Fire in the Lake

Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam is a Pulitzer Prize winning book by the American journalist Frances FitzGerald (1940-) and published in 1972 by both Back Bay Publishing and Little, Brown and Company.^[1][2]

Summary

The first major book by an American on America in Vietnam, which she calls a "first draft of history," it argues that American values of freedom, democracy, optimism, and technological progress were inconsistent with Vietnam's values, culture, agrarian economy, and long bloody history, making the Vietnam War effort doomed from the start. The Vietnamese sense of government, history, politics, and war is completely different from the American one, as is their cultural tradition of ancestor worship and their belief in what constitutes effective government (the Mandate of Heaven), yet the US government never took these differences into account, leading to failure.

"But the American officials in supporting the Saigon government insisted that they were defending 'freedom and democracy' in Asia. They left the GIs to discover that the Vietnamese did not fit into their experience of either 'communist' or 'democrats.' Under different circumstances this invincible ignorance…"

She goes on to say: "Whatever strategy the American government uses to carry on the war, it will only be delaying the inevitable."

The book discusses the US government's ignorance of Vietnam's history, especially their determination to rid themselves of any foreign invaders even if, as with the Chinese, it took 1000 years, making them unable to see themselves as just more foreign invaders to the populace.

Spending 90% of its text on the lead-up to the Tet Offensive, it covers several topics including the Cao Đài monotheist religious sect in Tay Ninh, the corrupt regime of Ngo Dinh Diem, and "Nixon's War".

In her discussion of the Battle of Bong Son, she discusses the futility of body counts:

"Furthermore, as the only 'indicator of progress,' it suggested that death and destruction had some absolute value in terms of winning the war. That the enemy might continue to recruit, rearm, and rebuild (often with the help of people enraged by the American destruction) did not seem to enter into the calculations."

The book is one of the first to expose the functions of the shanty towns built up around US bases as laundry, drinks, and prostitution.

Critical reception

The book won several literary awards including the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction,^[3] the National Book Award in Contemporary Affairs^[4] and the Bancroft Prize.^[5]

The book was criticized for trying to form a "grand Vietnamese Gestalt", which "ironically" argued that the West did not understand Vietnam still but used Western thinkers as justification for the claim. ^[6]

References

External links

• Fire in the Lake on Open Library at the Internet Archive