Winners and Losers: Battles, Retreats, Gains, Losses and Ruins From a Long War

Random House, $10.95

The GI’s fighting in Vietnam had a peculiar habit that Gloria Emerson noted during the years she spent covering the war for the New York Times. They brought their cameras with them everywhere, snapping peaceful scenes and bloody ones alike, needing to record, to say, “I was there.”

Winners and Losers is, in a way, Gloria Emerson’s war album, a great collection of portraits recording the war on two fronts: in Indochina, where no one was untouched by the carnage, and in America, where the damage wrought by our first lost war has been of a more subtle sort.

Her pictures of a devastated country and its people are vivid, unsentimental, and unsparing. At home, though, she is less sure of her material and less objective a reporter. Appalled and obsessed by the destruction she had witnessed, she became possessive of the war, outraged by people whose concern and guilt did not equal her own. Searching for the effects of the war among veterans, bereaved families, former members of the peace movement, she shows contempt for Americans who choose to intellectualize or oversimplify or forget, scorn for people who are not haunted daily, as she is, by terrible memories.

Whatever private demons drove Gloria Emerson to assemble this book, her intention is that it serve as a public record of the war in Vietnam. In that purpose it succeeds. It is impossible not to be shocked and moved by the innumerable horrors and personal tragedies recounted herein.