Volume 42, Number 14 · September 21, 1995
No Trumpets, No Drums
By Jonathan Mirsky
The Sorrow of War: A Novel of North Vietnam
by Bao Ninh, translated by Phan Thanh Hao
Pantheon, 233 pp., $21.00
Novel Without a Name
by Duong Thu Huong, translated by Phan Huy Duong, by Nina McPherson
Morrow, 292 pp., $23.00
Paradise of the Blind
by Duong Thu Huong, translated by Phan Huy Duong, by Nina McPherson
Penguin, 270 pp., $9.95 (paper)
Reading these novels makes one raise a long-neglected question: How did the North Vietnamese win the war? If Robert McNamara has read them he must be even more baffled; he says in his recent memoir that he realized almost from the beginning that few Americans, including himself, knew much about the Vietnamese. His critics have condemned him for this, noting how just when the war started the White House and State Department scorned journalists like Bernard Fall and Jean Lacouture, who had come to know the country during the French War, or academic specialists like George Kahin and David Marr, who had studied Vietnamese nationalism. Nor did the military listen to its own experts, like Colonel David Hackworth or John Vann, who had fought the North Vietnamese and warned that unless the Americans adopted the tactics and perhaps the strategy of their enemy they would lose the war.
Review, 3822 words
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