The Vietnam War
A Military History
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4.7 • 10 Ratings
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
“Remarkable… the best overview of America’s misadventure in Southeast Asia, and it is sure to become the standard one-volume book on the war.” – Thomas E. Ricks, New York Times
The Vietnam War cast a shadow over the American psyche from the moment it began. In its time it sparked budget deficits, campus protests, and an erosion of US influence around the world. Long after the last helicopter evacuated Saigon, Americans have continued to battle over whether it was ever a winnable war.
Based on thousands of pages of military, diplomatic, and intelligence documents, Geoffrey Wawro’s The Vietnam War offers a definitive account of a war of choice that was doomed from its inception. In devastating detail, Wawro narrates campaigns where US troops struggled even to find the enemy in the South Vietnamese wilderness, let alone kill sufficient numbers to turn the tide in their favor. Yet the war dragged on, prolonged by presidents and military leaders who feared the political consequences of accepting defeat. In the end, no number of young lives lost or bombs dropped could prevent America’s ally, the corrupt South Vietnamese regime, from collapsing the moment US troops retreated.
Broad, definitive, and illuminating, The Vietnam War offers an unsettling, resonant story of the limitations of American power.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This comprehensive, stylishly written account of the American war in Vietnam from historian Wawro (Sons of Freedom) concentrates on military tactics and political calculations that impacted developments on the battlefield. Though Wawro lays blame for the war's descent into quagmire at the feet of American politicians, whom he asserts intentionally prolonged what they knew was an unwinnable conflict, he also excoriates Gen. William Westmoreland, who commanded U.S. forces in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968, for the "waste, aimlessness and folly" of his "robotic" building of more and more bases from which to launch often fruitless and strategically dubious "search-and-destroy" missions. (The plan—mathematically impossible as well as immoral—was for "American-inflicted casualties" to outpace Viet Cong recruiting, Wawro notes.) Also skewerered are Lyndon Johnson's hawkish war advisers—among them Robert S. McNamara and Dean Rusk—along with Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger for their traitorous backchannel negotiations to prolong the war. Though Wawro has little good to say about South Vietnam's authoritarian president Nguyen Van Thieu, he likewise does not sugarcoat the ruthlessness and deceit of North Vietnamese leaders, especially the "audacious" Le Duan, who pushed aside an ailing Ho Chi Minh ("modest, affable, self-effacing") in 1967. Written in fluid, artful prose ("Galbraith JFK... ‘We shall bleed as the French did'.... Three weeks later, Kennedy himself lay bleeding"), this is well worth checking out.
Customer Reviews
Outstanding
Geoffrey Wawro is the most take-no-prisoners historian out there, and he doles out some well-deserved thrashings in this excellent history. LBJ, Diem, Westmoreland, of course, but also Nixon, Kissinger, Abram’s, and more. 58,000 Americans, 250,000 ARVN, 500,000 South Vietnamese civilians, and 1.4 million NVA and VV died in a war that should never have been fought. It should be sobering, but as he points out in his conclusion we still haven’t learned the lessons of Vietnam.