Imperial Stars 3-The Crash of Empire by Jerry Pournelle Page A

is so deeply rooted in the burial places of their families; or that the ethnic Chinese, including tens of thousands who supported Hanoi in the war, have been expelled from Communist Vietnam or interned; or that Hanoi's army is still bogged down in Cambodia defending a puppet government— nguy , the term they once applied so invariably to Saigon; or that the Vietnamese are hungry, even in the bountiful South, hungrier than they have been since the famine that followed the collectivization of the land by the Communists in the North in 1955 and 1956.
    The litany goes on, but is anyone listening? Certainly not the "useful idiots" of the Susan Sontag-Mary McCarthy school, that goes without saying—but what about the rest of us? We did the best we could for those people, and the worst; and never learned to distinguish the one from the other. And when the last of our troops left the country in 1973, two years before the fall of Saigon, we had finally reached a consensus: enough was enough.
    It still holds, it seems to me, but uneasily. In the fullness of time we built a monument in Washington to mourn our dead. We have had a trickle of novels, memoirs, and films, welling up from many sources, irrepressibly, about mayhem in the jungle and bewildered young men who could not fathom why they were there; and compensatory fantasies of the Rambo type, of course; and even a few attempts, conscientiously financed by foundations and think tanks, to review the historical record on public television. But these, much like the rare works of political and military analysis published in the past few years, have been strangely received, if at all: praised or damned mechanically, as it were, in feeble response to reflexes that have somehow lost their spring. It is as if the Vietnam that once so roiled our body politic, and gave rise to so much reportorial posturing, pop anthropology, and anguished moralism, had been relegated to oblivion, so that we have trouble remembering what it was all about.
    And now we have this Palace File , a moving account (and from an unaccustomed angle) of one of the most shattering events of our history. It is a scandalous book, in the biblical sense of the word, producing serious new evidence and argument to prove that we as a nation not only failed our Vietnamese allies but shamelessly betrayed them. It has been available for more than a year now, but—"woe unto him through whom the scandal comes!"— to date I have seen only one review.
    Granted, there must be others, beyond my ken, but I think it safe to assume that The Palace File has failed, as they say in the trade, to take off.
     
    This morning's New York Times carries the third or fourth of a series of reports on postwar Vietnam. A number of memoirs and studies of former members or supporters of the Vietcong, now for the most part in exile, have been published by David Chanoff and Doan Van Toai. And most importantly, Ellen J. Hammer has brought out her long-awaited—corrosive and devastating—account of the overthrow and murder of Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother, Nhu.[A Death in November, Dutton, 1987]
    According to Toai, once a fellow-traveler of the Vietcong and now a research associate at the University of California in Berkeley, there is more ahead; and all this would suggest that the amnesia that followed so hard upon our Vietnamese obsession may be coming to an end. It was never total, and now it remains to be seen whether the larger public, and not just one corner of academia, is ready to go back to "all that." There are always issues more pressing than the past, even the relatively recent past; and this truism is true a fortiori —notoriously—for a people as perennially and programmatically unfinished as ours.
    Witness the latest episode in the continuing struggle between the White House and Congress over the direction and management of our foreign affairs. When The Palace File appeared, the welkin was beginning to ring with revelations and rumors