Status Updates From Reporting Vietnam: American...

As a journalist myself, I really appreciate the breadth these Library of America advisors achieved in these two volumes. Among those advisors was Milton J. Bates, who wrote "The Wars We Took to Vietnam" and Lawrence Lichty, whose research work on media I've respected and the late great Marilyn B. Young. Those are just the names I recognize from past reading. Terrific job in achieving real breadth here.

This section switches state side for some Hunter S. Thompson from his Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72. While I'm not a fan of Thompson, he did write quite a striking overview of the Vietnam veterans who were active in marching and speaking about ending the war. I had forgotten that Ron Kovic winds up with a memorable cameo in this Thompson book.

I noted that there was "tragedy all around" in this war and now I'm reading some of the reporting about the devastation in the war's final years. In An Loc in 1972 "there are six buildings left in the town ... there were 30,000 civilians in An Loc two months ago. Now there are 3,000," wrote Rudolph Rauch for TIME. The litany of destruction goes on and on and still the generals claimed we were winning something.

I'm now in the middle of the volume 2 of Library of America's "Reporting Vietnam." In Volume 1, I was struck by how clear the early reporting was about the impossibility of "winning" such a war. Now in Volume 2, I'm reading long passages of reporting about what a devastated and dysfunctional culture and economy existed in "our" South Vietnam in the early 1970s. There's enough tragedy to go around for all involved.

Volume 2 opens with reporting on My Lai. In contrast, the vast majority of Ken Burns' 17-hour Vietnam documentary series is devoted to events before My Lai became public. The massacre took place in 1968 but was not widely known in the U.S. until late 1969. So, I'm curious as I begin this second volume how the Library of America editors considered My Lai as the mid point in reporting on the war.