The Seventeenth Degree

Mary McCarthy was an early opponent of the Vietnam War, but couldn't figure out what to do at first. Finally she decided to go, several times, at length even to Hanoi, which was being bombed by US planes. She wrote 5 short books--"pamphlets," she called them--and together they make up "Seventeenth Degree." She tells of her initial doubts and difficulties (one of which was that going to Vietnam might cost her husband his job with the State Department). Then she describes, in vivid and excruciating detail, what she saw in the country--the people, the damage, the corruption, the idiocy. What she saw resembles nothing so much as our current fiasco in Iraq--the ruthless devastation, the forced migrations, the fatcats, the corruption (Halliburton, anyone?), the hapless soldiers who don't know why they're there, the mendacious "officials" whose rationales and lies keep shifting, the torture, the horrors that keep getting "spun" into something palatable. Then, as now, the US government can't understand why people are not overjoyed to have their country bombed and invaded. But an overwhelming difference is that in Vietnam reporters were free, like McCarthy, to roam and report at will. The US army learned its lesson. The lesson was NOT "don't do it," but "don't let them SEE you do it." Granted, Iraq is more dangerous now for reporters than Vietnam was (though Vietnam was no picnic). But it's a shame there aren't more un-embedded reporters up to the task. (There are a few, like Robert Fisk, in Iraq.) A major reason Vietnam was brought to a close was the daily dinnertime TV news-images of napalmed babies, burned villages, dead soldiers. The war in Iraq is more sanitized, so we won't revolt at the horror. A sad, chilling, eye-opening, brilliantly-written book.

This collection is a monument to its pieces, smaller works of which Mary McCarthy herself could rightly complain, "One of my friends tried to get it that summer when she was in Idaho (the home state of war critic Senator Frank Church) visiting relations ~ no luck. When she passed through New York in the fall, same story." On a personal level, this is a complaint by someone of immense popularity that her own views on the war wouldn't sell, or weren't being sold. The highest irony of this book is its final sentence, at the end of a review of a very explicit book by David Halberstam, "In career terms, which in my view interest Halberstam excessively, how dead is 'dead'?" Please be assured that I feel the same way whenever a representative of my government calls me and asks where I am working, and then wonders why I would mention Richard Nixon. I only mention this book the way dubious achievements might be associated with Nixon and the question, "Why is this dead man laughing?" I promise that this book is easier to understand than the death of Homer, a famous Greek poet who was so blind he couldn't tell what two boys were doing when they said, "That which we see and catch, we leave behind, but what we neither see nor catch, we carry with us." McCarthy mentions Homer on page 235 to support the idea that "at the front, war itself appears senseless, a confused butchery that only the gods can understand." On page 268, she is more explicitly into Homeric epithets, comparing his use of the godly phrase "cloud-gathering Zeus" to "the air pirates," (one of "the set phrases of North Vietnamese diction.") Never again should we try to go to war without our Homer, whoever that might be. My vote for the Homer of Nam would be Bernard Fall, a smiling fellow in the picture of the author on the back of the jacket for this book. The picture might be more famous than the book. The caption under the picture says, "Mary McCarthy in Vietnam with Bernard Fall, February, 1967 (Fall was killed under fire shortly afterward.) Newsweek, Francoise Sully copyright 1967." It is a bit late to read this book now, but the calculation of the number of people who haven't read this book can only go one way, up, and it is going to do that forever, as sure as Homer is dead.