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Title: The Vietnam War (The Cold War) by Paul Dowswell, Paul Dowsell ISBN: 0-8368-5274-5 Publisher: World Almanac Pub. Date: March, 2002 Format: Library Binding Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $31.93

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Average Customer Rating: 4 (1 review)

Rating: 4
Summary: The Vietnam War laid out period by period for young readers
Comment: The Cold War is rapidly becoming a dim memory in a world shaped by September 11th, and with each year it will be harder to convince young students that when people my age were their age that we assumed that one day the Cold War was going to end in a heated nuclear exchange. The Cold War series has volumes devoted to "The Causes of the Cold War" and "The End of the Cold War," as well as pivotal conflicts such as the Berlin blockade, the Korean War, and the Cuban missile crisis. But if there is one part of the Cold War that has been transcendent, and which will continue to dominate American foreign policy in the 21st century, it is the legacy of the Vietnam War.

Actually, it is more the metaphor of the Vietnam War that matters, because every single military operation that the United States has engaged in since the last helicopter took off from the top of the U.S. Embassy in what was then called Saigon, South Vietnam, has been compared to Vietnam. The goal is to avoid "another" Vietnam, which was not a problem with invasions of Grenada and Panama, but a major concern with peacekeeping efforts in Bosnia. When the Soviet Union went into Afghanistan, it was seen as being "their" Vietnam. Today the American military effort in Afghanistan is on the back burner, and it is the occupation of Iraq that is being judged against the idea that it might be another "Vietnam." So even for young school children who were born after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, understanding the lessons of Vietnam is important.

In "The Vietnam War," Paul Dowswell goes all the way back to the beginning, looking at the history of Vietnam up to the start of the First Indochina War, 1946-1954, and the Second Indochina War, 1954-1963. The military involvement of the United States in the Vietnam War is covered in four chapters, against emphasizing a breakdown into distinct periods: Search and Destroy: Full U.S. Involvement (1964-1967), The Tet Offensive and its Aftermath (1968), Peace with Honor (1968-1970), The War Spreads (1970-1973), and the Final Conflict (1973-1975). The final chapter is devoted to the consequences of the war, focusing on what happened to Vietnam after the Americans left, and what happened to the American soldiers when they returned.

Throughout the volume pretty much each two-page spread includes historic photographs and sidebars on personalities (Ho Chi Minh, Nguyen Van Thieu, Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger), issues (the draft, American morale), and quotations from participants. The result is a nicely structured history of the Vietnam War as something that basically started at the end of World War II and continued for decades as Americans replaced the French on the losing side of the conflict. Dowswell does not focus on the specific lessons of the war explicitly, but in laying out the history of the war he certainly covers all the elements that are the key points of comparison between what happened in Southeast back then and what our military is doing any place else in the world ever since (Southeast Asia, ironically, might be the one place on the planet to which we might never send troops again).