This is the most powerful oral history book on the Vietnam experience I have ever read. These vets take you to the soul of their horror and grab you with the insanity of their current situation - it still eats at them every day.

Passing Time's time pasting took only one night! In that time W. D. Ehrhart flashed me back to '70, 68, 69, 71, and the nitexmasarclights of '72, Ho ho ho chi minhnity returns with both laughter and extreme anger! Ah! The ying and yang of it to me who calls Bill and old old dear friend whom I had never availed myself to his insight and wit like I did last night with Passing Time! Five stars *****, but never too soon to be a new motion picture. Of an old e-6 hippy from Perkasie, Pa, who graduated from Swarthmore College and worked at sea like all "Old Salt" gyrenes who went a few places, saw a few things and still live to tell about it in all speldid details from the heart. Perspicatious (if that can be now a new adjective!) jvb

RAMIREZ HAS BRAVELY WRITTEN AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY PLOTTING HIS LIFE'S PILGRIMAGE FROM CHILDHOOD TO SOBRIETY. AS A TRUE AMERICAN VIETNAM WAR HERO, HIS VERY PERSONAL TALE IS INTERTWINED WITH MOMENTS OF GREAT JOY, CONFUSION ABOUT HIS HERITAGE AND SELF-IDENTITY, DESTRUCTIVE BEHAVIOR AND HIS ULTIMATE SURVIVAL. I FOUND MYSELF ENTHRALLED BY RAMIREZ' WRITING STYLE. ON MORE THAN ONE OCCASSION, RAMIREZ' PROSE AND TIMING, IN THE MIDST OF THE MOST UNUSUAL CIRCUMSTANCES, RIVALS THE BEST. EVEN THOUGH I LAUGHED AND CRIED WITH RAMIREZ, HE NEVER LOOSES SIGHT OF WHO HE IS AND RECOGNIZES MILLIONS OF WAR VETERANS FOR TAKING A SIMILAR JOURNEY.

MY HAT IS OFF TO MR. RAMIREZ FOR WRITING A POIGNANT AND COMPELLING BOOK THAT FREELY EXPOSES HIS INNER FELLINGS. HIS WILLINGNESS TO SHARE HIS LIFE, FOR GOOD AND BAD, IS TRULY STIMULATING AND INSIGHTFUL.

Douglas Pike performed a valuable service to history by capturing the essence of the North Vietnamese strategy for victory in the Vietnam War. His explanation of the various techniques used to win not only victory on the battlefield, but, more importantly, strategic and political victories over both the American and South Vietnamese opponents, should be mandatory reading for anyone interested in how the United States lost this war. Well written and researched, this book is both enjoyable and disturbing.

The preface of Stuart Herrington's first memoir, "Stalking the Vietcong", relates the mood of the country in 1961: exhilarated, optimistic, omnipotent. He quotes Kennedy's inaugural, which included the pledge to "bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty". In "Peace With Honor?", his elegiac second memoir, we see the awful damage such grandiose promises can wreak.

Of course, any of the Cubans stranded without air support at the Bay of Pigs could have told the Vietnamese that some burdens were too heavy for the US to bear. Arthur Schlesinger explains in "A Thousand Days" how JFK didn't want to turn world opinion against his administration by supporting the invasion. That was a quick decision. In Richard Shultz' new book he details JFK's efforts to wage a covert war against Hanoi and still remain within the boundaries of all the international treaties. In other words, he decided to stop the North secretly, so as to maintain his honor--a less quick decision, but a decision all the same.

By the time of the fall of Saigon, the very notion of honor in Vietnam had become a little more than a source of bitter jokes. "Peace With Honor?" refers to President Nixon's version of honor in Vietnam, the Paris Peace Agreement. The question mark is added, I presume, because of the way Hanoi "honored" the agreement, and the way America enforced it. A ceasefire was declared, the Americans withdrew, the North regrouped, and attacked, and overran the South. "Peace With Honor?" is the final chapter of the tale that began with the pledge to "bear any burden". After fifteen long years the burden of Vietnam had become too heavy. A friend had to be betrayed and abandoned.

Herrington is unique in my experience with writers on Vietnam in that he knows the language. The Halberstams and the Karnows and the McNamaras have poured an ocean of words into explanations and perspectives of the war, but it all seems a little abstract next to Herrington's personal accounts. I doubt whether you can understand a culture or its problems, much less solve them, unless you speak to its people, and you can't speak to its people unless you know their language. Imagine trying to liberate France from the Nazis with no French speakers on your team. It could have been done, but would been much harder. Probably half the people in the Roosevelt administration knew some French. I wonder whether there was even one person in the Kennedy or Johnson or Nixon administrations that spoke Vietnamese.

"Peace With Honor?" then, is a portrait of the Vietnamese people, not just the southerners but those from the north as well, people from Hanoi and Saigon as well as peasants from the countryside. There is the heart-rending story of an 18-year-old boy drafted and killed in a few days, because his family elects not to pay off the conscription sergeant. There is the outrage and incomprehension of the South Vietnamese who watch the North violate the ceasefire with impunity and grind ever closer to their home. There is Col. Herrington's personal account of the evacuation airplane full of babies that crashed soon after take-off. He arrived to find the plane's fuselage "twisted and burning in the mud", and in the field around it "mud-covered infants strewn everywhere --some of them ashen-faced and quiet, others screaming in pain or fright". It would take the heart of a communist to view such a scene as a propaganda opportunity, and indeed that's what it became, with Hanoi's representatives claiming that the Americans were taking Vietnamese children to concentration camps.

One gets the impression from his conversations with North Vietnamese that they believed their own propaganda: an NVA Major insists Hanoi was bombed into rubble and that the socialist masses rebuilt the city, employing, according to Herrington, sophisticated aging techniques to make the buildings appear seventy years old. Another NVA Major tries to explain away the mass graves of civilians slaughtered in the city of Hue after it was taken during the Tet Offensive by saying they were caught in a crossfire. Herrington asks him whether he finds it unusual that the civilians had their hands tied behind their backs during the "crossfire".

The final third of the book finds Herrington struggling to evacuate as many people as he can from the collapsing Saigon. As for anyone who has come to know and love a culture, it was extremely painful for him to see it sacked. He spent a lot of time reassuring panic-stricken people that they would not be left behind to be reeducated or murdered. We Americans tend to view conflicts as presenting two options: stay and fight; or turn and run. But for the Saigonese in 1975 there was nowhere to run. In Cambodia, the only nearby country, the communists were arranging an even more efficient solution to the class enemy problem. Running in all other directions brought you to the sea.

So there was extreme terror and desperation. Near the end of the evacuation Herrington receives and obeys orders to leave on the final helicopter, though 420 people who have been assured of safe passage are still waiting on the embassy stairway. For the people of Vietnam this helicopter that never comes is the final betrayal.

I was reminded of the words of a novel that had been written a half a century before the war: "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy--they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made..."

Prepare to have your trust in government shattered. It illustrates the "credibility gap" during the Vietnam War, i.e., the gap between what Johnson and Kennedy were saying to the public and what was actually happening in Vietnam. The administrations constantly lie to the American public on our progress in the war. What's most interesting is reading these documents alongside speeches made to the public during this time by McNamara and Johnson. It's quite startling. Read this book.

This massive multi-volume study of US government policy on Vietnam has permanent value not just for scholars and students of the Vietnam War, but for anyone concerned with the making of American foreign policy. The "Papers" are fundamentally important not only in terms of content, of course, but even more so in contrast to the public statements of our leaders explaining the purpose and progress of the war. While this makes the (self-)deception and lies clear enough, it is the internal dialogue of bureaucratic thinking that is most fascinating.

The format of "The Pentagon Papers" is a bit confusing, with primary documents mixed into the main narrative, but not always in a distinguishable manner. The sheer bulk of the material will naturally deter many readers, but it does repay the effort and is superior to various abridgements. While the expurgated editions are useful, the nature of the selection process gives them an episodic quality, and tends to highlight dramatic incidents rather than the all-important mundane character of bureaucracy, even on life and death matters of global import.

Daniel Ellsberg, who released the papers to the press, may well have some unheroic qualities about him. But his greatness lay in transcending the constraints of background and institutional context, and recognizing a higher duty to his country and humanity. Not only the substance of "The Pentagon Papers" ensures their significance, but also Ellsberg's example of public service. This is vitally important in a time when yet another presidential administration deceives us all in pursuit of fatally flawed military adventures. Who will be the Daniel Ellsberg of the so-called "war on terror?"

Some of the issues raised by "The Pentagon Papers" and Ellsberg's career are addressed in N. Chomsky, "American Power and the New Mandarins" (especially the essays on intellectuals' responsibility); D. Ellsberg, "Secrets;" and from a rather different stance, J. Kwitny, "Endless Enemies." The fifth volume of the "Papers" contains invaluable critical essays by notable scholars such as Chomsky and Howard Zinn. For "balance," also look at Robert McNamara's mature reflections on Vietnam, "In Retrospect." But he still seems to be partly in denial.

Gibson's thesis is that we could never have won the war because we tried to see the Vietnamese on our terms instead of theirs. The Vietnam War was what he refers to as a "Technowar" -- since strength in the Western world has its basis in technology, we often have a tendancy to assume that is the same everywhere. This is what we did with our enemies in Vietnam -- we could not recognize their strengths because they were not like us. Because we had a stronger technological base, we thought there was no way we could lose the war, and ironically this way of thinking was a great contributer to our failures in Vietnam.

This book illustrates the importance of the courage of the men in the Vietnam War. The author was a journalist in the war, and he records everything he sees and hears. Your mind will be filled with detailed scenes from the actual war, you might even find yourself checking your shoulder for mortars!

From the horse's mouth in many cases, this book chronicles how the F-4 was actually used in combat. Highly recommended.