OUR WAR: What We Did In Vietnam And What It Did To Us, by David Harris, Times Books; September 1996, 180 pages

David Harris left Stanford University in 1967. As a senior baby boomer, he was steeped in the myths and ideologies of the Pax Americana following World War Two; he came of age questioning why the Vietnam War seemed so different from his father's war. The war is a crime," Harris preached in "a thousand speeches" throughout the mid-sixties; then, renouncing his student deferment, he refused the draft and went to prison.

Three decades after confronting the defining predicament of his generation, David Harris, with OUR WAR, challenges the Cold War assumptions of the world into which he was born and socialized. And while he never saw Vietnam action in the traditional sense, he remains at war over how History will interpret this American adventure for the generations that follow; he demands a reckoning, long overdue, for the act of aggression committed by the United States and its leaders behind a smokescreen of manufactured altruism.

Harris's narrative is inflamed, a retrospective drenched in undigested passions, though seldom in disproportion to the humiliations he suffered as a price for clinging to the high ground. More perplexing are the matters Harris has chosen not to address. Given his public visibility – magnified by a failed marriage to celebrity Joan Baez – and the drama of his incarceration among hardened criminals, a reader might reasonably wonder why Harris hasn't provided more on the domestic cultures of draft resistance and prison life and less avuncular commentary on the core facts surrounding the war.

Perhaps OUR WAR should be treated as Volume One of a work-in-progress, a mantra of right-thinking recitations and reflections on Vietnam that Harris, an apparent Calvinist now seeking the path of Siddhartha, needed to get off his chest before mining more subtle veins beneath the crust where good and evil only seem to lie in absolute distinction. Thus, Harris substitutes narrow moral judgments when evaluating national and individual responsibility for the war which others might examine against a wider hand of social, political and historical criteria.

A string of quotes can illustrate Harris' somewhat fuzzy, occasionally New Age, philosophical patter: “When a nation acts, all its citizens are joined insolubly in their responsibility for the consequences of their national behavior.” “When the question is asked, Who did this? – we must all raise our hands.” “Holding on to our denial will never allow us to escape the war . . . rather than owning our experience, it will continue to own us.” “Evil is not only banal . . . it is also participatory, and it only happens if everyone does their little bit to make it possible.” Well, not everyone, “I am proud to say,” Harris intones with that self-righteousness not unknown among pacifists, “that when my turn came, I declined to do mine.” Indeed, his was a noble act, even if he does say so himself.

Fortunately, such boilerplate thins out early in OUR WAR, as the author happily contradicts his theology of universal guilt, allowing that “[t]here are those among us more deserving of blame than the rest and they must be held . . . responsible.” Leading the accused for the Nuremberg Tribunal of Harris's mind are Robert McNamara, Richard Nixon, and that Great Satan of Harvard Yard, Henry Kissinger.

The war; Harris reminds us, lasted “nine years” after McNamara privately decided it was “unwinnable,” and “a lot more people died after [he] decided their lives were being wasted than before, and he never once said as much as a word to warn them . . . I cannot fathom how he manages to live with himself. Were I he, I suspect, I would have blown my own brains out years ago.”

Honorable suicide is not the imaginary option Harris offers the hated Henry K. Meeting up with a friend recently, an old Movement hand who'd become a Senate aide after the war, “we got on the subject of Kissinger one afternoon,” Harris recalls. And Nancy, he discovers, still harbors homicidal fantasies: “It's amazing,” she says. "All those good people dead, and nobody has managed to kill that son of a bitch yet.”

Commenting on the nauseating television spectacle of Richard Nixon's funeral, Harris ech¬oes the verdict of his sometimes colleague at ROLLING STONE, Hunter S. Thompson “Richard Milhous Nixon was as evil a man as any who has ever partaken of the apex of American political power . . . More people died on his watch than on any other, and he took a particular public pleasure in the devastation he wrought.”

A substantial portion of Harris’s text is devoted to describing the agent of that “devastation,” unprecedented American fire power, and its impact on the lives of Vietnamese and Americans alike, most specifically our own veterans, a sprinkling of whom pop up, bearing witness to their sins. Toward these survivors Harris expresses an ambivalence fashioned of familiarity and detachment: he acknowledges the vets' authenticity as a class, “poor boys” marked as fodder for the battlefields; but on a karmic level, they are not of his tribe.

Harris, by his own admission, is a Vietnam junknie, “obsessed” by the war. A precocious student born and raised in Fresno, California among the provincial gentry – western WASPS with DAR roots – by the time Harris was selected ‘Boy of the Year’ in the high school class of '63, he al¬ready “knew about the Geneva Accords . . . about the obstruction of free elections, about Ho Chi Minh, Bao Dai, and Ngo Dinh Diem . . . the napalm and strategic hamlets . . .”

Few of the sixties generation can touch that claim, which may account for the mature Harris's taxonomic preoccupation with military nomenclature and the war's other raw materials, catalogued throughout his untitled chapters in the form of lita¬nies, glosses, and asides: field tactics, weapons systems, place names, GI pidgin, Vet chat . . . A more in-depth and chilling probe of the CIA's Phoenix program is prompted by a revulsion for the widespread use of torture by Americans which, Harris stresses, “touched me in a way nothing else quite did . . . Nazis tortured, not Americans.”

Harris is a mainstream intellectual who lived through the agony of Vietnam refusing, despite mellowing into middle age, to accommodate apologists for the war on any significant point. A graceful writer, he has written a quirky book; from the few peeks he allows us into his personal saga and jail time, we may hope for an even more interesting sequel.

Michael Uhl is a veteran of the Vietnam War, and under contract to write a political memoir on it.