Military Review English Edition March-April 2014 | Page 81

LETTERS
Arnold Isaacs Replies to
Dr. William Stearman
Arnold R. Isaacs, Journalist and Vietnam War
Correspondent—Dr. William Stearman has every
right to his opinions on the Vietnam War. He has
no right to mislead readers about my essay and
what it said and did not say. Stearman’s distortions are startling, to put it mildly. To begin with,
for reasons only he can explain, he all but ignores
that my article was a discussion of selected books
on Vietnam. Except for a single title, he does not
refer to the books at all or say anything about their
subject matter. Then he fails to make any distinction between opinions I stated as mine and opinions
that are clearly described as those of the authors
whose books I reviewed. The result is a complete
misrepresentation of the essay’s fundamental nature
and its content.
The conclusion that the Vietnam War was
immoral, for example, was not mine but that of Nick
Turse, the author of one of the books I discussed. Far
from endorsing Turse’s view, as Stearman alleges, I
wrote at some length opposing it. I disputed Turse’s
assertion that war crimes were a typical practice
of American soldiers and criticized him for giving
absolutely no recognition to Americans who did
not commit or cover up crimes against civilians.
Elsewhere Stearman similarly and falsely attributes
judgments to me that were not mine but those of
one of the books I reviewed. Those were not subtle
differences but obvious ones, and I am at a loss to
know how Stearman arrived at such consistently
inaccurate interpretations of what I wrote.
Stearman took particular exception to my calling the Defense Department’s history for its 50th
anniversary commemoration “a feel-good fable.”
(That is my opinion, and I think an inescapable
one; it’s hard to know what else to call a history
that glosses over all uncomfortable facts including
that our side lost the war.) Stearman is not above
promoting fables of his own, however. His anecdote
about Peter Braestrup in Hue, for example, clearly
belongs in that category.
MILITARY REVIEW

March-April