These two fallacies were used to justify any number of atrocities from support of corrupt regimes such as those of Diem and Thieu, to forcing peasants off their land into Strategic Hamlets, to the bombing of villages and the use of chemical warfare (napalm and other herbicides) to 'destroy them in order to save them.' This of course just served to strengthen the resolve of the NLF, or more commonly known as Viet Cong (where Cong was to mean Communist). Worse, they harbored an illusion of the domino theory: if Vietnam was to fall to communism, all of American interests in south-east Asia and the Pacific would be compromised. The Americans from Eisenhower to Kennedy to Johnson and then Nixon, all suffered from a colonialist viewpoint thinking that the Vietnamese were a backwards and malleable people. I really liked the Thai proverb that FitzGerald quoted on page 41, 'While it is worthwhile to try and help an elephant that is trying to stand up, but perfectly useless to help one that happens to be falling down.' Following the defeat of the French colonists in the late 50s, there was an artificial split along the 17th parallel between north and south Vietnam which FitzGerald argues was arbitrary and ultimately fatal to any effort from the west to hold up over time. Their relationship with neighboring countries - Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia - has been tense with warfare and animosity.

Their religion remains to this day primarily ancestor worship / Confuscism with a smattering of Buddhism and Catholicism. The Vietnamese are a proud people that issue from southern China and live on the eastern coast of the Indochinese peninsula. The second part is more detailed on the American War, ending as I said in '72 after the Tet Offensive and Nixon's schizophrenic intensification of the war while withdrawing troops. As stated in the title, the book is split into two parts: the first part is an attempt to explain the Vietnamese as a people before colonization, during the French Indochina period and during the two Indochina wars. A triple crown winner (Bancroft Prize, National Book Award and Pulitzer), it is an impressive piece of scholarship and analysis. Outstanding analysis of the Vietnamese people and the American War from Frances FitzGerald written in 1972, so 3 years before the fall of Saigon.

Fire in the lake by frances fitzgerald