Vietnam, Forever

Summer, 2026

Playboy once published some of the most incisive antiwar writing in America. Revisiting David Halberstam’s 1970 story, “The Americanization of Vietnam,” writer Tom Bissell explores the myths that continue to shape American conflict.

MOST WARS begin with a set of questions: What do we fear? What is possible? What will they do to us? What will we do to them? Unfortunately, prewar imaginings are rarely very accurate. Any sustained study of human conflict becomes a shad...

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