Winners and Losers: Battles, Retreats, Gains, Losses, and Ruins from the Vietnam War

I did not get to know any women during my year in Vietnam, but I have contemplated the feelings of many women regarding that situation, and I would consider some of the odd things, but not forgotten, in Winners and Losers by Gloria Emerson, who was a reporter for the New York Times in Vietnam, very sophisticated observations about what was going on. I think one of her friends was planting a tree or moving it to a better location in America, which she was not at all concerned about, and he told her: "You would care if it was in Vietnam."

Gloria Emerson's early loose calculation of the closing costs of Vietnam remains extraordinarily valuable. When our government leaps before it understands/examines, then insists upon continuing long after many bright people have recognized a sequence of policy errors, this is what can happen. Episodic/impressionistic, widest possible scope, home & away. Strikingly even-handed, though Emerson developed a very strong set of opinions. Wonderful book. Terrifying war/time.

The system of rating books by the number of stars which a reader is willing to bestow is perfect for this book. In a section called "Odd Things, But Not Forgotten," the reader is thoroughly informed of how a general was awarded a silver star, how the New York Times sent a reporter named Gloria Emerson to the Awards and Decorations Section to see why the men had made up the perfect dream when they didn't have the kind of documentation normally associated with acts of valor, and how newspaper readers responded to the story. The high point for me was a poem by a draftee, which ended with the perfect attitude for a military mind. "Let me go into battle, / a hero I shall be. / I'm forty-four, I'm still alive, / and the army's mind is me." It made me glad that I served out in the bush, and not as a clerk in some headquarters.

While this book is not a military log of each and every battle on the Vietnam front, it is a very valuable book. It offers an honest, heart-felt, even heart-wrenching view of the EFFECT of the war on American, Soliders, and the Vietnamese