Forty years ago this week, on August 14, 1973, US bombing activities in Cambodia—in support of Lon Nol’s forces fighting the Communist Khmer Rouge—ceased at midnight in accordance with the Congressional ban resulting from the passing of the Case-Church Amendment earlier that summer.
This legislation ended 12 years of combat in Indochina and prohibited further US combat activity in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, unless the president secured Congressional approval in advance. Although the US did continue to provide military equipment and economic support to the South Vietnamese government, the Case-Church Amendment effectively ended direct US military involvement in the Vietnam War.
More than a decade later, William Broyles, drafted when he was a twenty-four-year-old student at Oxford University, found himself flooded with emotion during the dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, and decided to return to Vietnam to confront what he’d been through. In this gripping memoir, Broyles, a former marine, tries to make sense of the war.
No American before or since has gone so deeply into the other side: the enemy side. Broyles interviews dozens of Vietnamese, from the generals who ran the war to the men and women who fought it. He moves from the corridors of power in Hanoi—so low-tech that the plumbing didn’t work—to the jungles and rice paddies where he’d fought. He meets survivors of American B-52 strikes and My Lai, and grieves with a woman whose son was killed by his own platoon. Along the way, Broyles also explores the deep bonds he shared with his own comrades, and the mystery of why men love war even as they hate it. Previously published as Brothers in Arms, this edition includes a new preface by the author, excerpted below.
“I read Goodbye Vietnam when I was seventeen and about to join the Corps....This is an essential piece of American combat literature. Broyles captures the dizzying highs and crushing lows of small unit warfare, the camaraderie, the sacrifice, and the long trippy road home toward some kind of inner peace for the individual soldier. Read it. Read it. Read it.” — Anthony Swoffard, Jarhead: A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles
“A first-rate piece of work, infused with an ideal American common decency and common sense.” — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
“A book as important as this…called for an author young enough to have fought in Viet Nam, lucky enough and cool enough to survive, brave enough to go back and face his old foes and able to write well enough to capture the paradoxes, terrors and beauty of that land and its abominable war.” — Norman Mailer