Working Class War

SEQ CHAPTER \h \r 1 Class , Death and Vietnam

A Review of Christian Appy 's Working Class War

University of North Carolina Press , 1993

The American involvement in the Vietnam War remains an important issue in American politics . This is because it takes into itself executive powers , Congressional oversight , the American role abroad , popular opinion and , as this review is concerned with , class and its relation to the makeup of combat forces . The book here under review deals informally with the experiences of working class men in Vietnam . This is informal

' in the sense , while the book is largely written in normal expository prose , a good portion of the work is concerned with anecdotal memories of many who fought in the war and their experiences both as working class soldiers and their life after the war . While the anecdotal approach can be irritating and non-methodological , it does have its benefits in seeing the real opinions of these men

The major issue that the author seeks to deal with is not merely the experience of combat , that has been done over and again . What is more important to the author is dealing with the contradiction of drafting men into a war that they could not understand and did not identify with Ultimately , this argument rests on the idea that French Indochina is far too removed from the normal American consciousness in a way that Germany is not . But this argument rests upon the idea that Vietnam was not worth fighting , and...