Winners and Losers: Battles, Retreats, Gains, Losses, and Ruins from the Vietnam War

by Gloria Emerson

Book Overview

Based on interviews with both Americans and Vietnamese, Winners and Losers is Gloria Emerson's powerful portrait of the Vietnam War. From soldiers on the battlefield to protesters on the home front, Emerson chronicles the war's impact on ordinary lives with characteristic insight and brilliance. Today, as we approach the fiftieth anniversary of the Gulf of Tonkin incident, much of the physical and emotional damage from that conflict--the empty political rhetoric, the mounting casualties, and the troubled homecomings of shell-shocked soldiers--is once again part of the American experience. Winners and Losers remains a potent reminder of the danger of blindly applied American power, and its poignant truths are the legacy of a remarkable journalist.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393349330
• ISBN13: 9780393349337
• Release Date: July 2014
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 608 Pages
• Weight: 1.13 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.6" x 5.5" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

very intelligent

I did not get to know any women during my year in Vietnam, but I have contemplated the feelings of many women regarding that situation, and I would consider some of the odd things, but not forgotten, in Winners and Losers by Gloria Emerson, who was a reporter for the New York Times in Vietnam, very sophisticated observations about what was going on. I think one of her friends was planting a tree or moving it to a better location in America, which she was not at all concerned about, and he told her: "You would care if it was in Vietnam."

Read It Now

Gloria Emerson's early loose calculation of the closing costs of Vietnam remains extraordinarily valuable. When our government leaps before it understands/examines, then insists upon continuing long after many bright people have recognized a sequence of policy errors, this is what can happen. Episodic/impressionistic, widest possible scope, home & away. Strikingly even-handed, though Emerson developed a very strong set of opinions. Wonderful book. Terrifying war/time.

Silver Stars

The system of rating books by the number of stars which a reader is willing to bestow is perfect for this book. In a section called "Odd Things, But Not Forgotten," the reader is thoroughly informed of how a general was awarded a silver star, how the New York Times sent a reporter named Gloria Emerson to the Awards and Decorations Section to see why the men had made up the perfect dream when they didn't have the kind of documentation normally associated with acts of valor, and how newspaper readers responded to the story. The high point for me was a poem by a draftee, which ended with the perfect attitude for a military mind. "Let me go into battle, / a hero I shall be. / I'm forty-four, I'm still alive, / and the army's mind is me." It made me glad that I served out in the bush, and not as a clerk in some headquarters.

Winners and Losers

While this book is not a military log of each and every battle on the Vietnam front, it is a very valuable book. It offers an honest, heart-felt, even heart-wrenching view of the EFFECT of the war on American, Soliders, and the Vietnamese