Near the end of the Vietnam War, as the antiwar movement roiled domestic politics and the Viet Cong showed no signs of giving in, a group of black soldiers formed an underground society named the Mau-Maus, in reference to a 19th-century uprising against the British in Kenya. Other soldiers, at about the same time, put up posters at Army bases reading, “Don’t Do What They Tell You, Tell What They Do,” and went on “search-and-avoid” missions—told where the enemy was, they’d march in the opposite direction. In 1971, for the Fourth of July, soldiers at one base held a peace rally, calling for “immediate and total American troop withdrawal.”

These were only a few signs of an army in revolt and a foreign policy in collapse.

At home, Nixon composed his infamous list of political enemies, and used federal agencies to harass them. The “Plumbers,” his secret agents, broke into the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist to find documents that might be used to smear him after he released the Pentagon Papers. Vietnam veterans threw away their medals in front of the White House. Early in the morning before an antiwar demonstration on the Washington Mall, Nixon wandered down without Secret Service men in attendance, and gave a rambling speech to the college-age protesters, telling them to travel and see the world.

Such stories of Vietnam-era unraveling—and many more—can be found in Christian Appy’s Patriots: An Oral History of the Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides. Appy has interviewed soldiers, generals, North Vietnamese, South Vietnamese, antiwar protestors, politicians, Cold Warriors, artists, poets, flight attendants, conscientious objectors, draft dodgers and more. Juxtaposing the narratives of the men who planned the war with those who fought in and against it, the deepest theme of Appy’s book is the self-deception and moral blindness of American leaders, and their inability to justify the war—to American soldiers, to the general public, even to themselves.