Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam [Paperback]

This has got to be one of the most important books i've read in my life. It's 1972 or 1973, i've finished several years of college, VietNam dominates our thinking and hangs like a cloud over life, i eventually joined the Army in Jan 1973. I had a favorite and influential uncle who served in VietNam 1966-1970, and as a result i read everything that i could on VietNam.
This was the very best. Cool writing, but passionate underneath, scholarly but committed, historical but with the present always in mind. The best of writing and reading. Now as i review the book it looks so dated, for those memories although vivid are aged. But the book is still well written history done during the time with a political goal in mind, to inform the American public about the real issues of VietNam. As such it still bears reading, students who want to learn what those years were all about, or their elders wanting to revisit and re-evaluate long forgotten passions. In either case, this is a good place to start. For history may appear to be gone, but it is carried by those who were around, and as the years past, held ready for the inquirer in books such as these.

This book had a huge impact on me as a young man. It describes American involvement in Vietnam. While my position about Vietnam has changed considerably as the years pass, the impact of this book still leaves me with fond feelings for the skillful way the writer describes the ever-deepening quicksand that Vietnam became for our country. The writer describes the horrible descent-into-hell Vietnam became as the rural population flooded into urban areas, turning them into pits of filth and degradation for all that lived there. Fitzgerald describes the mistakes and bad luck, line by line, until, as one Vietnamese official of the time described it, America had fallen into a ï¿downward spiral.ï¿ A tragic and moving book.

Twenty-eight years after publication, and 25 after the war's end, Fire in the Lake remains one of the very best books on the Viet Nam war. Sadly, Americans are woefully ignorant of the rest of the world. We have little real knowledge of our own history; but for the rest of the world's history and culture, we have neither knowledge nor regarad. We do not even do the Vietnamese people the courtesy of respecting the name of their country--Viet Nam, not Vietnam; Sai Gon, not Saigon. FitzGerald helps to correct some of this ignorance and arrogance. She begins examining the U.S. in Viet Nam from the perspective of Vietnamese history and culture; and in the process, demonstrating the tenacity and courage of the Vietnamese people, as well as their determination to rid themselves of any foreign invaders, even if, as with the Chinese, it takes 1,000 years. Another great strength of FitzGerald's book is, with her attention to Viet Nam's history and culture and their 20th century struggle against the French, she demonstrates, in an almost matter of fact way, a fundamental tenent of U.S. foreign policy which has been repeated numerous times in the post World War II era. That central tenent is to support thugs over patriots, to elevate to power those who will sell out their people for 30 pieces of silver rather than work with those committed to the well being of their people. Ho Chi Minh was our ally during WWII; his hero was Thomas Jefferson, not Karl Marx or Stalin. He was very pro-American; yet he was a nationalist and a patriot first, which meant, from the perspective of the U.S., he was not only unreliable, but someone who had to be destroyed. And though FitzGerald does not carry her analysis beyond Viet Nam, an informed or a curious reader quickly can draw the parallels between U.S. policy in Viet Nam and U.S. policy in Africa, the Middle East, the Pacific rim (Indonesia specifically), South America, the Caribbean, and most obviously of all, Central America. Thus FitzGerald gives us not only the means of understanding the war in Viet Nam, and why we were doomed to lose, but also a point of departure for understanding the travesty of U.S. foreign policy for the last 100 years. Simply stated, the United States is an (economic) empire which cares nothing about democracy, self determination in other countries, which sees other people's patriotism and love of country as a threat to U.S. imperial interests. We can learn a lot from what FitzGerald has to say, about the Vietnames, and especially about ourselves.