Different Kind Of War Research Articles

The Overcoming of the Beyng of Machenschaft: Heidegger, Jünger, and T. E. Lawrence

ABSTRACT In 1939 Martin Heidegger made the astonishing claim that the overcoming of the beyng of machination occurs in T. E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom. He arrived at this assessment in the course of his attempt to distance himself from Friedrich Nietzsche and Ernst Jünger. It is well known that Heidegger formulated his understanding of machination in part in response to Jünger's account of total mobilization, but the importance for Heidegger of Jünger's accounts of his experiences at the Front also needs to be recognized. Lawrence presented Heidegger with a very different response to a different kind of war from that of Jünger. This paper highlights some passages in Seven Pillars that help to explain what led Heidegger to believe that Lawrence provided a model of how to avoid some of the pitfalls of Nietzsche's and Jünger's attempts to overcome metaphysics.

WHAT IS DISTINCTIVELY NEW ABOUT SO-CALLED ‘NEW’ WARS?

In the post-Cold war era, there has been a growing tendency to suggest the classification of ‘new’ wars, since the perception of the threat has changed. Since threats coming from within states have recently become dominant, many scholars have studied this development. The consensus they have reached is that this type of threat represents a different kind of war. Kalevi Holsti has named it a third kind of war (1996); Martin van Creveld has named it ‘Low-Intensity Conflict’ (1991); and Mary Kaldor has named it ‘new war’ (1999). This article will embrace Mary Kaldor’s ‘new war’ concept and use it to analyse and describe this different kind of war and compare it with old wars. In contrast to these aforementioned arguments, some scholars, such as Edward Newman and Stathis N. Kalyvas, have argued that there are no new wars in the contemporary world. According to them, many features of the so-called new wars can be seen in old wars. This paper also aims to unfold whether the new wars are in fact new or not. To better observe this, first the characteristics of new wars and old wars will be considered and then they will be compared to find out what is distinctively new about so-called new wars.

Extreme Civil War: Guerrilla Warfare, Environment, and Race on the Trans-Mississippi Frontier

In Extreme Civil War the historian Matthew M. Stith offers an insightful new look at the wide-ranging guerrilla conflicts of the western trans-Mississippi, a far corner of the American Civil War where the politically divided states of Arkansas, Missouri, and Kansas, and the Indian Territory met, “a cultural, racial, and environmental borderland” that included over 130,000 people (p. 2). Stith pursues a line of analysis that has emerged as a common theme in the recent guerrilla warfare literature, the concept of a no-man's-land, the constant exchange and reversal of dominant actors in a civilian-centered area. Control of agricultural resources and food, harsh terrain, and difficult weather influenced the war in this region and the pace of war. Stith's strongest analysis comes in his investigation of the cultural boundaries in the region. He pays close attention to clashes of different styles of combat and the importance of examining overlapping areas of settlement between different cultural groups, as one-third of the region's inhabitants were African American or Native American. Native Americans were allied with both Union and Confederate armies. Black soldiers supported the Union army in significant numbers, and many German immigrants did as well, creating a different kind of war from the one being waged in northern Virginia. Stith asserts that this cultural confrontation led to a war of deep racial and political division and hatred. In this region, the extreme conditions and even the creatures of the natural environment became “tools of war.” While he argues that this region became the most devastating theater for civilians by loss of life, he admits this is difficult to calculate and that further investigation is necessary by other scholars (p. 7). Nevertheless, Stith convincingly argues that the area “mirrored the worst pockets of irregular warfare across the South” (p. 4).

Billedbøger mellem læsere. Kontroversielle billedbøger i Norge og Danmark

“Picturebooks between Readers. Controversial Picturebooks in Norway and Denmark”When reading contemporary Scandinavian picturebooks, one may wonder who they are aimed at. The two picturebooks to be discussed in this article are the Danish book De skæve smil (The Crooked Smiles) (2008) by Oscar K. and Lilian Brøgger, and the Norwegian book Krigen (The War) (2013) by Gro Dahle and Kaia Dahle Nyhus. De skæve smil is a challenging picturebook about aborted foetuses, “those who never were born”. Krigen uses war metaphors to tell about a different kind of war, the war between two divorcing parents. Both books are existential picturebooks, illustrated in a naive drawing style with complex multi-layered narrative devices. They are challenging both thematically and in terms of their verbal and visual narrative devices. But unlike many other challenging Scandinavian picturebooks, they are also controversial and likely to offend their adult reader. What makes these picturebooks not only challenging but also highly controversial? This, in turn, leads to the question of audience: who are these picturebooks for?

Memories of a Rooted Sorrow: The Legacy of the Guerrilla War

Memories of a Rooted SorrowThe Legacy of the Guerrilla War Daniel E. Sutherland (bio) Historical memory and the role of memory in writing history have become popular themes in recent years. In Civil War studies, they have become a veritable subfield and used in a variety of ways. Some scholars compare postwar recollections to wartime accounts in order to clarify or correct the historical record. Other people try to show how faulty memories have caused misunderstandings about the purpose, conduct, or outcome of the war. Still others reveal how and why memories have been constructed for specific purposes, with events and motives selected and interpreted to satisfy the needs of particular people, groups, or communities. Sometimes these gaps between fact and memory originate with elderly people whose recollections have simply faded, or who never knew with certainty the where, when, or how of the events they described. Then again, some public figures publish reminiscences and memoirs intended to protect or embellish their own reputations, regardless of the facts. Sometimes these attempts to shape the past are successful. Later generations believe them, even in the face of contradictory evidence. As the editor of the Shinbone Star famously proclaimed in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, “When the legend becomes the fact, print the legend.”1 The efforts of former Confederate guerrillas to create legends, and so to influence how we remember their role in the war, have, until quite recently, [End Page 8] largely escaped historical inquiry. Even when writing about the guerrilla legacy, scholars have tended to rely on what other people said about it, rather than allowing the guerrillas to speak for themselves. This approach is understandable if one believes that ex-guerrillas were insincere in recounting their wartime deeds, but that leaves open the question of why they wrote and the ways in which they told their stories. No one writes without purpose, and so it behooves us to take their postwar testimonies seriously. This essay suggests that the postwar writings and actions of Confederate guerrillas were intended to rehabilitate an image that had been soiled by the type of war they fought and the bitter memories they had sown.2 Considering the broader historiography of the war, this seems an appropriate time to ask how Confederate guerrillas viewed themselves, for despite an impressive, and still growing, body of scholarly literature on the guerrilla conflict, some historians have been slow to acknowledge the scope and significance of its role. This is especially true of historians who promote the dominance of military history—by which is meant the role of conventional armies—in the Civil War narrative. None can gainsay the importance of [End Page 9] armies to the outcome of any war, but this narrow and somewhat defensive perspective misjudges the extent to which the guerrilla conflict dominated the lives of countless people, soldiers and civilians alike. For them, the real war was waged not on conventional battlefields but in their backyards, and it was a decisive force in both the conduct and outcome of the larger war.3 Equally discouraging is the failure of specialists in historical memory to consider the reminiscences of guerrillas in their accounts of the war. Traditionally, these scholars have explained how memories were fashioned to foster personal and sectional harmony between northern and southern whites. The postwar years, they say, witnessed a conscience program of reconciliation, a process of healing, of burying the ugliness and unwelcomed consequences of war for the sake of national unity and white racial solidarity. More recently, in a direct challenge to this positive view of postwar America, some historians have insisted that deep sectional animosities continued to fester, especially among Union and Confederate veterans.4 [End Page 10] Either way, former guerrillas have gotten the short end of the historio-graphical stick, mainly because they do not fit neatly into the orthodox Civil War narrative. And no wonder. The fact is, they fought a different kind of war, and they knew it. By war’s end, “guerrillas” and “bushwhackers” had become synonymous in North and South with unwarranted cruelty and violence. The Federals had accused them of ignoring the rules of “civilized warfare,” and they had...

Money as a “weapons system” and the entrepreneurial way of war

In US counterinsurgency doctrine, money has been characterized as “ammunition” and as a “weapons system”. Money is being wielded to win over the “hearts and minds” of the population, and to protect the lives of the occupying forces. Soldiers are taking on greater responsibility for spending money on reconstruction and development projects on the battlefield. Billions of dollars have been spent by the military in Iraq and Afghanistan on a wide range of projects including building schools, developing infrastructure, and providing agricultural assistance as well as microfinance. But military doctrine now extends to helping implement free-market economies, supporting business creation, setting up banking facilities, and promoting entrepreneurialism. In fact, economic development has been recast as a constitutive form of combat, not simply as a supplement to conventional warfare, or as part of post-conflict reconstruction. The use of money as a “weapons system” speaks to both a different kind of military and a different kind of war. Fighting and violence have not been replaced or even displaced, but are joined with new strategies and tactics that sit uneasily side by side. As soldiers have been retooled to be economic decision-makers, we need to better understand how money and markets are increasingly both the weapon of military intervention and the anticipated outcome.

Why We Fight: Congress and the Politics of World War II. By Nancy BeckYoung. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2013. 376 pp.

Why We Fight: Congress and the Politics of World II. By Nancy Beck Young. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2013. 376 pp. Nancy Beck Young departs from her previous works as a biographer to pen this in-depth examination of Congress and how it operated during the Second World War--although, to be fair, the book discusses pre-1939 legislative issues, as well. Unlike the majority of the books reviewed in this journal, the author chooses to focus on the legislative branch, noting that too many books focus on the efforts of the imperial presidency and miss what is happening on the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. Young argues that the Good War provided the opportunity for congressional conservatives to wage a different kind of war on the New Deal. With so much of the Democratic Party's leadership made up of southern conservatives, it was only moderates of both parties who managed to protect and institutionalize the New Deal's economic agenda, as its statism fit well with winning the war. Attempts at pluralism or social justice legislation along the same lines as the New Deal, however, were lost, as moderates sided with conservatives over fears that such laws would hamper the war effort or split the unity of the nation in time of war. Congressional liberals were not helped in the fight for social justice when Dr. New Deal became Dr. Win-the-War, as President Franklin Roosevelt ignored almost all social justice questions before the legislators. This coalition of the moderates meant that welfare state liberalism turned into warfare state liberalism. Young explains in her epilogue that moderates of both parties have disappeared since 1975; this has left twenty-first century Americans with massive congressional gridlock and hyperpartisan battles fought by screaming pundits and politicians alike. The author divides the book into two main sections: the economics of war and pluralism/social justice. The former includes fights on taxation, wage and price controls, extension of some of the New Deal's alphabet soup agencies, and labor legislation. The latter section includes issues such as Jewish refugees, racial equality, and the creation and later reauthorization of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). All of these chapters are solidly researched, with amazing quotes from Time magazine reporter Frank McNaughton detailing extraordinary behind the scenes struggles within the Democratic caucus. …

Sport and the military: the British armed forces, 1880-1960

Introduction 1. The growth of service sport, 1880-1914 2. Officer sports and their critics, 1880-1914 3. Sport in the great war 4. The amateur era, 1919-39 5. Soldiers, sailors and civilians 6. A different kind of war 7. The National Service years: the summit of military sport? Conclusion.

The War on Terror and the Ethics of Exceptionalism

The war on terror is commonly characterized as a fundamentally different kind of war from more traditional armed conflict. Furthermore, it has been argued that, in this new kind of war, different rules, both moral and legal, must apply. In the first part of this paper, three practices endemic to the war on terror – torture, assassination, and enemy combatancy status – are identified as exceptions to traditional norms. The second part of the paper uses these examples to motivate a generalized account of exceptionalism; a taxonomy of different exceptionalisms is derived, including temporal, spatial, and group-based exceptionalisms. The third part of the paper considers the ethical status of exceptionalism, paying particular attention to the group-based exceptionalisms that are argued to be prevalent in the war on terror. It is concluded that there is nothing inherently wrong with group-based exceptionalism and, furthermore, that the proper locus of ethical evaluation lies not with the norms that are being excepted, but rather with the groups that are being excepted from them.

Congress and the “YouTube War”

The United States is fighting a kind of in its on Terror, or so says President Bush. He's right. For the first time since the days of the Barbary pirates, America is doing active battle not with a rival nation, but with a non-state actor (al Qaeda) that lacks a geographical home, is motivated by ideology more than territorial ambition, and whose victories are defined in non-military terms. It is an enemy that uses communication technology, public opinion, and the global 24-hour news cycle to wage its battles. It is, in a very real sense, the first YouTube War of the twenty-first century. The rise of al Qaeda is a sign of the era in which we live. With the spread of economic and political liberalization, with the advent of new communication technology, and with the gradual erosion of state power and influence, individuals, organizations, and institutions are enjoying an unprecedented opportunity to affect international events. The rise of the non-state actor stands to become the most resonant characteristic of global affairs at the dawn of the twentyfirst century. Yet the stateless nature of this kind of enemy is not being reflected in America s current anti-terrorism strategy. In fact, the United States is wielding a military approach against its jihadist foes that is straight out of a twentieth-century playbook. President Bush has chosen to wage this different kind of war in Iraq, in a manner reminiscent of the Balkan wars, the conflict in Rwanda, and even the Vietnam a territorial, resource-based conflict between rival ethnic and religious groups competing for the spoils of political power.

Bearing Witness to the Unspeakable: 9/11 and America's New Global Imperialism

Two years ago, I told the Congress and the country that the on terror would a lengthy war, a different kind of war, fought on many fronts in many places. Iraq is now the central front. Enemies of freedom are making a desperate stand there, and there they must defeated. This will take time, and require sacrifice. Yet we will do -what is necessary, we will spend what is necessary, to achieve this essential victory in the on terror, to promote freedom, and to make our own nation more secure. -President George W. Bush, September 7, 2003 (USA Today). The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of emergency' in which we is not the exception but the rule. - Walter Benjamin (Illuminations 257). Introduction This article takes a critical and interpretive approach toward understanding the resurgence of patriotism in the United States following September 11, 2001. It considers this new wave of patriotism as a collective psychic and social phenomenon fostered within the context of the commercial mass media's perpetual creation and renewal of consciousness as a psychic precondition to the maintenance and expansion of US imperialism abroad. The piece seeks to move toward a theoretical understanding of the mediated experience of 9/11 and the media's role therein vis-avis an underlying subtext of governmental preparation to further America's global hegemony. September may constitute the most forthright example of political leaders hijacking catastrophe1 in modern history, and a situation wherein the continued potential for American and international democracy, the self-determination of all peoples, and the general welfare of the world hang in the balance. Never before in US history has the government, with the aid of intelligence and military technology, wielded such a threat to the civil liberties of its citizenry at home or the welfare and sovereignty of the nations of the world. Because the United States is a democratic republic, the management of the collective public psyche toward the imperial objectives of its ruling elite is a fundamental requirement in US governmental and corporate institutions' control of the world's energy supply. And, as we shall see, to counter the otherwise logical disposition of the American people - most of whom favor decreased military spending and engagement abroad requires the invention and cultivation of certain thought patterns actively perpetuated within the institutional and symbolic system comprised by the conglomerated for-profit news and entertainment media in conformity with the real and practical strategic ambitions of US governmental and corporate policy makers. As Australian journalist John Pilger puts it, the western-dominated media, now capable as never before of penetrating societies everywhere, is a new member of a club as old as Columbus (4). Indeed, nowhere is the media system's effectiveness in this regard more apparent than at home in the world's sole military superpower. Witnessing the Spectacle of 9/11 In one sense, the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon were an all-consuming mediated event that brought about something unprecedented in the American collective psyche, piercing the for-profit media's routine cultivation of a prevalent consumer consciousness. In a brief few hours, the US public was brought into direct alignment with its government's cumulative record of geopolitical strategies and courses of action. Historian Gabriel Kolko notes how the clandestine war the United States has been fighting abroad since 1947 had finally reached its shores (13). That which was unspeakable-death and destruction on a colossal scale in a familiar locale and with no readily apparent rationalewas observed, felt, lived, and relived in an all-toofamihar mediated terrain. The televisual whisked us to the scene to be there. Douglas Kellner explains how the international live television broadcasting brought a 'you are there' drama to the September 11 affair (From 9/11 54). …

The War Power and Its Limits

President Bush defined the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks as “acts of war.” His response was to promulgate policies, domestic and foreign, geared to protect against any future attacks against the United States. He urged swift passage of legislation that delegated vast new powers to the executive branch through the USA Patriot Act and two use‐of‐force resolutions, issued an executive order authorizing military tribunals, and announced a new national security strategy of preemption. These policies centralized power in the executive branch, and shifted it from Congress and the courts.

A different kind of war? September 11 and the United States' Afghan War

The terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 and the US response have been widely described as heralding a new kind of war. For over a decade previous to 11 September, however, a body of literature had developed arguing that during the 1990s a new kind of warfare had begun to emerge for the West. This article examines whether 11 September and its immediate aftermath – the US campaign in Afghanistan – confirmed these trends, or whether it really did constitute a different kind of war. It does so through a four-part framework: that during the 1990s wars were localised; that the enemy was not a state but a regime or individual leader; that civilian deaths should be minimised; and that wars were fought on behalf of the West by professionals, but that the risks to these forces should also be minimised.

La puissance militaire en question

The Effectiveness of Military Power, by Martin VAN CREVELD Twelve years after the publication of The Transformation of War — French edition, Le Futur de la guerre — it is time to re-examine its basic arguments. Two outstanding facts emerge. First, the fact that we are in the midst of a historical shift from interstate conventional conflict towards what différent people call low intensity war, non-trinitarian war, or asymmetric war, has been amply borne out and has, indeed, become the subject of a vast literature. Second, people have not yet corne around to re-examine the other main premise of the book, namely the need to re-examine Clausewitz and to come up with a new theory of war more suitable to the times in which we live. Still, sound practice can only be based on sound theory. At the beginning of the third millenium, we are still trying to wage war on the basis of theories first formulated two hundred years ago under completely different circum-stances, for a completely different kind of war. It is high time that this problem be remedied. Or, else, those who put their heads in the sand will end up by being kicked in the ass.

A Cultural History of the War without End

In October 2001, when President George W. Bush outlined his administration's responses to the September 11 attacks New York and Washington, he also announced that the United States was about to begin and different war, war against terrorism that would need to be fought on all fronts. Bush argued that unlike World War II, which brought clear-cut victory, or the Vietnam War, which ended in quagmire, or even the high-tech Gulf War, the new war would be a different kind of war that requires different type of approach and different type of mentality. Speaking to reporter few days later, Vice President Richard Cheney put it more bluntly, is different than the Gulf War was, in the sense that it may never end. At least, not in our lifetime.' The sense of historic rupture with previous models of understanding the world was widespread in the weeks following the attacks. Not only were the levels of destruction and the extraordinary human casualties unheard-of for Americans in peacetime, but the live television coverage had left the nation stunned. Eventually, perhaps, television's endless repetition of the second plane slicing through the south tower of the World Trade Center would become numbing, but other, more personal, images retained profound emotional resonance: firefighters covered in soot, rushing to save those they could and, later, searching through the rubble. Then came the friends and family who began to arrive the scene-and the screen-in the hours after the attacks. They carried large photocopied photos of their loved ones and spoke to reporters, tearfully telling of their last contact or determinedly showing the pictures that they hoped would inspire rescuers. Within days, September 11 had taken the folkloric status of the assassination of John F. Kennedy; at nearly every gathering, people would tell their stories: where they were and what they were doing when they heard-or, rather, saw-the news. It was not surprising, then, that the Bush administration would stress what many people in the United States already felt, that the nation was facing an unprecedented crisis and that nothing in our past had prepared us for such an attack. One corollary

LBJ and Vietnam: A Different Kind of War.

LBJ and Vietnam: A Different Kind of War.

LBJ and Vietnam: A Different Kind of War.

LBJ and Vietnam: A Different Kind of War.

Assia Djebar, Frantz Fanon, Women, Veils, and Land

By RITA A. FAULKNER Frantz Fanon uses the image of the unveiling of in A Dying Colonialism in drawing a connection between the land, the nation, women, and their bodies. Assia Djebar twists that image in her story d'Alger dans leur appartement and in the Postface to the collection of the same name. Djebar uses the space of the city of Algiers rather than that of the whole nation. Twenty years after Fanon's polemic, Djebar examines the place of women in under the patriarchal nationalists, finding women's bodies and minds imprisoned by physical walls and mental veils. In a different kind of war, through her discourse, she seeks to contribute to the liberation of Algerian women, their gaze, and the voices which emanate from their material bodies. Fanon's project included the liberation of women, within the nationalist project of Algerian liberation. However, he also makes use of the ancient metaphor equating land with women and women with land which can be found in texts ranging from the Koran (Surah II, verse 223: Your women are a tilth for you [to cultivate] so go to your tilth as ye will), to ancient Western, to modern Arabic literature. That this metaphorical relationship between land and women is shared in both the French and Algerian psyches is argued by Winfred Woodhull in Transfigurations of the Maghreb: Feminism, Decolonization, and Literatures: cultural record makes clear that women embody not only for Algerians in the days since independence, but also for the French colonizers. ... In the colonialist fantasy, to possess Algeria's women is to possess (16). This cultural fantasy extends, she maintains, even to French intellectuals, who, like their military and administrative compatriots, make of Algerian women key symbols of the colony's cultural identity (19). Algerian women were once the emblem of the colony's refusal to receive France's 'emancipatory seed' and the gateway to penetration (19). Thus, not only was imagined as a to be possessed, but possessing (conquering, penetrating) an Algerian was a step toward possessing Algeria. As Fanon's title Algeria Unveiled indicates, this equating of land and is especially focused on the veiled woman. Woodhull concurs in her analysis of French colonial fantasy: Whether the imagined contact between races or peoples involves a perilous siege or easy pleasure, a key point of contact, where is concerned, is the veiled or secluded woman (20). Fanon outlined the resistance by the colonized Algerian males (in collusion with Algerian women) to a purported colonial plot to defeat the Algerian nation by unveiling its women. In this work is depicted as a veiled woman, threatened with unveiling, which is tantamount to rape. In the collective psychology, according to Fanon, this leads to Algerian/male dishonor due to colonial domination either of the land or of the nation. Fanon, a Martinican, Marxist, existentialist, and FLN (Algerian National Liberation Front) supporter, celebrates in A Dying Colonialism the liberation and newfound power he claims Algerian women have fought for and won through their participation in the Algerian Revolution (as bomb carriers, for example). At the time of writing, year five of the revolution (1959), Fanon believed the newly won position of respect and apparent equality held by the female combatants (as described and, presumably, perceived by him) was permanent, an augury of the future modern, socialist, revolutionary Algeria. Assia Djebar, eleven years his junior, was twentyhree in 1959, and in fact worked at approximately that time as a writer under Fanon, the then editor of the revolutionary newspaper El-Moujahid (Zimra, 190). She would undoubtedly have been familiar with Fanon's ideas, and in fact may have influenced them, for she could well have been an informant regarding the rare female students he describes who grew up not wearing the veil (Fanon, 39). I don't think there is any doubt that Djebar would have been familiar with Fanon's widely read monograph, A Dying Colonialism (orig. Uan cinq de la Revolution Algerienne, 1959). Djebar's collection of short stories Women of Algiers in Their Apartment (orig. Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement, 1980) answers Fanon (1925-61), who did not live to witness the condition of Algerian women in postrevolutionary Algeria. Djebar has lived through this period and, twenty years after her collaboration with Fanon, takes stock of the place of women in the new society in her fictional and essay accounts, revealing the limitations but most especially the richness of the women's oral tradition, cutting through both tradiRita A. Faulkner holds degrees in French and comparative literature from Purdue University, has studied Arabic in Tangiers, has taught English at Kuwait University and the University of Bahrain, and is currently a doctoral student in comparative literature at the University of Illinois, specializing in francophone, Arabic, and English colonial and postcolonial literatures. The present article was written during her tenure as Traveling Scholar at Indiana University.

LBJ and Vietnam: A Different Kind of War.

LBJ and Vietnam: A Different Kind of War.

The Unfinished War

The Unfinished War Charles E. Neu (bio) Sam Adams. War of Numbers: An Intelligence Memoir. South Royalton, Vt.: Steerforth Press, 1994. xxx 210 pp. Appendix, sources and notes, and index. $22.00. David M. Barrett. Uncertain Warriors: Lyndon Johnson and His Vietnam Advisers. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993. xii 194 pp. Appendix, notes, bibliography, and index. $35.00. George C. Herring. LBJ and Vietnam: A Different Kind of War. Austin: University Press of Texas, 1994. xiv 186 pp. Notes and index. $29.95. Deborah Shapley. Promise and Power: The Life and Times of Robert McNamara. Boston: Little, Brown, 1993. xvii 615 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $29.95. Peter Macdonald. Giap: The Victor in Vietnam. New York: Norton, 1993. 346 pp. Illustrations, epilogue, and bibliography. $25.00. Michael Lee Lanning and Dan Cragg. Inside the VC and the NVA: The Real Story of North Vietnam’s Armed Forces. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1992. xiii 260 pp. Illustrations, appendixes, source notes, bibliography, and index. $20.00. On many levels and in many different ways, the process of coming to terms with the Vietnam War continues to unfold. As Morley Safer writes, each witness to that conflict is “still imprisoned, to one extent or another, by that place and that time.” 1 Memories of the conflict remain vivid among many Americans, who are still trying to understand why we fought so long and so hard in such a distant place, and why, in the end, we and our allies in Saigon suffered such a humiliating defeat. Recent literature has given us a better sense of the evolution of American policy, of how decisions were made within the American government, and of how these decisions were carried out in the field. Many aspects of American policy, however, remain obscure, while we [End Page 144] have only begun to learn about the calculations of communist revolutionaries in Vietnam. These six books, written by scholars, journalists, and participants, are only a small part of what is a fascinating effort to fit together all of the pieces of the Vietnamese puzzle. Sam Adams was one of those witnesses to the war, a young CIA analyst whose study of the Vietcong became first a great adventure, then a compelling cause until his untimely death in 1988. In August 1965 Adams was transferred to the Southeast Asian Branch of the CIA’s Deputy Directorate of Intelligence, where he was given the task of studying Vietcong morale. He was the first person in Washington to give the enemy in South Vietnam his undivided attention. Poring over captured enemy documents, POW interrogations, and interviews with defectors, Adams concluded that the war was far larger than the Military Assistant Command Vietnam realized and that all the calculations of the American government about the numbers of troops needed and the time it would take to win were inaccurate. One captured document, on Vietcong strength in Binh Dinh province, listed 50,255 enemy soldiers, while MACV’s figure was only 4,668. Adams gradually realized that the Vietcong consisted of a vast, intricate organization, most of which was hidden from view. General William Westmoreland’s command was concerned with Vietcong main force units, but it failed to realize that these well-armed soldiers were only the tip of a large funnel that ran all the way down to the village level, and that main force units were augmented by many specialized units, such as sappers, secret police, service troops, and political cadre. The result was a resilient organization that could replace its losses quickly. Adams’s passionate curiosity about the Vietcong resulted in a series of superb, detailed studies, but it also brought an unwillingness to appreciate the dilemma CIA Director Richard Helms eventually confronted. Burdened with a White House that wanted only good news, and challenging the military’s figures in the middle of a major war, Helms felt that he could only push so far. Or as he explained to Adams, “You don’t know what it’s like in this town. I could have told the White House there were a million more Vietcong out there, and it wouldn’t have made the slightest difference in our policy...