Edge of History

When speaking of the American military serviceman's experience in Vietnam, it's important to know that there were many vastly different combat tours, depending on where in the country one was stationed and when they served. An Army soldier "in the bush" down in the rice paddies of South Vietnam's fertile flatlands in 1970 had a very different war than a Marine posted in the mountainous country close to the border with ...

In 1965, the United States appeared to be "in it to win it." The trouble was, nobody knew what a
winning outcome would look like. The government of South Vietnam was hopelessly corrupt and made up of landlords that simply stepped into the exploitative French system that came before them. Capturing territory meant nothing, because the enemy fled and then returned as soon as American troops went somewhere else to search for them. The...

In 1965, American President Lyndon Baines Johnson ...

Unbeknownst to many people (and certainly to American war planners, seemingly) is Vietnam's
long and proud history of resisting colonial oppressors. For most of the last two thousand years, the area we now know as Vietnam was dominated in some way by much larger and more powerful forces. The associated ethnic groups making up the Vietnamese people never forgot their own identity or their desire to manage their own affairs. Colonial...

For far too many Americans, "Vietnam" conjures up vague film or picture images of futility, atrocity, and stupidity; it also seems to symbolize folly and national shame. While there are truths to all of these, if we are to learn the things the American war in Vietnam can teach us (and dare I say even the ways in which it can inspire us), we need to know its stories better than the two weeks we got in high school. What ...

Many of us in America know a few phrases of it here and there because we all had to read it in
high school. We know it was a good speech, totally reaffirming freedom while honoring war dead, yadda yadda. But lost in the cliches is how significant it was that Lincoln was able to make such a speech at such a time, and make it stick. He had a LOT riding against people even taking the speech seriously, let alone holding it up later as ...

Part 3 of a series on historical events that are widely overrated in aspects of their impact and yet actually underrated and deeply misunderstood. The decisive victory Hannibal Barca won over the Roman Republic at Cannae in 216 BC was the crown jewel of his many achievements, and has been studied so often that perhaps it's now cliché. I retell the story to focus on why it was so significant in that war and why it still has lessons ...

Part 2 of a series on historical events that are widely overrated in aspects of their impact and yet actually underrated and deeply misunderstood. The Roman civilization is famous all over the world, but few people know just how unlikely and unique their rise to power was. Through an uncommon combination of ruthlessness and humility, Rome built a culture and a war machine that learned from mistakes, adapted to circumstances, and re...

Part 1 of a series on historical events that are widely overrated in aspects of their impact and yet actually underrated and deeply misunderstood. President Abraham Lincoln 's landmark Emancipation Proclamation is known popularly as what "freed the slaves," but its story is far more complex. Skeptics correctly point out that it did very little to change the legal and actual status of slaves anywhere in America at that time, but I b...