Fire in the Lake; The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam by FitzGerald, Frances - 1972

Boston: Little, Brown and Company [An Atlantic Monthly Press Book], 1972. Book Club Edition, also Third Printing [stated]. Hardcover. Good/Good. xiv, 491, [5] pages. Endpaper maps. Occasional footnotes. Note on the Title. Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Some endpaper soiling. Edges soiled. DJ has some wear, tears, and soiling. Frances FitzGerald (born October 21, 1940) is an American journalist and historian, who is primarily known for Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam (1972), an account of the Vietnam War. It was a bestseller that won the Pulitzer Prize, Bancroft Prize, and National Book Award. Her book Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam was serialized in five parts in The New Yorker in its newly-created "Annals of War" series starting in July 1972 earning her a Special Front Page Award. Fire in the Lake was met with great acclaim when it was published in August 1972. The book cautioned that the United States did not understand the history and culture of Vietnam and it warned about American involvement there. FitzGerald has continued to write about history and culture: her published books include America Revised, a highly critical review of history textbooks published in the United States; Cities on a Hill, an analysis of United States urban history compared to ideals; and Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War, a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Frances FitzGerald's landmark history of Vietnam and the Vietnam War, "A compassionate and penetrating account of the collision of two societies that remain untranslatable to one another." (New York Times Book Review) This magisterial work, based on Frances FitzGerald's many years of research and travels, takes us inside the history of Vietnam--the traditional, ancestor-worshiping villages, the conflicts between Communists and anti-Communists, Catholics and Buddhists, generals and monks, the disruption created by French colonialism, and America's ill-fated intervention--and reveals the country as seen through Vietnamese eyes. FIRE IN THE LAKE was the first history of Vietnam written by an American. With a clarity and insight unrivaled by any author before it or since, Frances FitzGerald illustrates how America utterly and tragically misinterpreted the realities of Vietnam. This was the first major book by an American on Vietnam, its history, and the United States activities there. FitzGerald said it was a "first draft of history." She explored thousands of years of the history and culture of Vietnam, showing how these affected the relations of its peoples with their encounter with the United States. She says that the US understood little about the country and its leaders, reacting to the threat of communism rather than recognizing the nation's long struggle to gain and keep its independence from foreign invaders. She argued that American values of freedom, democracy, optimism, and technological progress were inconsistent with Vietnam's values, culture, agrarian economy, and long history of warfare with France and China, making the Vietnam War effort doomed from the start. The Vietnamese sense of government, history, politics, and war is completely different from the American one. They have had a cultural tradition of ancestor worship and a different belief in what constitutes effective government (the Mandate of Heaven). The US government's failure to acknowledge these differences led to its failure in waging war there against the North Vietnamese and insurgents. FitzGerald wrote, "But the American officials in supporting the Saigon government insisted that they were defending 'freedom and democracy' in Asia. They left the GIs to discover that the Vietnamese did not fit into their experience of either 'communist' or 'democrats.' Under different circumstances this invincible ignorance..." She continued, "Whatever strategy the American government uses to carry on the war, it will only be delaying the inevitable." The book discusses the US government's ignorance of Vietnam's history, especially their determination to rid themselves of foreign invaders. They fought against Chinese domination for 1000 years, despite the latter's vastly superior population and resources. Many of the people considered United States forces to be another wave of foreign invaders. The book covers the history in depth and reaches the Tet Offensive 90% of the way through the narrative. It explores the Cao Dai monotheist religious sect in Tay Ninh, the corrupt regime of Ngo Dinh Diem, and "Nixon's War". In her discussion of the Battle of Bong Son, Fitzgerald discusses the futility of the US use of body counts to tally successes. The book is one of the first to explore the Vietnamese shanty towns that developed around US bases. They were centers of laundry services, bars and food, and prostitution.