Letters to the Editor
We are always pleased to have letters to the editor because this shows that people are reading our Journal seriously. However, due to space limitations, we ask that letters be kept under 500 words.
To the Editor:
I was disappointed in John Garland's review of Mark Moyar's Triumph Forsaken. If the book has made a critical splash, and if it is so long and says so many provocative things, then perhaps Garland and the Journal should have done a review essay. Further, I agree that Moyar presses his case too zealously at times; but if Garland uses quotes to highlight what he calls "unfortunately purple" writing, then the quote itself should be accurate. Garland's quote of Moyar's page 352 sentence is incorrect, and thus makes Moyar's comment about Nguyen Khanh and the radical Buddhists seem like an ethnic slur.
Dr. Carland responds:
Absent the ethnic slur comment by Douglas Campbell I would not respond to his letter. What I did in my review was to accidentally drop a line of text from the quoted sentence on page 352 of Triumph Forsaken. I did so either when I copied the sentence to my notes preparing to draft the review, or as I advanced from draft to draft. I suspect the former since the words dropped coincide exactly to a text line in the book. It was a regrettable mistake on my part but no more than that. I certainly should have proofed the piece better and caught the mistake before hitting the send button.
In any case, the sentence in its entirety reads: "Khanh did not stand up to the Buddhists but instead yielded to their demands once again, like a man confronted by wolves who lacks the nerve to shoot and instead runs away while dropping his food in the hope of satiating the beasts." The italicized words are the ones dropped. How Mr. Campbell concludes that the words actually quoted in the review constitute an ethnic slur is beyond me.
