conversations.from: human
conversations.value: a title for a book about Vietnam, War, United with the genre: History, Americas
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this book could be 'The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Vietnam War'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first five paragraphs for this book.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Vietnam War
  Who was Ho Chi Minh and what did he want? The French in Vietnam asked this question quite a few times, and never cared much for the answers. The Americans were destined to do the same thing.
  Ho could sound like Thomas Jefferson on Tuesday and Joseph Stalin on Wednesday. A communist, nationalist, opportunist, and revolutionary, Ho Chi Minh was a complicated guy. But to the leaders of the French empire, he was simply the opposition. He and his so-called "freedom fighter" friends had to go. This was not an easy task.
  Neither the French nor the American governments spent much time studying up on things Vietnamese. While the French fought their losing battle to hold on to their abused nineteenth-century colony, the Americans decided to champion their anti-communist cause in Southeast Asia. It was a deadly decision.
  History hurts. It's the study of "dead people and old stuff," a university student once told me, and it seems to offer little relevance to today's fast-paced world. I beg to differ. True, what our forebears did or did not do can seem downright mystifying. And yes, the past can even appear rather alien. People acted so differently back then. But this does not mean history is irrelevant, and the Vietnam War is an especially large case in point.
  Since April 1975 and the end of the Vietnam War, most Americans have wondered whether the conflict was necessary. In hindsight, this 30-year-long bloodbath appears terribly sad and unfortunate. But 50 years ago, during the strident days of the Cold War, the confrontation between capitalism (represented by the United States) and communism (represented by the Soviet Union) was a simple fact of life. Like baseball, hot dogs, and apple pie, the Cold War, most believed, was here to stay. Winning it was America's destiny. During the late 1940s, the Truman Doctrine was born. Championed by the U.S. government all the way to the 1990s, this policy supported anti-communist regimes around the word. Being democratic was not a prerequisite for that support. But was Vietnam a logical place to take this crusade?
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me three more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: If America won too quickly, however, the ARVN role would be a real problem. The ARVN, in a way, were North Vietnam's best ally at that specific time. More than 5,500 ARVN troopers deserted their posts per month in 1964. Nearly 45 percent of the countryside and some 50 percent of the South Vietnamese population were under Vietcong rule by the middle of that year.
  While the U.S. military launched its offensives in South Vietnam (according to the plan), Westmoreland expected Washington to be especially generous to the Saigon regime and the ARVN. Massive economic aid programs and massive shipments of military hardware, as well as stateside administrative and specialized military training for the best and brightest in South Vietnam, would all assist in the "motivation" effort. Like Johnson, Westmoreland insisted that the taxpayer bill was irrelevant for the time being. Fiscal matters could be argued over later. The price of victory was always high.
  The year 1964 was an American general election year. Whereas, to varying degrees, the two Presidents Bush as well as Bill Clinton would tear up on national television when describing the burdens of power, Johnson, like Franklin Roosevelt, loved power. He had no apologies for liking his job, and he saw few obstacles to government influence.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last five paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: After several years on the job, Peterson had helped ease hundreds of U.S. companies into Vietnam, but this was not satisfactory in his view. Old animosities lived on. His biggest problem had been convincing Americans that Vietnam was worth more than old war memories. It remained a hard sell, particularly in light of the various anniversaries marking the end of the war. Peterson stayed optimistic, but there was a long way to go. With long-time diplomatic experience in both the Philippines and China, Raymond Burghardt became the George W. Bush administration's ambassador to Vietnam. Like Peterson, he agreed that old wounds healed slowly, but time was on the side of peace and progress.
  Indeed, years after the last U.S. troops left Saigon, the Vietnam War still hurts. More people know about its myths and legends than about its history. Old doves still say they were right and everybody else was wrong. Old hawks say the same thing. Young people haven't a clue what everyone is yelling about, and politicians say "Let's move on and make some money."
  Sadly, the war's legacy became a kind of political spectator sport during the height of the early twenty-first-century wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Next to baseball and football, cable TV comedians joked, comparing and contrasting the Vietnam War to events in Iraq and Afghanistan had become America's new national sport. From academia to talk radio, arguing over how these wars were "just like Vietnam"—or not—became the in thing. Suddenly, the word "quagmire" was back in the headlines.
  The 2004 election brought out the most debate, including a battle of defense secretaries. On the one side stood former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. On the other stood then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
  Once quite secretive, McNamara had become vocal and apologetic on Vietnam issues following the publication of his memoirs in the mid-1990s. By 2004, he touted 11 specific ways the Iraq War, for instance, was identical to his own "flawed" Vietnam decision making 40 years earlier. Almost all of these ways involved matters of American hubris, cultural misunderstanding, and ideological or political exaggeration. To Rumsfeld, such conclusions assumed a looming American defeat in Iraq, and that Middle East policymaking priorities equaled Southeast Asian policymaking priorities of decades earlier. Iraq, he vowed, was not a "quagmire," and the sport of making Vietnam/Iraq comparisons was largely played by those who opposed Bush administration policies. That was that, Rumsfeld said in a dismissive fashion.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: After several years on the job, Peterson had helped ease hundreds of U.S. companies into Vietnam, but this was not satisfactory in his view. Old animosities lived on. His biggest problem had been convincing Americans that Vietnam was worth more than old war memories. It remained a hard sell, particularly in light of the various anniversaries marking the end of the war. Peterson stayed optimistic, but there was a long way to go. With long-time diplomatic experience in both the Philippines and China, Raymond Burghardt became the George W. Bush administration's ambassador to Vietnam. Like Peterson, he agreed that old wounds healed slowly, but time was on the side of peace and progress.
  Indeed, years after the last U.S. troops left Saigon, the Vietnam War still hurts. More people know about its myths and legends than about its history. Old doves still say they were right and everybody else was wrong. Old hawks say the same thing. Young people haven't a clue what everyone is yelling about, and politicians say "Let's move on and make some money."
  Sadly, the war's legacy became a kind of political spectator sport during the height of the early twenty-first-century wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Next to baseball and football, cable TV comedians joked, comparing and contrasting the Vietnam War to events in Iraq and Afghanistan had become America's new national sport. From academia to talk radio, arguing over how these wars were "just like Vietnam"—or not—became the in thing. Suddenly, the word "quagmire" was back in the headlines.
  The 2004 election brought out the most debate, including a battle of defense secretaries. On the one side stood former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. On the other stood then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
  Once quite secretive, McNamara had become vocal and apologetic on Vietnam issues following the publication of his memoirs in the mid-1990s. By 2004, he touted 11 specific ways the Iraq War, for instance, was identical to his own "flawed" Vietnam decision making 40 years earlier. Almost all of these ways involved matters of American hubris, cultural misunderstanding, and ideological or political exaggeration. To Rumsfeld, such conclusions assumed a looming American defeat in Iraq, and that Middle East policymaking priorities equaled Southeast Asian policymaking priorities of decades earlier. Iraq, he vowed, was not a "quagmire," and the sport of making Vietnam/Iraq comparisons was largely played by those who opposed Bush administration policies.