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Welcome to the Annals of Vietnam, a collection of articles, reviews, and images dealing with America's misadventures south and north of the 17th parallel. I have a particular interest in the early years, because that's when I was there as a reporter for the left-liberal magazine, The Nation, which was so financially strapped that it would publish dispatches even from a Republican like me.

Chickenhawk in the Highlands

A hawk is the guy who loves combat, while a chicken is terrified of it. A chickenhawk, therefore, is the secret soul who's both terrified to be facing death and enraptured by the experience -- an attitude more common, I suspect, than most war stories would have you believe. Meet Robert Mason, who wrote this delightful book about the Vietnam War, along with a sequel called Chickenhawk Back in the World about the awfulness that that afflicted him when he came home. I live in a college town, where to call a Vietnam War book "delightful" is a social crime on the order of gushing, "Hey, isn't that Trump doing a great job!" Nevertheless, I found Chickenhawk fun to read, at least until I came to the epilog.

Full disclosure: part of the pleasure I found in these pages was the echo of my own months in the Highlands of Vietnam. When Mr Mason was a helicopter pilot-candiate in June 1964, I was wading "the skinny Song Ba" (as he calls that river) and admiring the white obelisk and rusting armored vehicle on Route 19, where Groupe Mobile 100 was ambushed and France began to lose its attempt to reconquer Indochina. We all thought it would be different this time, but it wasn't. For one thing, American deaths in our Vietnam War came to 58,000, compared to about 21,000 Frenchmen who gave their lives from 1946 to 1953. (Thousands of Algerians, Moroccans, and other foreigners also lost their lives in the Indochina War. Indeed, when the Foreign Legionnaires boarded the troopships that would take them home, for farewell they sang Lili Marleen ... in German.)

Chickenhawk is a great book. Read it if you haven't already, and that probably include some of you, since more than half a million copies have been bought already.

Blue skies! -- Daniel Ford. You can send humanitarian aid to Ukraine through Razom (a tax-exempt US-based charity). Or support its military through the National Bank of Ukraine.

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Question? Comment? Newsletter? Send me an email. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford