Elizabeth Rosner's "Survivor Café"

Elizabeth Rosner is the author of three novels and a poetry collection.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her first work of nonfiction, Survivor Café: The Legacy of Trauma and the Labyrinth of Memory, and reported the following:

From page 99 (footnotes omitted):

In 2007, the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity issued a letter condemning the denial of the Armenian genocide, a letter signed by fifty-three Nobel laureates. Wiesel himself repeatedly called Turkey’s campaign to downplay its actions “a double killing.”

It’s already more than a year past the one-hundredth anniversary commemorating the Armenian genocide of 1915. At a ceremony on April 24th, 2015, the Turkish government offered “condolences” for the 1.5 million victims, while pointedly refusing to use the word “genocide.”

*

Inside a former matzo factory in Istanbul, now that Turkey’s Jewish community has found it cheaper to import matzo from Israel, an art installation was created. White pieces of paper, imprinted with images to make the paper look like matzo, hang suspended from wires. They are referred to as “ghost matzo.”

Years ago, while I was wandering aimlessly through the Lower East Side of New York City, my gaze was suddenly drawn upward to a small wire-mesh-covered window through which I could make out the machinery of the once-famous Streit's factory for matzo-making. I watched the baked pieces dangling and drifting in the hot air, slowly drying.

I’ve heard that factory is closed now too.

My friend Lola tells me that among printmakers, the second image printed after a monotype is called a ghost.

*

According to firsthand testimony, the Sonderkommando observed a Passover seder. Matzo, that is, unleavened bread, also translated as “the bread of affliction,” were baked in the oven at Birkenau. One of the men had worked in a bakery before Passover and knew the special requirements.

I’m humbly gratified to see that Page 99 of Survivor Café serves as a compact example of the book’s structure, its interlocking themes, and even its multi-layered voice. First, these three sections, separated by asterisks, represent the braided organization of my book -- its interweaving of research and conversation and personal story. Even though I don’t always oscillate this rapidly among subjects, and even though more often than not the narrative moves rather slowly and elaborately along a single pathway, the book’s overarching messages are revealed through each of the sub-sections on this page: the way genocides connect us to one another; the way art tries and fails and tries again to comment upon or even to embody history; the way truth can be hidden in the abuses and erasures of language; the way stories of war and loss and beauty and resilience echo back and forth across time and place.

Whether or not it’s explicitly clear to the reader at each moment, in my own mind as the writer, everything in the book is both invisibly and visibly interconnected like this. In these passages, I recognize details that refer to the legacy of trauma (Elie Wiesel calling the Turkish government’s denial of the Armenian genocide a “double killing”) and also the labyrinth of memory (Istanbul and its closed matzo factory and the making of ghostly art). Last but not least, in moving formally and informally between citations and interpretations, between the globally collective and the individually personal, this one page captures the tone of the book, a voice that is intimate as well as journalistic, emotional as well as scholarly. I love the idea that not only the quality of the book but also the cumulative effect of reading it can, in microcosm, be imagined by way of this single page-long experience.

Visit Elizabeth Rosner's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Peter Sahlins's "1668: The Year of the Animal in France"

Peter Sahlins is Professor of History, University of California, Berkeley.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, 1668: The Year of the Animal in France, and reported the following:

From page 99:

The conversations about and descriptions of the Royal Menagerie, coming at the end of the Promenade de Versailles [by Madeleine de Scudéry, published in 1669), support this reading. The Promenade is part guidebook, part “gallant description,” part “Story of Célanire,” and part conversation … the discussion at the menagerie discloses an important characteristic of the site: it is less a source of science than of the civilizing process, here expressed in literary terms.

The page 99 test makes my book seem as though it’s for a largely literary crowd – that, in this case, it might be about the infamous French salonnière Scudéry – but it’s not. I draw widely across the disciplines, to capture in my net a hitherto under-documented appearance of a huge array of animals in many different media in and around 1668, from the decorative arts and tapestry, to lectures on physiognomy, to the design of the fabled animals in the Royal Labyrinth, and to pamphlets about medical scandals involving animal blood transfusion.  What did this sudden visibility of animals, this “animal moment,” 450 years ago, mean? Animals, I argue, were good to think (I unapologetically invoke the famous phrase of anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss).  In 1668, they were especially good to rethink certain fundamental changes in ideas about governance, about nature, and about animals themselves.  I introduce a neologism  – “Renaissance humanimalism” – to describe the world that was superseded, but never completely, in 1668; and I tell the stories of artists and weavers, courtiers and virtuosi, and others who were opponents and supporters of the two towering figures that dominate the great mutation of 1668: Louis XIV and René Descartes. In the shadow of these giants – representing versions of absolutism and mechanism -- animals were critical agents in the imagining of new world views.

It all started with the Royal Menagerie at Versailles, first conceived in 1664, and largely completed by 1668.  The Menagerie was dominated by graceful avian species. The birds and (fewer) mammals of of Versailles staged  a new model of animal spectatorship, one with deep political and cultural implications. On page 99, I write that “The Menagerie is less a source of science than of the civilizing process, here expressed in literary terms.” The “civilizing process,” adapted from the German sociologist Norbert Elias, could be extended to make sense of the uses of animals in the realm of politics, but also in the  world of literature and other media including media of medical pamphlets, painting, tapestry, sculpture, garden design, and more.

Finally, page 99 contains my core thesis about the Royal Menagerie, itself at the center of the Year of the Animal in 1668, where it all began.  As René Magritte might have put it, “this not a zoo.” Although the dead bodies of the Versailles’ animals quickly found their way onto Claude Perrault’s dissecting table of (as of the spring of 1668, if not earlier), such was not the intentional design of Louis XIV’s menagerie. At its founding, the Royal Menagerie was a work of of splendor rather than of science. It was allegory before it was zoology, and it was literary before it was social.  In the end, page 99 passes the test.

Learn more about 1668: The Year of the Animal in France at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Laura Engelstein's "Russia in Flames"

Laura Engelstein is Henry S. McNeil Professor Emerita of Russian History at Yale University, where she served as chair of the History Department, and Professor Emerita at Princeton.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Russia in Flames: War, Revolution, Civil War, 1914-1921, and reported the following:

On page 99 of Russia in Flames Rasputin is murdered. Even people who know little about the Russian Revolution of 1917 have heard of Grigorii Rasputin, the sinister holy man who allegedly held the Empress Alexandra under his spell and contributed to the downfall of the 300-year-old Romanov dynasty. The details are lurid: on December 17, 1916, as Russia was struggling under the pressure of World War I, Rasputin was enticed into the basement of the Petrograd palace of the wealthy and highly placed Prince Felix Yusupov. There, Yusupov and two accomplices, one a grand duke and the tsar's cousin, the other a vociferous anti-Semite, first poisoned and then shot their victim, before dumping his body under the ice of the frozen river. The patriotic assassins hoped to restore the tsar to his senses and improve Russia's fortunes in the war. Many Russians at the time believed Nicholas II was in thrall to the occult forces personified by the man in black; people ever since have been fascinated by the healer's gruesome demise.

When my editor first approached me about a project for the centenary of 1917, he proposed I write about Rasputin. Rasputin's influence behind the throne and the public's widespread belief in his demonic powers contributed to the erosion of the tsar's political authority. Rasputin nevertheless had only a bit part in the large-scale drama that was leading Russia to the revolutionary brink, a turning point in world history. Russia in Flames tells the big story: the autocracy's collapse, the heroic attempt of civil society to create a democratic Russia, the defeat of that project by the demands of continuing war, the despair of the popular classes that bore the brunt of the conflict, the bloody Civil War that dismembered the empire, and the machinations of Lenin's Bolsheviks, determined to point Russia in a new, utopian direction. Yet, on page 99, Rasputin comes back to haunt me.

Learn more about Russia in Flames at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Linda Gordon's "The Second Coming of the KKK"

Linda Gordon, winner of two Bancroft Prizes and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, is the author of The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition, Dorothea Lange and Impounded, and the coauthor of Feminism Unfinished. She is the Florence Kelley Professor of History at New York University and lives in New York and Madison, Wisconsin.

Gordon applied the “Page 99 Test” to The Second Coming of the KKK and reported the following:

Page 99 places the reader in the midst of the 1920s Klan’s vigilante attacks on Catholics, Jews, people of color including not only African Americans but also Mexican and Asian Americans, immigrants, Prohibition violators, and people “parking automobiles along our highways …for what is believed to be immoral purposes.”  These categories overlap of course.  What’s more, they are all racialized: in Klan ideology, immigrants are bad unless they are “Nordic” Protestants; only Catholics drink liquor and it’s only Jews who supply it; and the “immoral purposes” are incited by the Jews who use their control of Hollywood in a conspiracy to subvert American values and thereby weaken the nation.

Klansmen and police jointly conducted raids on saloons and bootleggers; sometimes the Klansmen were legally deputized by law enforcement.  One sheriff worked with a civilian “booze squad” of Klansmen.  In southern Illinois such attacks “produced lethal battles in 1924 and 1925, involving gunmen and the deployment of military forces, and ended by forcing the anti-Klan sheriff out of office.”  The victims of these raids then appeared before Klan-sympathizing judges—one a future Klaliff, aka Vice Cyclops aka a regional Klan leader—who always convicted them.  Klansmen, by contrast, were never convicted for their vigilantism.  In Oklahoma, and perhaps elsewhere too, Klan membership was automatically suspended for any man called for jury duty, so that he could deny it and not be excluded for bias.

We also learn on page 99 that a Klan Grand Goblin “modeled his spy network on that of tsarist Russia.”  (This is the northern KKK, with some 3 to 5 million members, founded in 1920.  Unlike the original southern Klan, a secret terrorist gang who lynched African Americans to warn the whole African American population not to dare protesting white supremacy, the northern Klan, not at all secret, extended its campaign of bigotry to target Catholics and Jews.)  Its “spies” worked to catch and discipline Klan members who patronized stores run by Catholics and Jews.

Much of the Klan’s method of intimidation involved threats rather than physical attacks, and the rest of the page recounts some of those.  “If you are the mouthpiece of American labor in this locality and do not endorse the above principles,” an Oregon “Kleagle” warned,  “then you would be a fit subject for a Vigilance Committee.”  Threatening a Vermont journalist:  “Unless “certain newspaper reporters ... stop attacking the Klan, they will be taught the same lesson that some editors in the south have learned.”

The Klan also practiced “black psy war.”  This label derives from the US war in Vietnam, in which the CIA and armed forces distributed leaflets designed to look as if they were issued by the Vietnamese National Liberation Front (aka the “Viet Cong).  The goal was to get people to turn against the NLF by attributing malign  plans to it.  The Klan used similar tactics, distributing frightening material allegedly from Catholic sources.

The page concludes thus: “Taken in the aggregate, it seems clear that these threats also constituted terrorism, aimed … “  The sentence continues on the next page: “at sending a message to whole communities of people—intimidating noncomforming groups into submission to Klan `law’,”

Lest we assume that only men were responsible for KKK bigotry, let me point out that the very next chapter is about Klanswomen, who numbered about 1.5 million.

Visit Linda Gordon's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Paul Halpern's "The Quantum Labyrinth"

Paul Halpern is a professor of physics at the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia, and the author of fifteen popular science books, including Einstein’s Dice and Schrödinger’s Cat. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright Scholarship, and an Athenaeum Literary Award. Halpern has appeared on numerous radio and television shows including Future Quest, Radio Times, several shows on the History Channel, and The Simpsons 20th Anniversary Special. He has contributed opinion pieces for the Philadelphia Inquirer, blogs frequently on Medium, and was a regular contributor to NOVA’s “The Nature of Reality” physics blog.

Halpern applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Quantum Labyrinth: How Richard Feynman and John Wheeler Revolutionized Time and Reality, and reported the following:

I think page 99 of The Quantum Labyrinth is emblematic of the book’s depiction of Feynman’s cleverness (in terms of his work at Los Alamos), mischievous nature (his pension for playing pranks and picking locks), love for his first wife Arline who was ill with tuberculosis (she was his creative muse), and overall versatility.  That page does not mention Wheeler, the other protagonist of my book, so it is not fully representative, however.

Visit The Quantum Labyrinth website.

My Book, The Movie: The Quantum Labyrinth.

Writers Read: Paul Halpern.

--Marshal Zeringue

Deborah Parker and Mark Parker's "Sucking Up"

Deborah Parker is Professor of Italian at the University of Virginia. Mark Parker is Professor of English at James Madison University. They are coauthors of Inferno Revealed: From Dante to Dan Brown.

They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Sucking Up: A Brief Consideration of Sycophancy, and reported the following:

Our book considers sycophancy from several perspectives—from the earliest types in classical literature, to historical examples, to modern sociology, to famous literary examples, among them Dante, Shakespeare, Austen, Dickens and Proust.

Page 99 occurs in the book’s final section, “How Low Can You Go?” where we look at Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. The book’s narrator Stevens is an aging butler who served the aristocrat Lord Darlington during the build-up to WWII. As Stevens ponders his life of devoted service, he gradually reveals that Darlington had been a Nazi sympathizer.

Much of the narration is defensive, a kind of anxious special pleading. Stevens’ suppression of self and his complicity in his master’s meddling in foreign policy, weigh heavily upon him. To justify his assent Stevens carefully develops his professional ethos through a series of anecdotes, from which he draws certain lessons that illustrate a “great” butler. A “great” butler will only “abandon the professional being he inhabits” when he pleases. Adherence to this code proves excruciating when a guest at one of Lord Darlington’s banquets wishes to show the limitations of democracy. The guest peppers Stevens with questions about various economic and political issues to expose the butler’s ignorance and Stevens performs his humiliation satisfactorily.

Key to Stevens’ maintenance of dignity here is the illusion of choice. He makes himself small out of professionalism. And with such self-deceptions, Stevens transforms a range of sycophantic roles—from the “yes-man” to the reliable doormat—into something positive. Page 99 is integral to our consideration of the blindness which accompanies some forms of sycophancy. The brilliance of Ishiguro’s novel lies in the narrator’s unreliability, his blinkered recollection of the past. Stevens is always on the verge of unhappy revelations about himself, Lord Darlington, and the nature of his service. Like a word forever on the tip of one’s tongue, this full consciousness never emerges. Flatterers fool themselves.

Learn more about Sucking Up at The University of Virginia Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Craig Callender's "What Makes Time Special?"

Craig Callender earned his PhD with research on the direction of time at Rutgers University. He then worked at the London School of Economics before moving to the University of California, San Diego. He has interests in time and physics, the interpretation of quantum mechanics, quantum gravity, philosophy of science, and environmental ethics.

Callender applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, What Makes Time Special?, and reported the following:

Page 99 is a fair representation of the first half of the book. The book can be divided into two parts, one on time and physics followed by one on time and psychology. As we navigate through life, we employ a model of time that is deeply tied to what makes our lives recognizably human. This model of flowing time is connected to personal identity, agency, freedom and more. The first half investigates the fate of this model when confronted by physics. The model doesn’t fare well: current physics judges it to be more or less rubbish. The second half accepts this conclusion and then uses psychology, evolution, and more to explain why the model we use, even if fundamentally flawed, nonetheless makes sense for creatures like us to use.

But what about future physics? Could it possibly save intuitive time? That is the question addressed on page 99. Here I point out that on the horizon we have quantum gravity, a set of research programs aiming to join quantum theory with relativity. Depending upon whether one regards quantum theory or relativity as the more secure foundation, one will either “rescue” time from relativity or further relativity’s attempt to demolish time. Neither task, I show, is so easy. The time of relativity is very resilient. Because it connects up with the central tension running throughout the book — is the flow of time an illusion? — Page 99 is a good indication of what you’ll find throughout.

Learn more about What Makes Time Special? at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Aidan Forth's "Barbed-Wire Imperialism"

Aidan Forth is Assistant Professor of British imperial history at Loyola University Chicago.

He  applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Barbed-Wire Imperialism: Britain's Empire of Camps, 1876-1903, and reported the following:

Camps, throughout history, have served a multitude of functions, from incarcerating political suspects, to rounding up refugees, enemy aliens and military combatants. One thread that connects this global history is the language of disease. Whether in Nazi Germany, where camps detained “carriers of the bacillus of Bolshevism” (218) or at Guantánamo Bay, where barbed-wire incarcerated Haitian refugees suspected of carrying AIDS (227), medicine and social sanitation have proven central metaphors of modern statecraft. Likewise, in the British Empire, medical concerns led to the detention of more than a million colonial subjects during a global pandemic of bubonic plague in 1897. A system of medical quarantine camps, from Hong Kong to South Africa, and especially in India, interned those suspected of carrying the contagion. In the name of “disease control,” camps (like the one pictured on the cover of the book) detained “certain classes of people” who “as a rule are dirty in their habits” (82). Page 99 is the final page of chapter 3, which systematically examines this vast system of detention and lays the groundwork for future chapters on camps for political rather than medical “suspects.”

Ultimately, the chapter concludes that medical quarantine largely failed to stop the spread of plague. In the words of Claude Hill, Private Secretary to the Bombay Governor, plague camps were “not only ineffective,” they “created an undercurrent of discontent” among the native population (99). Yet camps remained popular among colonial officials because they offered an excuse to remove undesirable social and racial elements—“the scum of the Bombay population,” according to one police official (56)—from the center of colonial cities. Urban “cleansing” became racial “cleansing.” British plague camps also provided effective logistical models for the billeting of mass populations in the future. These included the “concentration camps” of the South African War (1899-1901), which interned “verminous” and “extremely dirty” populations during a colonial “dirty war” (167). Interestingly, officials from India with experience managing plague camps were eventually seconded to administer this new system of camps in South Africa.

Learn more about Barbed-Wire Imperialism at the University of California Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Walter S. Judd & Graham A. Judd's "Flora of Middle-Earth"

Walter S. Judd is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Department of Biology, University of Florida. Graham Judd holds an MFA in Printmaking, and received a Jerome Foundation Fellowship for Emerging Printmakers at Highpoint Center for Printmaking.

They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Flora of Middle-Earth: Plants of J.R.R. Tolkien's Legendarium, and reported the following:

From Page 99:

The forest gate is described as archlike, formed by two gigantic trees leaning against each other, and these trees are ‘strangled with ivy and hung with lichens’ and bear only a few old, damaged leaves. Here we see two distinctive characteristics of Usnea: first, its preference for sickly, dead, or dying trees that have fewer leaves and thus a more open canopy, allowing more sunlight to reach the lichens; and, second, its characteristic epiphytic and hanging habit—that is, it almost always grows on trees or shrubs on which it forms a much-branched system of often pendulous, pale gray to yellowish branchlets (Figure 7.8). This growth form is so characteristic of Usnea, a fruticose lichen (i.e., one that has a branched, miniature, shrubby or treelike form), that the species of this genus are  called beard lichens (or old man’s beards) because their hanging branches look like a graying beard. These common names are alluded to by Tolkien elsewhere, as when Merry and Pippin entered Fangorn forest (Figure 7.8) and saw ‘great trailing beards of lichen hung from’ huge branches (LotR 3: III), and Pippin, picking up on the feeling of the forest, exclaimed—‘Look at all those weeping, trailing, beards and whiskers of lichen!’ (LotR 3: IV). These descriptions perfectly match the appearance of many species of Usnea, which are widespread and diverse in Europe (with more than 30 species occurring there) and thus would have been very familiar to Tolkien. Usnea seems to have been as common in Middle-earth, and it adds to our mental image of—and gives a certain foreboding quality to—the great forests of Mirkwood and Fangorn. This expectation of evil is expressed most clearly in the very similar description of the forest gateway where the orc trail from Thangorodrim entered Taur-nu-Fuin: the Forest-Beneath-Night, so named because it was filled with terror and dark enchantment by Morgoth. We read in The Lay of the Children of Húrin that Beleg and Gwindor saw

[A]n archway opened.        By ancient trunks

It was framed darkly,        that in far-off days

The lightning felled,         now leaning gaunt

Their lichen-leprous        limbs uprooted. (Lays I: lines 936-939)

Again, we see the image of ancient dead trees covered with beard lichens. Their presence is described as ‘leprous’ because of their gray-green to yellow-green color, but this term is also appropriate given that Taur-nu-Fuin itself is diseased and distorted by the evil actions of Morgoth. This forest, located in Dorthonion north of Beleriand in the First Age, was much more perilous than either Fangorn or Mirkwood. Yet it was here that Beleg found Gwindor and rescued Túrin (see SILM 21).

This book is a flora, and like any flora it documents the plants occurring in the geographical area of concern—in this case J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth. For each of the 141 genera and/or plant species mentioned in Tolkien’s major writings, we include (1) the common and scientific names, along with an indication of the family to which the plant belongs; (2) a brief quote from one of Tolkien’s works in which the plant is referenced; (3) a discussion of the significance of the plant in the context of Tolkien’s legendarium [part of which is quoted above, for Beard Lichens]; (4)  the etymology, relating to both the English common name and the Latin scientific names, and, where relevant, the name in one or more of the languages of Middle-earth; (5) a brief description of the plant’s geographical distribution and ecology; (6) its economic importance; and (7) a morphological description. Most of these are also provided with a woodcut-style illustration (as an aid to identification), along with an inset illustrating one of the events in the history of Middle-earth in which the plant played a role. Tolkien was clear that his Middle-earth is to be viewed as our own world, and his writings, therefore, are meant to reconnect us to important elements of our internal and cultural landscape and also to impact how we interact with other individuals and with the world in which we live—including the landscapes of our natural environment—including plants!  The plants within Tolkien’s legendarium are actually part of the story, showing numerous connections with humans, elves, and hobbits in the myths and history of Middle-earth. We hope that our detailed treatment of these plants will create a visual reference, and legitimacy, for both the plants growing in our forests, meadows, and marshes, as well as those that we have received as gifts from Tolkien’s imagination. Finally, Tolkien viewed the light of the Two Trees of Valinor as “the light of art undivorced from reason, that sees things both scientifically … and imaginatively” – following his guidance, we attempt in our book to integrate both botanical science and artistic imagination

Learn more about Flora of Middle-Earth at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gregory A. Daddis's "Withdrawal: Reassessing America's Final Years in Vietnam"

Gregory A. Daddis is an Associate Professor of History and Director of Chapman University’s MA Program in War and Society. He is author of Westmoreland's War: Reassessing American Strategy in Vietnam.

Daddis applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Withdrawal: Reassessing America's Final Years in Vietnam, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Just as important, the increasing role played by the ARVN meant a necessary decline in American influence. Though the “one war” approach envisioned an integrated allied effort, officers still saw deficiencies in the “sequential manner of attacking one critical phase or threat at a time.” If both pacification and Vietnamization relied on a secure environment in which to flourish, then it made sense to defeat the enemy’s military threat. Yet the combined campaign plans continued to place the primary responsibility for pacification on the ARVN’s shoulders. In large sense, the South Vietnamese armed forces were being pulled in two opposite directions….

Yet it seems hard to argue against the idea that South Vietnamese forces, despite all their flaws, indeed were best suited for pacification, always a process of negotiation between the host government, its army, and the people. Realizing the “population had to be provided with more than temporary security,” MACV had always intended the ARVN to work closely with local territorial forces. But with US forces withdrawing, Abrams and his staff grappled with whether the South Vietnamese army should focus on pacification or improving its ability to react to the more conventional NVA threat.

For many Americans who fought in the Vietnam War, their relationship with the South Vietnamese army, popularly known as the ARVN, remained one fraught with tension. The friction seemed inevitable. With President Richard M. Nixon’s 1969 decision to withdraw U.S. forces from South Vietnam, American military leaders felt they were bestowing the war to an ally in which few had much faith. Generals like Creighton Abrams were far from optimistic about a policy that quickly became known as “Vietnamization.” Even after years of US aid and assistance, by the late 1960s, the ARVN was grappling with issues of corruption, low morale, and poor leadership.

True, South Vietnamese soldiers fought hard across much of their homeland. They were instrumental in helping pacify the countryside, defeating local insurgents, and building bridges between the Saigon government and its rural population. An excerpt from page 99, however, illustrates a key paradox that the American military assistance command (MACV) faced as it began to depart from a war not yet concluded. That paradox remains a controversial topic on the U.S. war in Vietnam to this very day.

Learn more about Withdrawal at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Westmoreland's War.

--Marshal Zeringue