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Zusatztext 45748358 Informationen zum Autor CHRISTIAN G. APPY is a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts! Amherst! and the author of two previous books on the Vietnam War. Patriots was a main selection of BOMC and won the Massachusetts Book Award for nonfiction. He lives in Amherst. INTRODUCTION We didn’t know who we were till we got here. We thought we were something else. —Robert Stone, Dog Soldiers (1974) “I DIDN’T KNOW there was a bad war,” George Evans recalled. He grew up in Pittsburgh in the 1950s. Starting at age six, before and after school, he helped his father deliver blocks of ice to poor and working-class people who could not afford the shiny new refrigerators advertised in all the magazines. George understood that the American Dream was beyond the grasp of his parents and most of their friends and neighbors. He was a streetwise kid. He knew life was difficult and the future uncertain. But there was one thing George trusted completely—his nation’s military power and the good that it did. With all his heart he believed the United States was on the side of justice and freedom and all our wars were noble. Despite personal hardships, you could always count on Americans to be the good guys, and always victorious. It was simply unimaginable that the United States might betray that faith. “I was raised in a family and neighborhood of extreme patriots,” George explains. “My father was the commander of his VFW post and I got to go to the club and hang out with the veterans. I was their little mascot.” He especially looked forward to Flag Day, when he would help the World War II vets decorate the graves in a military cemetery. “Imagine how beautiful it looked to a kid to see hundreds of graves in a geometric pattern, all with shining bronze plates and flags waving in the wind. You just can’t exaggerate the pull of the military on kids from neighborhoods like mine. Everything you’d seen and heard your whole life made it feel inevitable and right.” But George’s faith in America’s global goodness was forever destroyed in Vietnam, where he served as an air force medic. “I realized that the country I was from was not the country I thought it was.” One day at the hospital in Cam Ranh Bay he was ordered to clean the bodies of two young Vietnamese boys. They were dead. As he was sponging one of them with soapy water, a Vietnamese woman raced into the room. She must have been the mother, but George wasn’t sure. “I’ll never forget her face. I can see her still. I remember her hitting me on the chest, grabbing me. Then she was running back and forth between the two bodies, from child to child.” George later learned that the boys were hit by an American military truck driver who may have been competing with other drivers over “who could hit a kid. They had some disgusting name for it, something like ‘gook hockey.’” With the possible exception of the Civil War, no event in U.S. history has demanded more soul-searching than the war in Vietnam. The false pretexts used to justify our intervention, the indiscriminate brutality of our warfare, the stubborn refusal of elected leaders to withdraw despite public opposition, and the stunning failure to achieve our stated objectives—these harrowing realities provoked a profound national identity crisis, an American reckoning. The war made citizens ask fundamental questions: Who are we? What defines us as a nation and a people? What is our role in the world? Just as the Civil War forced Americans to confront the reality of slavery, an institution that stood in glaring contradiction to the nation’s avowed ideals of human freedom and equality, the Vietnam War compelled millions of citizens to question the once widely held faith that their country is the greatest force for good in the world, that it always acts to advance democracy and human rights, that it is superior in both its...
