After the Good War, Volume 135

The fall of Saigon in 1975 marked the end of the Vietnam War-more than fifty years later, its memory is already fading, although its cultural impact remains. Beginning in the mid-1950s with the Republic of South Vietnam in a civil war with North Vietnam over communism, the United States's military commitment rose to half a million soldiers, airmen, and sailors. Among them was Jerome Loving, a twenty-four-year-old college graduate. Over the next two decades, the conflict took the lives of nearly three million Vietnamese and sixty thousand Americans. Loving returned home from Vietnam in the final days of 1966 to watch the war as he pursued graduate degrees and pondered the cataclysm he had witnessed. As part of the first major wave of American troops, Loving describes in After the Good War: A Vietnam Memoir his life of nearly nine months in the combat zone between the treacherous streets of Saigon and the harbor and air base at Cam Ranh Bay. Loving's memoir, primarily based on letters he wrote while "in-country" to his wife and a diary kept during his service in Vietnam, is not a war story per se but a lament. Its looming symbol is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial at National Mall and Memorial Parks in Washington, DC; unlike previous war memorials or statues, it's a wall of words with the names of the deceased American combatants. After the Good War offers a deeply personal, nuanced meditation on the war and its aftereffects, both on American society and in the minds and hearts of the Americans who fought there.