Hey Spaw -- I'm going out on a limb here, since I still haven't read the book. But one possible answer to your "what's the point?" question is that it illustrates how we adopt attitudes and points of view based on "facts" that may not be factual. I find this to be a tremendously relevant and important question. We all carry around a lot of assumptions that are not based on personal knowledge, and we all incorporate these assumptions into our view of the world. We Americans recently fought another war (the 1991 Gulf War) in which we made a lot of decisions based on the lessons we learned from our Vietnam experience. If our view of the Vietnam experience was fundamentally flawed, then our decisions in the Gulf may also have been flawed. And the decisions we make tomorrow, or next year, or ten years from now, may likewise spring from these same flawed assumptions.

Military people and planners are often justly criticized for "fighting the last war". There is some justification for the view that when we fought in Vietnam, we were actually mis-applying the lessons we learned in World War II (that America's overwhelming industrial superiorty would make the achievement of our aims in Vietnam a foregone conclusion). So it's worth examining the lessons we took from the Vietnam era to see if we are also misapplying them to the crises we face today.

If history were just a rehashing of past events that have no relevance today, then I would agree that there's little value in this. But the Vietnam War has had a tremendous impact on US foreign policy in the years since, so I think that questioning our assumptions about that war is worthwhile.