Perhaps the most terrible thing about the Vietnam war is that in fighting it the primary metric of success was body counts. This fact was the foundation of perverse incentive structure that encouraged American soldiers to kill people indiscriminately. The all-encompassing pointless terribleness of that war is the major current in testimonies of the American soldiers recorded in the 1972 documentary film Winter Soldier. The stories they tell are brutal: live prisoners thrown out of helicopters, civilians tortured, gutted, and dismembered, women and children slaughtered, villages torched, all by 18 and 19 year old kids transformed into animal killers.

Winter Solider disabused me of any lingering romance I may have felt for the American cause in Vietnam after reading Karl Marlantes Matterhorn (2010) last month. Matterhorn is a fictionalized account of a company of Marines in Vietnam circa 1969. Its narrative force is derived from the tension between the meta-stupidity of the war and the reader’s attachment to the Marines as they have to deal with it. I know that if you find yourself in combat, you do what you have to do to survive. But, I can’t help thinking the best thing would have been not to have a war at all, or failing that, refuse to go fight it.