The son of the Iwo Jima flag-bearer in one of the most iconic photos in U.S history, James Bradley gained fame for his 2000 book Flags of Our Fathers, which was made into a film directed by Clint Eastwood.
Offput at how Flags of Our Fathers was used to manufacture nostalgia for World War II and the so-called “greatest generation,” Bradley told me that he intended it as an anti-war book recounting the grim war experience of his father John and other Iwo Jima flag-bearers and the long-term psychological toll it took on them.
Over the last decade, Bradley said, he has been largely shunned in the mainstream media because his writings critically assess U.S. foreign policy in Southeast Asia.[1]
Bradley has even been labeled as a “conspiracy theorist” and “MAGA nut” by members of his family, in part because he has adopted iconoclastic views regarding Russia Gate and the Russia-Ukraine War, and COVID-19 lockdowns.
Bradley’s latest book, Precious Freedom: a novel (New York: Skyhorse, 2025), is among his most powerful in advancing an anti-war theme and critique of U.S. foreign policy. The focus is on the Vietnam War and how America lost the war and the Vietnamese won.
Bradley is a gifted story teller and writer. Living for a decade in Vietnam, he interviewed prominent figures in the Vietnamese government and National Liberation Front (NLF, aka Vietcong) to help better understand the Vietnam War.
Precious Freedom shatters the growing wave of historical revisionism, which suggests that the U.S. could have won the Vietnam War if it had altered its military strategy and that the U.S. cause in Vietnam was noble at its core.
The latter conclusion is derived in part from the assertion that South Vietnamese government officials were genuinely committed to democracy and enjoyed popular support.
Precious Freedom makes clear that South Vietnam was an illegitimate political construct created by the U.S.—a “Potemkin state.”
The Vietnamese overwhelmingly regarded Vietnam as one country and fought the Americans and its proxies to unify it.
The South Vietnamese leaders praised by revisionist historians were dependent on U.S. foreign aid, had largely collaborated with the French, favored the minority Catholics, and brutally oppressed their political opponents.
Those who took up arms in support of them were widely regarded as traitors who allied with the latest in a long set of foreign invaders.
Bradley explains that the Vietnamese consider themselves a peace-loving people but have mobilized against foreign invaders throughout their history—starting with the Chinese, and then the Mongols, French and Americans.
The wide reverence for Ho Chi Minh is apparent in the fact that people keep portraits of him in their home along with his top military lieutenant, General Vo Nguyen Giap, who coordinated Vietnam’s victory over the U.S., France and Japan.
In the U.S., by contrast, few hang portraits of Lyndon B. Johnson, William Westmoreland or Robert S. McNamara, key architects of the American war in Vietnam who are widely considered to be liars, charlatans, fools and war criminals.
McNamara admitted that he was wrong about the Vietnam War in his memoir, stating that he knew almost nothing about Vietnam when he coordinated the sending of U.S. troops there.
According to Bradley, McNamara’s cris de coeur gets at the heart of why the U.S. lost the Vietnam War—namely that Americans did not understand their enemy and what motivated them.
The illusion was that the U.S. was in Vietnam to liberate the South Vietnamese from North Vietnamese communist aggression.
This viewpoint makes no sense in light of the fact that the division of Vietnam was artificial and Vietnamese always saw themselves as being citizens of one country.
Significantly, the Eisenhower administration refused to abide by the 1954 Geneva Accords which, after a temporary division, called for elections that would unify Vietnam in 1956.
The U.S. never allowed those elections to take place because, as Eisenhower conceded, Ho Chi Minh would have won with at least 80% of the vote.
Instead of going forward with the elections, the U.S. set about manufacturing support for a regime led by anti-Communist Catholic Ngo Dinh Diem, who alienated the majority Buddhist population and triggered a guerrilla rebellion by jailing and torturing his political opponents and anyone who had fought in the liberation war against France.[2]
Gaining important experience fighting against the French (and Mongols and Chinese before that), the Vietnamese counteracted superior American technology by planting traps in the ground, developing networks of underground tunnels and planning ambushes and sneak attacks at night.
Requiring only rudimentary weapons to shoot down U.S. helicopters, they knew the jungle terrain much better than the Americans and obtained foreknowledge of U.S. attacks because of the ability of their spies to penetrate U.S. military bases.
The construction of the Ho Chi Minh Trail was a marvel of modern engineering that enabled the Vietnamese to transport troops and supplies from North to South and to bypass the heavily guarded Demilitarized Zone (DMZ).
According to Bradley, the Vietnamese had the motivation and purpose the Americans and their allies lacked. A popular Vietnamese saying is “when the foreigner puts even one foot on Vietnamese soil, everyone stands up, including the women.”
Bradley centers his story around two fictional characters: Chip Zobel, an American GI from small-town Minnesota, and Hoang Thi May, a female NLF fighter and sniper. May decided to join the NLF at the tender age of 15 after Zobel shot and killed her father right in front of her.
Bradley describes Zobel’s upbringing in rural Minnesota in a Catholic family that embraced the dominant Cold War ethos of the 1950s and 1960s.
Zobel’s father Hank had fought in the battle of Saipan in the Pacific War and two uncles served in the Korean War.
Chip, an altar boy who went to mass every Sunday with his parents, was taught that communism was a disease and that he had to go to Vietnam to fight its spread.
As a teenager, he had been drawn to the writings of Tom Dooley, a missionary doctor who described atrocities supposedly committed by the Vietnamese communists in the aftermath of the first Indochina War.
Zobel was unaware at the time that Dooley was a CIA “asset” whose stories were war propaganda.
During boot camp, Zobel was molded into a professional killer.
When he got to Vietnam, he and his buddies ran roughshod over the Vietnamese whom they called “dinks” and “gooks.”
In some of the villages, Zobel’s friends would rape the girls before killing them.
Zobel himself became haunted by killing May’s father and experienced nightmares for the rest of his life.
Like so many other veterans, he became disillusioned by the war and came to recognize that it was rooted in lies.
His wife Mary gave birth to a stillborn baby; Chip had been rendered infertile as a result of being sprayed with Agent Orange.
Stricken with grief and a perception of betrayal by society and its leaders, Chip ended his life in 2008 by shooting himself in the heart.
May, by contrast, had a far happier life than Chip. After the war ended, she worked as a history teacher and is now a grandmother.
After Chip killed May’s father in 1967, she sought vengeance and was instructed to go to the jungle to meet with “Mr. Son,” a nephew of Pham Van Dong, a revolutionary in Ho Chi Minh’s inner circle, who trained her to be become an effective guerrilla fighter.
May endured great hardships living in the jungle but found it easy to kill Americans because they were often loud and traveled in groups.
Ironically, May was shot and wounded in a river battle in which Chip Zobel was also wounded.
Both survived the war, though only May with peace of mind, since she was the one who fought for a just cause.
While her son was fighting overseas, Chip’s mother Betty began reading more into the history of the Vietnam War and came to recognize that Tom Dooley was a CIA functionary and that she and her son had been deceived.
A librarian friend with whom she shared articles, Kathryn, experienced the death of her son Billy, who was killed in an errant U.S. napalm strike.
At the end of Precious Freedom, Chip’s sister Claire, at the age of 62, visits with May and, during an emotional meeting, apologizes to her for her brother’s actions during the war.
Claire had been a teenager during her brother’s tour of duty, and was impressed by May’s kindness and spirit of forgiveness.
May told her a maxim of Ho Chi Minh: that the Vietnamese should not hate American soldiers because they were instruments of their government and had not been told the truth about Vietnam.
During her trip, Claire and the author James Bradley, who inserts himself in the story at the end, travel to various historical sites together, including: a) Con Dao Island, which housed a notorious U.S.-run prison where inmates were tortured in bamboo cages; b) the Cu Chi tunnels, which the NLF built to survive the American bombing attacks; and c) the gravesite and museum honoring Vo Thi Sau, a Vietnamese heroine executed by the French at the age of 19.[3]
Bradley emphasizes that the “America could have won the Vietnam War if only” crowd should visit these sites and interact with Vietnamese people to gain a better understanding of the war.
Most Vietnamese who fought against the U.S. were not steeped in communist or Marxist-Leninist ideology, but fought to liberate Vietnam from an invader who destroyed people’s homes, forced them into concentration camps (i.e., “strategic hamlets”) and murdered their families.
According to Bradley, American historians’ framing of the war is often wrong in that the U.S. never controlled any territory in Vietnam or achieved anything tangible militarily despite possessing superior technology and control over the skies.
Massive bombing campaigns and the spraying of Agent Orange left massive damage but could never offset popular support for the nationalist guerrillas.
Unfortunately, Americans continue to be fed lies about the Vietnam War that have led to the perpetuation of more Vietnam-type calamities—whether in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Gaza or Ukraine.
Those societies have also been devastated by American or American-backed warfare, whose human cost is incalculable.
These writing include: a) Flyboys: A True Story of Courage (Boston: Back Bay Books, 2004), which tells the story of U.S. Air Force pilots, including George H. W. Bush, who participated in a bombing raid over Iwo Jima; b) The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War (Boston: Little, Brown, 2009), about a diplomatic mission led by Secretary of War William Howard Taft that established the groundwork for U.S. imperial expansion in the Asia-Pacific; and c) The China Mirage: The Hidden History of American Disaster in Asia (Boston: Back Bay Books, 2016), about illusory American perceptions of China and the domestic fall-out bred by the 1949 Chinese Revolution. ↑
A wave of revisionist historians, some of whom teach at elite universities, have tried to present Ngo Dinh Diem as a great leader whom the U.S. was mistaken in assassinating in November 1963 after a CIA-backed coup. ↑
The prison was run by a former racist LAPD deputy chief named Frank Walton, an Irishman working for USAID’s Office of Public Safety (OPS), who had told congressional visitors that Con Son Prison was like a “boy scout recreational camp.” ↑
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About the Author
Jeremy Kuzmarov holds a Ph.D. in American history from Brandeis University and has taught at numerous colleges across the United States. He is regularly sought out as an expert on U.S. history and politics for radio and TV programs and co-hosts a radio show on New York Public Radio and on Progressive Radio News Network called “Uncontrolled Opposition.”
He is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and is the author of six books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019), The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018), Warmonger. How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden (Clarity Press, 2023); and with Dan Kovalik, Syria: Anatomy of Regime Change (Baraka Books, 2025).
Besides these books, Kuzmarov has published hundreds of articles and contributed to numerous edited volumes, including one in the prestigious Oxford History of Counterinsurgency .
He can be reached at jkuzmarov2@gmail.com and found on substack here.
