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''Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam'' is a Pulitzer Prize winning book by the American journalist Frances FitzGerald (1940-) and published in 1972 by both Back Bay Publishing and Little, Brown and Company.〔 〕〔 〕 ==Summary== The first major book by an American on America in Vietnam, which she calls a "first draft of history", it argues that American values of freedom, democracy, optimism, and technological progress were inconsistent with Vietnam's values, culture, agrarian economy, and long bloody history, making the Vietnam War effort doomed from the start. The Vietnamese sense of government, history, politics, and war is completely different from the American one, as is their cultural tradition of ancestor worship and their belief in what constitutes effective government (i.e. the mandate of Heaven), yet the U.S. government never took these differences into account, leading to failure. "But the American officials in supporting the Saigon government insisted that they were defending 'freedom and democracy' in Asia. They left the GIs to discover that the Vietnamese did not fit into their experience of either 'communist' or 'democrats.' Under different circumstances this invincible ignorance…" "Whatever strategy the American government uses to carry on the war, it will only be delaying the inevitable." The book discusses the U.S. government's ignorance of Vietnam's history, especially their determination to rid themselves of any foreign invaders, even if, as with the Chinese, it took 1,000 years, making them unable to see themselves as just more foreign invaders to the populace. The U.S. tendency to support thugs over patriots, to elevate to power those who will sell out their people for money rather than work with those committed to the well-being of their people is brought out, as well as how Ho Chi Minh was a U.S. ally during WWII, his hero was Thomas Jefferson, he was very pro-American at first, yet he was a nationalist and a patriot first, which meant from the U.S. perspective that he was not only unreliable but someone who had to be eliminated, throwing him into the arms of the Red Chinese. If the U.S. had overlooked his storefront Communism, they might have sent U.S. troops not to help Vietnamese fight Vietnamese while Mao Tse-tung pulled the strings hoping for later absorption of the whole country, but to fight Chinese on the Chinese-Vietnam border, which could have lasted to this day. Spending 90% of its text on the lead-up to the Tet Offensive, it covers several topics including the Cao Đài monotheist religious sect in Tay Ninh, the corrupt regime of Ngo Dinh Diem, and "Nixon's War". In her discussion of the Battle of Bong Son, she discusses the futility of body counts: "Furthermore, as the only 'indicator of progress,' it suggested that death and destruction had some absolute value in terms of winning the war. That the enemy might continue to recruit, rearm, and rebuild (often with the help of people enraged by the American destruction) did not seem to enter into the calculations." The book is one of the first to expose the functions of the shanty towns built up around U.S. bases as laundry, drinks, and prostitution. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Fire in the Lake」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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