era, returning G.I.s are loners disillu-
sioned not just with the war and the
years taken from them but also with
what their country seemed to have be-
come in their absence: hard, greedy, in-
different. Samet even scours military
handbooks, including a 1945 one, mem-
orably titled “112 Gripes About the
French,” which admonished American
G.I.s that they “didn’t come to Europe
to save the French,” or “to do anyone
any favors,” so they should stop stomp-
ing through the Continent as though
expecting everyone’s gratitude. Not ex-
actly “Band of Brothers,” is it?
T
here is a before-and-after quality to
the Second World War in Ameri-
can political writing. The adjective “post-
war” still clings to this one conflict, as
if no American soldiers had wielded
weapons in battle since. But if memories
of one conflict shape attitudes toward
the next, Samet writes, then the Good
War legend has served “as prologue to
three-quarters of a century of misbe-
gotten ones.” There’s plenty of support
for this quandary. In “A Bright Shin-
ing Lie: John Paul Vann and America
in Vietnam” (1988), Neil Sheehan iden-
tified the “disease of victory,” wherein
U.S. leaders, particularly in the military
ranks, succumbed to postwar compla-
cency and overconfidence. Samet recalls
the reflections of Rear Admiral Gene
La Rocque, a Second World War vet-
eran who retired during Vietnam, and
who told Terkel that “the twisted mem-
ory” of the Good War “encourages the
men of my generation to be willing, al-
most eager, to use military force any-
where in the world.”
Memories of the Good War also
helped shape the views of military life
held by the men who fought in Viet-
nam. Samet takes up Philip Caputo’s
Vietnam memoir, “A Rumor of War,”
showing how the author’s notions of
war and service were inf luenced by
youthful fantasies of the Second World
War. “Like thousands of boys,” she
writes, “he imagined himself perform-
ing heroic feats in the style of John
Wayne.” Caputo, a decorated Marine
Corps infantry lieutenant, described
the looming threat of “moral and emo-
tional numbness” during his service,
and how war transforms callousness
into savagery. In his memoir, earnest-
ness mingles with bitterness: “In the
patriotic fervor of the Kennedy years,
we had asked, ‘What can we do for our
country?’ and our country answered,
‘Kill VC.’ ”
The war in Vietnam, Samet sug-
gests, still functions as a counterweight
to the legacy of Good War mythology
in America’s national-security discus-
sions. President George H. W. Bush, in
expelling Saddam Hussein from Ku-
wait in 1991, believed that he had also
exorcised the demons of that bad war.
“By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam
syndrome once and for all,” he exulted
in a White House speech. This past
summer, amid worries that Kabul 2021
would resemble Saigon 1975, President
Biden declared, “There’s going to be no
circumstance where you see people being
lifted off the roof of an embassy of theUnited States.” (He was technically cor-
rect; the landing pad used to evacuate
Embassy personnel a few weeks later
was next door.)
Yet the enduring power of Vietnam
in the American imagination may have
a paradoxical effect: its badness bol-
stered a sense of the Second World War’s
goodness. Decades after George H. W.
Bush was shot down in the Pacific by
Japanese forces and rescued by an Amer-
ican submarine, the old bomber pilot
justified Desert Storm in explicitly Sec-
ond World War terms. His collection
of correspondence, “All the Best, George
Bush,” includes various letters from 1990
and 1991—to King Hussein of Jordan,
to Cardinal Law of Massachusetts, to
his children—invoking the enemies and
the stakes of the Second World War in
arguing for action against Saddam Hus-
sein. For the record, Kuwait was Po-
land, Saddam was Hitler, and Bush
would not be Chamberlain.T
he U.S. exit from Afghanistan and
the coinciding twentieth anniver-
sary of Al Qaeda’s 2001 attacks have
precipitated a spate of memory-mon-
gering over the global war on terror.
Samet identifies several verdicts already
in contention: that it was a “tragic coda
to the American Century,” a two-decade
transition from end-of-history swag-
ger to end-of-empire fatalism; a “val-
iant crusade” undone, as ever, by insuf-
ficient political will to carry on; or a
regrettable misstep by a country that
really should know better. She is par-
ticularly skeptical of the notion that
liberating Afghan women was a vital
part of the original U.S. mission. “How
easily consequence is becoming justi-
fication,” she scoffs. “How flattering it
will be one day to reimagine it as an
original objective.” The search “for a
kind of honor amid the ruins” shapes
the literature of Iraq and Afghanistan,
Samet writes, a tendency that she also
finds in works that revisit Vietnam,
such as Errol Morris’s 2003 documen-
tary, “The Fog of War,” in which Rob-
ert McNamara, L.B.J.’s Secretary of
Defense, says, “We all make mistakes.”
It’s not much as regrets go, though it
tops the Rumsfeldian “Stuff happens”
response to the looting that took place
in Baghdad in 2003.
“If I do that to my own Barbie, imagine what might happen to a tattletale.” “We search for a redemptive ending