Chris Bray
The customer is always right. In 1961, working to support the government of Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam, American military officials launched a new effort to understand their task. The organization then known as the Advanced Research Projects Agency—it has since added the word “Defense” to its name, becoming DARPA—decided to fund new programs in social-science research. The agency “needed studies performed that could answer questions that were confounding defense officials at the Pentagon,” Annie Jacobsen writes in her sprawling history of all things DARPA. “Who were these people, the Vietnamese? What made one Vietnamese peasant become a communist John Foster Dulles (left) and his brother, Allen, 1956. John Foster Dulles was a dullard and a prig. “He was driven to find and confront enemies, quick to make moral judgments, and not given to subtlety or doubt,” the former New York Times reporter Stephen Kinzer writes in his new biography of the Dulles brothers. […] Napalm bombs explode during a live-fire exercise, 1984. “At 5,000 feet you could smell the flesh burning.” The bomber crews that dropped napalm on Tokyo on the night of March 9, 1945, “gagged and vomited” in the sky over the burning city. The paint on the bottoms of their planes blistered from the heat. On […] 
The presidential election of 1964 unfolds across a few colorless pages in Joshua B. Freeman’s American Empire, pitting a candidate who embraced “expansive state action” to “improve the quality of life” against a guy who opposed “the expanded functions the state had taken on during the previous three decades.” Circling back later, when the story has moved on to 1966, Freeman notes that some actor in California is still hanging around. Behold the elaborate flatness of this sentence: “Reagan, a one-time New Deal Democrat who over the years had moved to the right, came to national attention as a political Two new war memoirs, one from a reporter and one from a former army officer, describe close to nothing at all but do so with urgency. Violent images flash by, lives are shattered, the end. You might be inclined to wonder about the difference between observer and participant reports on war, but those distinctions evaporate on the page. Prosecuting strategically senseless war with a muddled premise in an unfamiliar social and political landscape seems to make everyone—even soldiers in the field—into oddly detached observers. In these disjointed accounts, people are just pulling the trigger and watching what happens next.