What does it mean to be an American? What do you want it to mean? These questions are at the heart of the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Finkel’s AN AMERICAN DREAMER: Life in a Divided Country (Random House, 238 pp., $32). Agile and bracing, the book trails a small network of people who span the economic, political and racial spectrum. At the center is Brent Cummings, a white Iraq war veteran who lives in Georgia’s most affluent county with his wife, Laura. Finkel begins following Cummings in 2016, as he nears the end of a 28-year career in the Army. Though he suffers from his experiences in Iraq, what truly haunts him is the feeling that “the country he had spent most of his life defending was being overtaken by something he didn’t fully understand.”
Cummings is appalled when Donald Trump is elected president, not because of Trump’s policy, but because of his behavior. “You can be bombastic and crude and selfish and still get to fly on Marine One?” Cummings asks. “My whole life I’ve been taught that people like him fail. And he’s not failing.”
The people around Cummings are also grappling with an environment of high pique. A Black R.O.T.C. student at the University of North Georgia, where Cummings teaches, is nearly imprisoned for taking a sensitive photograph; a man at a duck-hunting competition is accused of cheating and attacks his accuser with a boat paddle; Laura, fearing a break-in while Brent is stationed in Israel, starts sleeping with “a hammer under the mattress and a can of wasp spray on the night stand.” Finkel’s book adroitly assembles these stories into a poignant account of the social and political mood in the United States during Trump’s presidency.
As outrage simmers around the 2020 election, Cummings struggles to find the country he fought for. He is generous with his Trump-loving, Democrat-loathing neighbor; he pushes the R.O.T.C. student to earn a second chance; he tries not to let himself be consumed by anger. “An American Dreamer” is a timely and compelling argument for tolerance and moral character in times of extreme antagonism.
The tussle between patriotic hope and despair animates the Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic’s A DANGEROUS COUNTRY: An American Elegy (Akashic Books, 263 pp., $27.95). Kovic, a once proud soldier raised on baseball and God, has written a personal chronicle of the long torment that can trail military service. On his second tour in Vietnam he accidentally shot and killed one of his own men; his platoon mistakenly murdered an old man and wounded several children; and in the first month of 1968 a bullet severed his spinal cord and left him paralyzed from the chest down.
Kovic’s first book, the best-selling memoir “Born on the Fourth of July,” was published in 1976 and became an Academy Award-winning film starring Tom Cruise. Kovic was feted as a “true American,” but in his new memoir, he describes his descent into a veritable hell of shame, isolation and mania in the wake of that first book. “I was fed up with America, tired of being harassed and hounded,” he recalls. “As far as I was concerned, the government was the enemy and America had become a dangerous country that I now hated and feared.”
Structured as a kind of confessional experiment, it includes the journal Kovic kept on his second tour — the entries are stuffed with the potent mix of conviction and enthusiasm he would later renounce — followed by an impressionistic account of the breakdowns that twice landed him in the hospital. “I am out far in the darkness now,” he writes, “lost at sea on a raft going nowhere, hanging on for dear life.”
Kovic attributes his collapse to the repression of what he did in Vietnam, a secret “still buried deep within me,” although he clearly described those events in his first book. (In a familiar paradox, it seems that writing about it didn’t make it easier to talk about.) He is also candid about his sexual frustration as a paraplegic man, and the lack of human intimacy — both physical and emotional — is a crushing aspect of veteran life. His hard-earned lesson is one he doesn’t take lightly: “No one will ever again be my enemy; no government will ever teach me to hate another human being.”
Charles Trueheart, a former foreign correspondent for The Washington Post, was 9 years old in 1961 when his father, William “Bill” Trueheart, was appointed second-in-command to the American ambassador to Vietnam, Frederick “Fritz” Nolting. These two were best friends — they’d gone to school together in Virginia and served as part of the U.S. delegation to NATO in Paris; Nolting was godfather to both of Trueheart’s children. Yet by the mid-60s they were no longer on speaking terms. In DIPLOMATS AT WAR: Friendship and Betrayal on the Brink of the Vietnam Conflict (University of Virginia Press, 343 pp., $34.95), Trueheart retells the story from the inside.
It went like this: In the 1950s, Ngo Dinh Diem became president in South Vietnam and the United States supplied his government with training and equipment to combat the Vietcong. Nolting believed that trusting and empowering Diem was the most effective way to fight the Cold War. Trueheart initially shared this position, though sometime in early 1963 misgivings began to creep in.
That June, while Nolting was away on vacation, a Buddhist monk set himself on fire in protest of the Diem regime, compounding the unrest already roiling the country. Without consulting Nolting, Trueheart helped turn the State Department against Diem, and Nolting was soon removed from his post. By November, the U.S.-backed president of South Vietnam had been killed in a U.S.-backed coup. The war in Vietnam only got more chaotic from there.
This ground has been covered before, most famously in David Halberstam’s “The Best and the Brightest,” but Trueheart brings a personal vantage and renewed diligence to the task, admirably culling from memoirs, dossiers and telegrams. Most of all, Trueheart understands that statecraft is a matter of loyalties that are almost always in conflict over what is best for the country. “I think Fritz felt that my responsibility during his absence was to him, whereas I felt my responsibility was to Washington,” Bill Trueheart once said. It’s a familiar dilemma: a consensus that America might be worth saving, but a divide over how.
