Lieutenant Dangerous A Vietnam War Memoir – Jeff Danziger

Historical examples were so numerous that only by resolutely ignoring history could anyone conclude that strategic bombing would work. To resolutely ignore this evidence, we had the air force. Sometime in the 1950s the air force, no longer a part of the army, developed a concept known, either officially or jocularly, as the Air Force Plans for Peace.

These plans were developed to counter the equally unproven theory that intercontinental ballistic missiles could keep people in line. For the air force the challenge was to keep the need for manned aircraft alive. If missiles were accepted as effective, why would jet fighters and huge bombers be needed? Why would anything other than missiles be needed? For a time John Kennedy was at least partially convinced that this was true.

Fear of obsolescence ran through the upper ranks of the air force. Bombing would work. Especially nuclear bombing. And then reality raised its ugly, grinning head. Bombing did not stop enemy insurgents. In fact, it gave the enemy the one thing they desperately needed, an enemy. Being bombed by the capitalist Americans meant, among other things, that Lenin, or Mrs. Lenin, was right. In World War II bombing didn’t defeat the British, but never mind that, either.

In fact, the air force concluded that the example of the Blitz could be used to make their point. Bombing did not defeat the British because, wait for it, Göring stopped too soon. Well, there, you see? He didn’t bomb enough. That was his problem. We Americans would not make that mistake. Not us! We learned from history. Bombing would work, the air force said, if you did it long enough. With this lesson from history firmly in mind, the Air Force dropped a tonnage of bombs on North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia so great that they, even today, cannot calculate it accurately.

The popular claim is that the tonnage exceeded the total of all bombs dropped by all sides in World War II, but as previously asked, that means exactly what? Flying from bases in Thailand, the air force loosed hundreds of thousands of tons of bombs on the supply lines coming down through the jungle from the north, the Ho Chi Minh Trail. In theory, without supplies the North would capitulate. And maybe it would have, if the supplies were being transported on railroad trains.

But the supplies, food, ammunition, medicines, and so on, were being transported on bicycles.

“From arguably the best political cartoonist this nation has ever produced… wow: words! And what words. Having spent a decade on the ground in Afghanistan, I can certify: this book applies directly to today’s wars. Only, in the transition to an all-volunteer army, what may have disappeared from the ranks of our officers is this type of brutally honest skepticism.” — Sarah Chayes, author of The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban and On Corruption in America: And What Is At Stake “Every West Point cadet should be required to read Lieutenant Dangerous, political cartoonist Jeff Danziger’s powerful memoir about his four years in the army, when honor, integrity, and purpose were as illusory as American victory in Vietnam.”

— David Cay Johnston, recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, an IRE Medal, and the George Polk Award “Not since Tobias Wolfs’ In Pharoah’s Army has there been such an honest and self-aware war memoir to come out of the Vietnam conflict. Jeff Danziger’s Lieutenant Dangerous belongs on the shelf next to Wolf, Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, and Karl Marlantes’ Matterhorn.” — Tom Bodett, author and radio anomaly “ ‘I am not a weeper, but I sat on the bus to Ft.

Dix and wept.’ So begins Jeff Danziger’s youthful journey to the center of America’s Vietnam maelstrom. A 24 year-old Vermonter with a pregnant wife at home, Danziger experienced the full-on nightmare of the Army’s Vietnam catastrophe. He saw everything combat – death, hypocrisy, moral degradation, and the fervid futility of the mightiest nation on earth bested on the battlefield by men and women fighting in pajamas and loincloths. He saw everything, that is, except the nominal purpose of the conflict. There is no evidence of a shared cause with our South Vietnamese ‘allies,’ no evidence that American soldiers knew or cared about the Communist Threat, and no evidence of the proverbial quest for glory that theoretically animates military endeavors.

War, he writes, is ‘in an awful way, interesting, if you can avoid getting killed and don’t mind loud noises.’ Danziger’s purpose is to inform, but he and we wonder what the story of the 55,000 squandered American lives has taught us. Then the jungle; now the desert.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: 0f5f64115b281764
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 4,127,474 bytes (3.936 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• ISBN: 9781586422738, 9781586422745
• Pages: 166
• Language: English (en)

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