The Seventeenth Degree Review

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(More customer reviews)Mary McCarthy was an early opponent of the Vietnam War, but couldn't figure out what to do at first.
Finally she decided to go, several times, at length even to Hanoi, which was being bombed by US planes.
She wrote 5 short books--"pamphlets," she called them--and together they make up "Seventeenth Degree."
She tells of her initial doubts and difficulties (one of which was that going to Vietnam might cost her husband his job with the State Department).
Then she describes, in vivid and excruciating detail, what she saw in the country--the people, the damage, the corruption, the idiocy.
What she saw resembles nothing so much as our current fiasco in Iraq--the ruthless devastation, the forced migrations, the fatcats, the corruption (Halliburton, anyone?), the hapless soldiers who don't know why they're there, the mendacious "officials" whose rationales and lies keep shifting, the torture, the horrors that keep getting "spun" into something palatable.
Then, as now, the US government can't understand why people are not overjoyed to have their country bombed and invaded.
But an overwhelming difference is that in Vietnam reporters were free, like McCarthy, to roam and report at will.
The US army learned its lesson. The lesson was NOT "don't do it," but "don't let them SEE you do it."
Granted, Iraq is more dangerous now for reporters than Vietnam was (though Vietnam was no picnic). But it's a shame there aren't more un-embedded reporters up to the task. (There are a few, like Robert Fisk, in Iraq.)
A major reason Vietnam was brought to a close was the daily dinnertime TV news-images of napalmed babies, burned villages, dead soldiers. The war in Iraq is more sanitized, so we won't revolt at the horror.
A sad, chilling, eye-opening, brilliantly-written book.


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