Good Night Vietnam

Good Night, Vietnam is a fascinating journey back to the Vietnam era and the horrific war that was the centerpiece of it all. Written by Vietnam veteran Robert Lawrence, an Army radio/TV newscaster and former war hawk, this book traces his transition into an Army Rebel with A Cause for good reason. This historical epic explores the beginning, middle, and end of that chaotic era of assassinations, violent and deadly protests, a nuclear threat, and a war spiraling out of control. Explosive, intimate, and relentlessly gripping, this book reveals the covert and deceptive actions taken by a succession of American presidents that resulted in over 58,000 American soldiers killed and more than 300,000 wounded.
Readers will witness:
• A phantom attack on Navy destroyers giving American presidents license to attack North Vietnam. It’s the catalyst for America’s deep descent into the Vietnam quagmire.
• A Navy commander leading eighteen aircraft in America’s first strike against North Vietnam, one he knows is unjustified, yet is powerless to prevent. Later, having flown 201 combat missions in Vietnam, he’s on his final one, ending horribly, with brutal consequences.
• An American Secretary of Defense convincing a president that the U.S. should assume command of the war from the South Vietnamese even though he knew the war was unwinnable.
• Turning-point battles at key U.S. bases leaving hundreds of soldiers dead or wounded, and the baffling aftermath that follows.
• An American war correspondent reporting from behind enemy lines in North Vietnam.
• U.S. soldiers committing the most horrific Vietnamese civilian massacre of the war, later exposed by an Army private who wasn’t even there.
• Courageous war correspondents whose battle reports differ greatly from sanitized versions that military PR briefers provided to their fellow Saigon reporters. This deception was meant to keep them from reporting the truth to soldiers in-country, the public back home, and the world.
• A courageous war analyst risking all to expose the U.S. government’s secrets, only to be deceived by a newspaper reporter who publishes everything he knows. In the aftermath, a president and secretary of state try to discredit him, triggering unfathomable intrigue involving the FBI and CIA.
• South Vietnam’s president reluctantly meeting with an American president to announce the first U.S. troop withdrawals—later blaming the U.S. for abandoning his country.
• Lawrence as a volunteer helicopter door gunner when his chopper is shot down.
His mission at the American Forces Vietnam Network in Saigon is to defy his superiors’ efforts to stop him and his colleagues from reporting news they don’t want U.S. soldiers to hear. He profiles ten from that eclectic group of broadcasters, along with the AFVN newsroom boss who hired most of them.

Lawrence’s explosive on-air reports provoke outrage and spark confrontations with both his immediate superior and the general atop the military echelon in-country. He is twice vociferously confronted by South Vietnam’s president for airing reports critical of his military. Then comes an editorial in a newspaper owned by the president’s brother-in-law declaring that Lawrence should be hanged in Saigon’s public square. Amid this storm, he becomes romantically involved with an American girl visiting relatives he soon learns are CIA agents, not company executives as they claim. Two men also working there become his prime suspects after he nearly dies following a luncheon they attend.

After revealing the truth about military censorship during a nightly TV newscast, Lawrence faces court-martial charges and is placed under house arrest at the headquarters of Commanding General Creighton Abrams. In an accidental confrontation, he and Abrams engage in a shouting match during which the general calls him a traitor and tells him to “Enjoy life in the jungle.” He is then exiled deeper into the war zone, where he will experience battlefield horror that drives him to the brink of suicide, burdened with the guilt of having survived.
Readers will be with him:
• On deadly reconnaissance patrols, ambushed and pinned down, facing death because Washington’s micro-management of the war restricted soldiers from firing on the enemy until fired upon first.
• On a night reconnaissance patrol where chilling voices of “the walking dead” blast over loudspeakers to frighten the enemy into surrender.
• Upon hearing the seductive voice of Hanoi Hannah on North Vietnam radio urging U.S. soldiers to desert.
• When volunteering as a spotter on a plane under fire, heading toward a crash landing.
• Returning to Saigon after the war and interviewing a courageous South Vietnamese Army general who had warned of certain defeat unless tactics were changed.
• On the scene of America’s chaotic Vietnam exodus, the fall of South Vietnam, and its devastating aftermath.
Prior to Lawrence’s Vietnam assignment, readers will:
• Be at the scene of a 27-man U.S. Army mutiny on American soil after a stockade guard kills a teenage Army private who begged for it.
• Walk through San Francisco’s drugged-out district that gave birth to the counterculture anti-war movement, where that same teenager lost his mind.
• Accompany an elite North Korean commando unit on a daring mission to assassinate South Korea’s president.
• Board an American Navy spy ship fifteen miles off North Korea’s coast as it is harassed by gunboats and fired upon. See it all through the eyes of the ship’s commander and his eighty-one surviving crewmen, who will come to wish they had died that day.
• Go with him in “The Twilight Zone,” where he is forced to join the United Nations Command’s Honor Guard—only to be threatened with a court-martial for seeking reassignment to the American Forces Korea Network (AFKN).
• Learn secrets of the Korean demilitarized zone.
• Go inside a U.S. military courtroom as he defends an Army clerk in a court-martial trial while facing two threatened trials himself.
• Watch as he acts to save the career of AFKN’s commander, who later returns the favor.
Bottom line: Good Night, Vietnam is the unvarnished truth of a generation betrayed by its leaders and scarred by a war that should never have been fought. It stands as a stark reminder that such deception and sacrifice must never be repeated.