e ones that led him into writing are the same; that impulse was there before he ever saw combat and his experiences as a Marine lieutenant in Vietnam merely clarified his desire to tell other people about the importance of war as a defining element of both personal and national history (Bain, 1997, p. BR1) How he came to be a correspondent lies both in his personal history and in the political history of his generation. One almost senses that he would have found some other war to write about if Vietnam had not happened to him and to the country û except for the fact that his work makes it clear that he sees the war as integral to its part in American history.
While not serving as an apologist for the war, he does suggest that it was necessary in some way, an inevitable part of the panoply of 20th century history. He writes the history of American politics in our times with a sense of Greek tragedy: Things should have been other than what they were, people should have been better than they were, but given that they werenÆt, what happened was in many ways inevitabl
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