It’s all around us and is destined to remain all around us: the perpetual star-spangled, noisy tribute to lives lost defending the Empire aka The Homeland aka Our Freedoms, in the myriad US invasions abroad, following the defeat of Fascism in 1945. Yes, there are tributes to the events and personalities of that last item as well, but by this time, and apart from occasional movies, mainly in the (paid) Obituaries columns of the fast-disappearing daily newspapers. Overwhelmingly, it’s Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. If dissenting ideas sneak in now and then—perhaps some wars were really unnecessary and lives apparently lost or broken in vain—the familiar message nevertheless comes through, NFL extravaganzas to election appeals, no more so than in the recent Commander-in-Chief Showdown between Clinton and Trump.
We are never going to get a better truth-telling antidote than the one John Marciano provides in The American War in Vietnam: Crime or Commemoration? Longtime activist and scholar, author of Civil Illiteracy and Education, the battle for the Hearts and Minds of American Youth and co-author of Teaching the Vietnam War, Marciano knows his stuff. This text has been battle-tested, so to speak, in the classroom, among the kinds of ordinary kids who enlist in the military for educational funding (before retirement, he taught at SUNY Cortland).
He quickly brings us to one of the most painful truth in all of American life: the Vietnam War must be seen by…