Book review: The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam
So the truth about “Technowar in Vietnam” is much like the Vietnam War itself: you can really go nuts on the details, but the basics are quite simple. America got involved in Vietnam due to overwhelming arrogance, one that assumed with enough force, materiel, and firepower, politics could be ignored. “The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam” by James Williams Gibson is a book with a very good core criticizing how and why the war was fought, but when it steps away from that core, it can be atrocious. The book’s cardinal flaw (or saving grace, depending on your point of view) is that this core and the halo of mostly confused nonsense around it never link together; the methods of one have nothing to do with the other. If the postmodern jank took over it’d be just another gibberish academic book to be filed and forgotten; had an editor managed to cut out the extraneous bits, Technowar might have been a classic. So...when the book is good, it is ...