Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam, Bowden - C +

                                               Hue was the former imperial capital, and the third largest city in Vietnam.  This book is a history of the Battle of Hue during the Tet offensive in early 1968. Gen. William Westmoreland had visited Washington in November, 1967 and had assured his President, the press and the nation that victory was at hand. Indeed, the invitation to the New Year's Eve party at the Saigon Embassy said "Come see the light at the end of the tunnel." As we all know, the Tet offensive was the beginning of the end of America's commitment to see the war through.
                                              The Northern Vietnamese Army (NVA) and Vietcong (VC) prepared extensively for  Tet. In some instances, it took four months of marching to put men into position for the offensive. A US officer later called it a "logistical miracle." They sought and obtained help from the general populace. As naive and optimistic as Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) was, the party leadership in Hanoi was equally so. Their premise was that the cousins in the south would overwhelmingly welcome and join them when the north's soldiers appeared in their streets. They did not. Although some in MACV and the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) noticed increased infiltration and suspected something was up, no one had ever considered possible what was about to happen. At 2:30 A.M. on January 31, all hell broke loose from one end of South Vietnam to the other. Eighty-thousand NVA and VC attacked one hundred targets. In Hue, 10,000 soldiers poured into the city. With the exception of the MACV compound in the south of Hue, the city was entirely overrun by dawn. Throughout the day, US Marines tried to move out of the compound and head north into the city. They were flung back with heavy casualties. Up the chain of command, there was disbelief at the size of the incursion. Only in Hue had the enemy come with such a substantial force. MACV and in particular, Westmoreland had expected an attack at Khe Sanh and for days refused to give credit to the depth of the attack at Hue. Indeed, as late as Feb. 2, Westmoreland was telling the White House there were no more than 600 enemy troops in the city. The marines slowly  pushed the enemy back a block at a time. A week into the battle, the US barely had a threshold in the city. An Army base north of the city sent troops to join the fray. The marines targeted the Triangle on the south side of the Huong River and the army, The Citadel on the north side. As the US slowly recovered the city, they discovered innumerable victims of  the National Liberation Front (NLF) atrocities. The popular uprising never took place and the 'liberators' purged their civilian opponents. It took three weeks of heavy fighting until to the city finally was back in American and South Vietnamese hands.
                                                After the victory, Gen. Westmoreland declared that matters were more serious and requested another 120,000 men. Doubts in Washington grew and most consider February 27th as the beginning of the long end of American involvement in Vietnam. In a Special Report, Walter Cronkite spent half-an-hour contradicting Westmoreland and concluded we were "mired in stalemate". Westmoreland was relieved of his command in June. The consensus of history is that his failure to acknowledge that the enemy had occupied the city led to undermanned efforts to take it back and in turn, unnecessarily heavy casualties.
                                               This book is a highly acclaimed bestseller. The author uses the technique of telling a historical narrative through personal vignettes. It is an effective and popular technique. In my opinion, it is taken way too far here. The personal details outweigh the narrative to the point that you frequently lose track of the overarching story.  I suspect the upcoming Ken Burns/PBS special on Vietnam will be significantly more enlightening

The Old Man, Perry - B-

                                               This is the second book I've read by this author and it's hard to characterize the genre. He seems to specialize in people on the run. In 'Butchers Boy', the protagonist was a hit-man, who spent a lot of time in hiding and trying to avoid getting hit himself. Here, the lead character is a former Army special-ops agent who has been in hiding for 30 years because a Libyan warlord, with friends in the US, has been after him. They catch up to him and he leads them on a trans-America wild goose chase and finally, ends the whole process by returning to Libya and assassinating the warlord. This is a classic summer beach-read.

The Shape of Water, Camilleri - B

                                               This almost 20 year-old novel is the first in a series set in Sicily and featuring Inspector Salvo Montalbano, a man beleaguered, trying to bring justice to a locale inherently opposed to transparency, and the rule of law. A local notable is found dead in his car in a notorious lovers lane, with his pants around his ankles, and the autopsy shows his heart virtually exploded. Everyone hopes for a quick conclusion, but the fact that a lady of ill-repute casually walked away from the scene after assisting in the heart attack raises concerns for Montalbano.

The Winter Fortress: The Epic Mission To Sabotage Hitler's Atomic Bomb, Bascomb - B

                                               As WWII approached, scientists around the world were developing theories about fission and fusion, leading all probable combatants to start thinking about atomic weapons. One of the possible facilitators of an atomic reaction was water with an extra hydrogen atom - heavy water. Heavy water was an offshoot of hydro-electric power generation and the only place in the world where it was created was in central Norway at Vermork. After Germany's April, 1940 occupation of Norway, the Germans demanded an increase in heavy water deliveries to Berlin. For many Norwegians, resistance meant escape to Britain and training for a return home. In the UK, the decision was made to pre-empt the Germans by depriving them of heavy water and sabotaging Vermork. An SOE-trained Norwegian team parachuted into their occupied homeland in Oct. 1942. Their role was to prepare the way for two teams of British sappers who came in on two gliders (towed from Scotland) a month later. Both gliders crashed, although on one, most of the men survived. The sappers were captured by the Germans and executed. The Germans ascertained that Vermork was a target and significantly increased security. The next attempt was a Norwegian team that parachuted into their home country in February. The nine man demolition team wore British uniforms, travelled through a massive winter storm and climbed an almost vertical 600 hundred foot cliff face to access Vermork. They entered the plant, blew up the heavy water section, and knocked the facility off line for a year. Miraculously, and again through another brutal winter storm, they escaped, and were able to travel over 200 miles to neutral Sweden. As well as Operation Gunnerside had done, the Germans had the plant up and running by August, 1943. The Allies decided to target the facility for a bombing run and lied to the Norwegians about their intentions. One-hundred and seventy-six bombers from the 8th Air Force headed for Vermork on Nov. 16,1943 and pounded the plant, but for all of the devastation, the heavy-water facilities were untouched. The Germans decided to dismantle the heavy-water facilities and move them to Germany. On February 20, 1944 a train left Vermork and headed to Mael, where the cars would be loaded onto a ferry. At the deepest part of Lake Tinn, a pre-placed bomb sank the ferry and all of its railcars. Germany would never obtain the materials necessary to build an atomic weapon.

Woodrow Wilson, Auchincloss - B

                                                This is a brief bio in the Penguin Lives series. Wilson came to office after an academic career, and only two years as Governor of New Jersey. He told one of the politicians who handed him the career in N.J: "Remember that God ordained that I should be the next President of the United States." His progressive policy views led to a Tariff Act, the establishment of the Federal Reserve and the creation of a progressive income tax. When war came to Europe in August, 1914, Wilson assiduously and sincerely pursued a policy of neutrality. Many of America's immigrant communities were opposed to the war. The Germans wanted no part of a fight against their homeland, the Irish had no desire to assist Great Britain and the Jews were adamantly opposed to allying with the Tsar. "But above all there was a widespread feeling that the war was not our war and we should stay out of it..." Wilson believed that he, and he alone, could suggest or impose peace upon the warring parties; that he had the insight to end the horror. America somehow was above the fray. In April 1915, he said "There is such a thing as a nation being so right that it does not need to convince others by force that it is right."  In 1917, the reinstatement of unrestricted submarine warfare led to a US declaration of war. Although a proponent of peace, Wilson was an effective war President. His Fourteen Points and his plans for peace were so admired that Harold Nicholson, British diplomat and scholar, said "Had the Treaty of Paris been drafted solely by the American experts, it would have been one of the wisest as well as the most scientific document ever devised." Wilson went to Paris against just about everyone's advice and without a Republican of standing. As the Republicans won the mid-terms in 1918 and Henry Cabot Lodge was now Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, this is considered one of his biggest mistakes. In Paris, he was so focused on the League of Nations that he let Lloyd-George and Clemenceau run roughshod on all of his principles. He also suffered what medical historians believe was his third minor stroke. The battle lines were drawn over the League and Article 10 of the Treaty, which could require the US to take military action if the League mandated it.  Lodge saw it as an imposition on our sovereignty.  In September of 1919, Wilson fell ill on his nationwide trip to sell the Treaty, and in October suffered a major stroke. For the last year-and-a-half of his presidency, he was an invalid and his wife controlled all access to him. Lodge offered an adjustment to the Treaty,requiring Congressional approval for the US to take up arms. Britain and France agreed, but not Wilson.  The Treaty failed and Wilson died three years after leaving office. His wife asked Lodge not to attend the funeral.

The Pale House, McCallin - B-

                                               In the second novel in this series, we find Reinhard back  in Sarajevo, but two years later. It's April 1945 and the Third Reich is on the verge of collapse. The focus of his investigation is an atrocity involving the murder of ten men, believed to have been assigned to a penal battalion. No one seems to rally care as death, destruction and imminent defeat surround the  Germans. The Ustase know there is no retreat for them and they are even more volatile and violent than they had been previously. Gregor ascertains that the Ustase have been killing Germans and assuming German identities, in an attempt to escape from Yugoslavia.  Once again, the phenomenal detail of the background fascinates

Safe, Gattis - B -

                                               The author is an Angeleno with an ear for the street and the writer of some fascinating material about folks getting by on the bottom of the ladder. Here, we meet Ghost, a safecracker dying of cancer in his 30's, and Glasses, a double agent trying to survive between his gang and the DEA. Ghost does jobs for the DEA,  manages to skim from them, and is using the money to help others, sort of a Robin Hood of the ghetto. Glasses made a hit in the stock market with some settlement money from an LAPD beating and is hoping to get the hell out of town. Both are fundamentally good men and it is inevitable that their paths will cross. They do. One survives.

Bill Clinton, Tomasky - B

                                               This biography is one of those fabulous essay-length books of about 150 pages. I read it because there was so much I missed in the nineties, while working rather hard, and because I thought it might help me better understand our current political divisions, which seem to stem from that era*. Clearly, a new-age draft avoider with a propensity to chase skirts riled the hard right. The right's standard bearer was the loathsome hypocrite Speaker Newt Gingrich. They clashed throughout Clinton's term with the President winning round one: the conflict over the 1994 government shutdown. Although the 1996 Republican reform of welfare was anathema to Clinton's advisers, his signature propelled him to an easy victory over Bob Dole. Clinton's second term appeared to be on track for greatness as the economy was totally booming and the deficit, Republican topic number one for decades, was headed toward elimination.  Then, in early 1998 with Kenneth Starr breathing down his neck after four years of fishing, the President advised Monica Lewinsky to lie in an affidavit about their relationship and the result was the second impeachment trial of an American president. The effort failed in February, 1999. In his last two years in office, Clinton attempted to broker peace in the Middle East and ultimately, added his name to the long list of those who have failed in that effort. He successfully added vast amounts of land and ocean to federally protected status.
                                              The author, who is described as someone whose work leans left, states that historians have been generally favorable to Clinton's years in office. He cites the economy and the deficit elimination, and I suspect that over the long course, Bill Clinton will be highly regarded because of those numbers and his do-no-harm foreign policy. The author chides him for remaining in the public eye and for the sometimes questionable activities of his Foundation. As for me, I did not find any particular insight into the political clashes, and also note that there was only an incomplete mentioning of the eastward expansion of NATO, which some characterize as a very serious mistake and one which the Clinton administration undertook without much thought or assessment.


*In 2016's best-seller,'White Trash', the author suggests that one of the reasons Clinton was attacked so venomously by the right was that he was white trash and far from the traditional establishment. Somehow, Georgetown, Oxford and Yale sound pretty establishment to me. Gingrich's background as the only child of an apparent teenage shotgun marriage, and then, growing up on army bases, is equally trashy, and he led the charge.