Rereading Vietnam

I heard some anti-American type in a Wuxi pub proclaim that the Americans got their butt kicked in Vietnam.  Alas, that is not true.  The NVA never ever beat an American army in a conventional battle.  The Americans fought with "one hand tied around their backs".  This article "Rereading Vietnam" by Robert Kaplan in the Atlantic tries to tell some stories that the anti-Vietnam mindset can never contemplate. 

I love this paragraph in the article about Admiral Stockdale:

 

Moral philosophy, in particular the Stoics, helped Stockdale survive. As he puts it, after he ejected from his plane, "I left my world of technology and entered the world of Epictetus." Epictetus was a Greek-born philosopher in first-century Rome, whose Stoic beliefs arose from his brutal treatment as a slave. Stockdale explains, "Stoics belittle physical harm, but this is not braggadocio. They are speaking of it in comparison to the devastating agony of shame they fancied good men generating when they knew in their hearts that they had failed to do their duty ... " When Stockdale writes about Epictetus, Socrates, Homer, Cervantes, Calvin, and other writers and philosophers, their work achieves a soaring reality because he relates them to his own, extraordinary experiences as a prisoner in one of the 20th century's most barbaric penal programs. Stockdale reminds us about something that much scholarship, with its obsession for textual subtleties, obscures: The real purpose of reading the classics is to develop courage and leadership.

Admiral Stockdale was Ross Perot's vice presidential candidate, a victim of the t.v. medium.  Too bad, he has become a figure of fun.  He was in fact a man of great honour.