a suffering people with the American dream and they were rejecting it as the blood stream might reject a foreign body." Thus he states the theme of his two-year study of the American effort in Vinh Long.
What emerges is a microcosm of the war that brings much of its apparent confusion into sharp focus. We follow a pacification project from its conception in an air conditioned conference room, through its implementation in the field, to its disastrous "success" months later. We learn the hither-to untold story of the bizarre events leading up to the Tet Offensive that changed the shape of the war. Here too is the moving account of one American's struggle with his conscience, and of another's escape into a fantasy world of statistics.
California Congressman John V. Tunney himself conducted an on-the-spot investigation of the pacification program in South Vietnam for the House Foreign Affairs Committee of which he is a member. "What sets Vinh Long apart from other books," writes Congressman Tunney in his introduction, "is that the broad American characterizations about the war are here examined against the merciless reality of the situation in a single province . . . If peace comes to Vietnam, it must come to Vinh Long. If you are to understand the prospects for peace, your chances are better if you understand them in Vinh Long."
Time is getting late for understanding. This is an urgent book.
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| KATALÓGUS | TARTALOM |
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