acts by the enemy are treated with sarcasm. He even matter-of-factly explains Saigon torture: "The police were not highly professional, prison guards were underpaid, and South Vietnamese have a low regard for human life." "Revisionism" America in Vietnam has frequently been assailed as a "revisionist" text. The book has been referred to as "a classic revisionist interpretation of the war", "the first and most impressive of the revisionist accounts" of the Vietnam war, and "one of the earliest and most sophisticated of revisionist works". In the text itself, Lewy asserts that he is attempting to "clear away the cobwebs of mythology that inhibit the correct understanding of what went on -- and what went wrong -- in Vietnam." Adherents Among adherents of the text, Mark Moyar wrote in his 2006 Triumph Forsaken that "Lewy's superb book was the best history of the Vietnam War when it was first published, and ... remains one of the best." Moyar has himself contended that the orthodox histories of the Vietnam War incorrectly assert that it was unjust, unnecessary, and unwinnable. The political group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth utilized some of Lewy's work in their 2004 publication Unfit for Command, and Norman Podhoretz has often cited America in Vietnam and written extensively in its defense. In one text, Podhoretz took aim at those who were attacking Lewy's conception of immorality as illegality in the context of war. "The task Lewy sets for himself turns out to be surprisingly simple, for the laws of war are so vaguely stated and so radically incomplete that a brief for the defense is readily put together", asserted Michael Walzer; of America in Vietnam, Theodore Draper added, "It is a continuing shame ... that the shamefulness of this war should be incidentally taken up in a book designed to cover up the shame by taking refuge in narrow and dubious legalisms." The wide-held belief that the Vietnam War represented "a dramatic collapse of both reason and morality" or that it was marked by "immoral conduct" was answered by Lewy and defended by Podhoretz: "The American way of war," as it came to be called in the polemics of the period, was based on the motto "Expend Shells Not Men." Was it immoral of American commanders to follow this rule? The antiwar movement thought so, and Lewy's critics still do. Podhoretz suggests that the struggle against communism is linked