Volume 55, Number 18 · November 20, 2008
Vietnam: Dead Souls
By Jonathan Mirsky
Ghosts of War in Vietnam
by Heonik Kwon
Cambridge University Press, 222 pp., $30.00
The Boat
by Nam Le
Knopf, 272 pp., $22.95
The Vietnamese say, 'There are no enemies in cemeteries.' After reading Heonik Kwon's fascinating, important, and sometimes incomprehensible book, we might add, 'All apparitions are equal.' The most unexpected passages in Kwon's book refer to the hunt for MIAs, missing in action American servicemen. For many years, urged on by Presidents Reagan, Clinton, and Bush, the retrieval of those missing dead has been such a sensitive political issue that, during his visit to Hanoi in November 2006, President Bush paid only one call outside his official duties. He visited the American MIA office devoted to recovering the remains of American war dead.
Review, 2983 words
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