As films, books, and television series on Vietnam proliferate, the focus is almost always, of course, on us: on how young Americans lived and died when thrust into a world for which they were unprepared, how our decision-makers calculated, or miscalculated, as they confronted the bewildering Indochinese quagmire. This is natural enough. The war tore our country apart too; and the poison that it injected into American politics is still with us, coloring every debate on the use of American force abroad.
But for all our absorption with the grunts on Hamburger Hill and the POWs in the Hanoi Hilton, the fact remains that the story of American involvement in Vietnam can only be understood by examining the complex, and ultimately fatal, interaction between Saigon politicians and American policymakers. And it must begin with the days before American combat troops came to Vietnam, when the United States, with relatively little public debate and often without public announcement, slipped from an advisory role, for which we were ill-suited, into the responsibility for a war that we couldn't win.
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