American Reckoning

Christian Appy’s 2015 book American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity examines the realities and myths surrounding the Vietnam War and investigates the lasting impact it has had on our national self-perception. Referencing various sources ranging from movies, novels, and songs to media coverage, official documents, and contemporary commentary, the author presents an original interpretation of the conflict and its consequences for both foreign policy and popular culture. An insightful book that speaks urgently to America’s role in today’s world, American Reckoning is an invitation to carefully and honestly grapple with the conflicting lessons learned and legacies left by the Vietnam War.

Appy opens the book by taking aim at the notion of American exceptionalism as a dangerous delusion by recounting some of the horrors witnessed in the Vietnam War, including mass forced relocations, napalm and chemical defoliants, carpet bombing, and the massacre at My Lai. These atrocities, he says, served to destroy the central principle of national American identity that held that the United States constitutes a uniquely good force in the world, which provoked a profound crisis. The concept of American exceptionalism was rarely challenged during the Cold War, and it was not largely considered until Vietnam revealed the divide between the rhetoric of America’s foreign policy and its reality.

The author zeros in on the career of Tom Dooley, a wartime Navy doctor, noting that initially, America’s intervention in Vietnam was portrayed as an attempt to rescue the country’s people from evil communist aggression. Dooley, however, gave the false impression that the country was largely Catholic and that the people were hostile toward the Viet Minh. Thus, the United States wound up in support of the corrupt Diem regime, which repressed the Buddhist population.



Appy also considers the Munich analogy, whereby American politicians characterized Vietnamese communists as being similar to Hitler in their desire for world domination. However, he views the conflict more as a civil war in which the Vietnamese who lived in the South, with the support of the Ho Chi Minh communist regime, attempted to topple the repressive government.

The United States’ aggressive militaristic policy during the war was, according to Appy, the product of fear as liberals such as Lyndon B. Johnson believed that failure in Vietnam could result in another wave of McCarthyism in America, endangering the president’s Great Society. Such domestic considerations, he says, were linked to the notion that in order to maintain its reputation and prestige, the United States had to fight in Vietnam. The author also suggests American masculinity played a role in the country’s involvement in the war as it did not result from a quagmire that dragged innocent Americans into a conflict but was rather a premeditated choice to employ force. Appy is also sure to note the economic incentives the war gave to military contractors, such as the Brown and Root Construction Company, which became Halliburton.

Returning to his meditation on American exceptionalism, Appy explains that the notion was celebrated through the Green Berets’ heroic image and in popular songs, such as “The Ballad of the Green Berets,” by Barry Sadler. In reality, however, the war quickly replaced this image with atrocities like the My Lai Massacre. Instead of representing an elite force in Vietnam, the United States relied on a draftee population in which the working class and minorities were overrepresented, which resulted in a movement of resistance within the military.



Appy goes on to mention the dependence the United States had on air power, also noting that a far greater number of bombs were dropped by Americans in South Vietnam than the North. This supports the argument that the stronger threat for the American-backed government was the guerrillas in the South, rather than North Vietnam.

During the decades that followed the war, American veterans became increasingly viewed as the central victims of the war as individuals who had risked their lives but were not admired by their country. Little attention was given to the millions of Vietnamese who perished in the conflict. American politicians, as well as popular culture, focused on supporting returning soldiers or on searching for prisoners of war still allegedly being held captive by the Vietnamese.

Thus, says Appy, the war’s legacy held that an innocent America became the victim of a despicable foreign assault. Such attacks, he claims, have broadly been viewed as barbarous hate crimes without clear motive or provocation from America. This has been used as an explanation for the Iranian hostage crisis, the Gulf War, the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. It has resulted in a kind of blind patriotism of obeying and serving without asking questions. Appy contends that a lesson learned from Vietnam is that future conflicts must curtail the number of American casualties to lessen dissent. The author concludes that the persistence of American exceptionalism endangers the nation’s democratic traditions because the notion too easily gives way to the misuse of power in the name of doing good.