
Fire in the Lake
1972 · 500 pages
Americans in Vietnam were fighting a country they never tried to understand, FitzGerald argues, explaining Confucian village order and the mandate of heaven to readers whose sons were still being sent there.
★ 5.9

Americans in Vietnam were fighting a country they never tried to understand, FitzGerald argues, explaining Confucian village order and the mandate of heaven to readers whose sons were still being sent there.

The men who walked America into Vietnam were the most credentialed in Washington, and Halberstam shows how their brilliance became the problem. He reconstructs the meetings and memos that made escalation feel reasonable.