Conversations With Americans
Americans are still inclined to cleave to their traditional belief that sadism and torture tactics are not a part of the American makeup and that “incidents” like the one at My Lai are isolated exceptions. Conversations with Americans sweeps aside this comfortable chauvinism with devastating finality. Mark Lane spent a year traveling abroad and in America, interviewing young men who had been in combat service in Vietnam. Some were deserters and some were disaffected. Some had received honorable discharges, some had even been decorated, and some were still in the service. But it all added up to an overwhelming testimony about the horrors and brutality of this war and what it is doing to our sons and brothers.
In this book are Lane’s interviews with over thirty of the more articulate men he saw. It is impossible for anyone who reads it not to feel that this is one of the most shocking, eye-opening books ever encountered in the annals of wartime reporting. Conversations with Americans is urgent reading for every man; universal in its impact, it has a special significance for us Americans – who are directly involved, and who will not relish this look at ourselves. Added to other revelations of the corruption of the human spirit, this book, we hope, can catch the conscience of our country before history attests the shocking bankruptcy of our moral coin, before our sense of outrage is finally numbed by repeated assaults on our humanity.
Conversations with Americans Simon and Schuster, New York, 1970.
