Everyman
We can let go of the military strategy in Vietnam. There is more to this book than that. Of course, it is an historical study, and so detailed that at times it gets to be a bit of a slog. But to me, it has been a Morality Drama, and one of the most important books of that type I have come across. General Westmoreland is being portrayed here as something more than himself. He is a kind of Everyman writ large.
Most of us know what ambition is all about; all of us know what the craving for recognition and admiration does to us. But rarely do these aspects of a personality have such a broad scope in which to act themselves out. We are small time actors on a shrunken stage. But Westmoreland had a worldwide stage, and the incomparable sadness of his collapse gives us far more than somebody?s sermon on mature judgment and the capacity to listen to advice.
You will remember a living man crucified on his own hubris, and carry him with you for the rest of your life. Perhaps that was his vocation, a call to serve us as a kind of minister to our own maturity.
