The American War in Vietnam: Crime or Commemoration?

Marciano has written a newer history of the war that provides analysis and perspective on how the war ought to be remembered—and how it is being misremembered and misused. I am eager to add it to my curriculum!

—W.D. Ehrhart Ph.D., editor, Carrying the Darkness: the Poetry of the Vietnam War, author, Vietnam-Perkasie: A Combat Marine Memoir

Marciano provides a deft overview of the American War in Vietnam with all its deceits and horrors while demonstrating how the true history has been sanitized and distorted in class-room history texts, thus depriving younger generations a proper historical and political consciousness, making them unable often to see through the flood of propaganda used to sell more recent military interventions.

—Jeremy Kuzmarov, J.P. Walker assistant professor of history, University of Tulsa; author of Modernizing Repression: Police Training and Nation Building in the American Century and The Myth of the Addicted Army: Vietnam and the Modern War on Drugs

The American War in Vietnam pulls no punches in its condemnation of America’s participation in the Vietnam War, citing both outright war crimes (such as the notorious My Lai massacre) and the extensive collateral damage and human suffering that the war inflicted. Author and antiwar activist John Marciano (Professor Emeritus at SUNY Cortland) further denounces the pervasive whitewashing of America’s purpose, role, and methods in the Vietnam War. Notes, a bibliography, and an index round out this stark, persuasive, and ferocious challenge to America’s status quo historical narrative.

—Midwest Book Review

John’s book is now at the top of my list of recommended readings for people planning to come to Viet Nam. The other is Huu Ngoc’s recently released Viet Nam: Tradition and Change. Those books will give visitors context and an accurate framework of Viet Nam’s past and present—including the massive American shadow that we still cast here.

—Chuck Searcy, former U.S. Army intelligence specialist in Vietnam; current International Advisor to Project RENEW, which works to eliminate landmines and help Vietnamese families with consequences of Agent Orange