Where I speak of a sobering book...

The Vietnam War... I think many people don't really know what happened in that war. What very little I hear is either in praise of it for "helping stop communism" or bitterness about what happened. I know, it was an unjust war, and it was a mess. But we still had American men over there fighting, whether or not they wanted to, that our country ought to have supported as men while working to stop the war as a whole. I'm reading a book for school called America and Vietnam- the Elephant and the Tiger by Albert Marrin. It's not a pretty book, it's anything but... But it's history, and it's a reminder of how awful, confused, and messed-up that war was. If you want to better understand the Vietnam War it is highly worth reading. It is a sobering, saddening, breathtaking, wincing, maddening, frustrating account of a war that is little understood. I love history, because it is through history that we learn for the future. Don't get me wrong, I do not love reading the negative accounts of history, but I know that it is important to understand and learn from the past. Edmund Burke said, "Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it." and the Roman historian Livy once said, "The study of history is the best medicine for a sick mind; for in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see; and in that record you can find yourself and your country both examples and warnings; fine things to take as models, base things, rotten through and through, to avoid." Albert Marrin does an excellent job of writing historical facts in such a way to hold your attention. It's not fiction, but all of his biographies and history books that I have read have been phenomenal.

You're probably wondering why I posted this. Well I'm in the middle of America and Vietnam, and it's been an eye-opening read the whole way, but just now I am reading of the turmoil, conflict, and division in the United States while the people of those states turn not just against the war, but against the men who fought in that war. The nasty, rotten way our country handled it, and the soldiers in it, has held me in deep thought. And I felt like I had to share it. How much of history do people not really understand...