Revisiting Vietnam

The late Tom Hayden has an answer for conservative attempts to recast the United States, involvement in Vietnam as a patriotic and worthy exercise, and it comes straight from his own history as an anti-war activist. Hell No: The Forgotten Power of the Vietnam Peace Movement (Yale University Press, $32) is part memoir, part history and part warning. The memoir portion has some regrets for things like protesters waving Viet Cong flags, as well as his own observation, during a postwar visit to Vietnam, of the same shops and chains that proliferate in America. He asks, “Why kill, maim and uproot millions of Vietnamese if the outcome was a consumer wonderland approved by the country’s still-undefeated Communist Party?” That is a very, very good question.