(Fwd) Re: Vietnam

[Burgess, John]

I'm a bit puzzled by your comment that TRP "turned WWII on its head."  I 
don't see how you reach that conclusion.  There's nothing in there that's 
an earth-shattering (or ideal-warping) revelation of the war and its 
machinations.  By tieing together skeins of paranoia threads TRP creates 
a fascinating and fabulous book, one that's formed a minor obsession for 
me.  His use of published materials, though, is something less than 
revolutionary or revisionist... unless you construe the paranoia as 
revisionism.  

Were "The White Visitation," "ARF," and other organizations to be real 
(not hyperbolic fantasies based on considerably lesser organizations), 
then there might be some revelatory nature to GR.  As they are fictional, 
though, he creates a novel that works at the personal level.  It's a 
novel, not a history, after all.