Containment and Credibility reviewed in the Library Journal

The Library Journal just published a review of Pat Proctor's third book, Containment and Credibility: The Ideology and Deception that Plunged America into the Vietnam War in its October 1 issue. Here's an excerpt:

“Historians will find in this work a fresh take on the Vietnam War, as well as its warnings for current conflicts”

Containment and Credibility reviewed in Publishers Weekly

Publisher Weekly just published a review of Pat Proctor's third book, Containment and Credibility: The Ideology and Deception that Plunged America into the Vietnam War. Here's an excerpt:

“What is new [in Containment and Credibility] is Proctor’s sound conclusion that the Vietnam War containment and credibility framework has had a lasting influence on U.S. foreign policy. Today’s 'War on Terror,' he says, is still being fought with a Cold War-era foreign policy ideology, which could be a recipe for 'a century of costly and fruitless warfare across the globe.'”

To see the entire review, click here.

Military Times Review of "Task Force Patriot"

J. Ford Huffman, a staff writer for Military Times, has written a review of Task Force Patriot and the End of Combat Operations in Iraq. Here's an excerpt...

“In his detailed narrative, Proctor, an Army lieutenant colonel, is not afraid to admit a 'fatal assumption' or a 'serious flaw' that leads to his unit’s realization that 'it was time to start from scratch,' again and again. Frustrations with local politicians, State Department representatives and local business practices get in the Army’s way, but the officer is persuasive.”

To read the entire review, click here.

Task Force Patriot is published by Government Institutes Press, an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield. The book is now available in stores, or you can order it on Amazon.com or at Barnes & Noble.

Creating the Credibility Gap

William M. Hammond, Public Affairs: The Military and the Media, 1962-1968, Washington, D.C.: Center for Military History, U.S. Army, 1988, 429 pages.


In the years since the end of the Vietnam War, both war correspondents and historians have written extensively about press coverage of the war. Very few works, however, have covered this topic from the perspective of the government and the military, particularly the US Embassy and Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) personnel who fought on the front lines of the media war in Vietnam. This is the territory covered in William Hammond’s Public Affairs: The Military and the Media, 1962-1968. Hammond provides a fascinating “behind the scenes” look at the actions that shaped the official message on Vietnam throughout the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.


This book is an in-depth, “blow by blow” account of both media coverage of the war, and the efforts by both Saigon and Washington to shape that coverage. Public Affairs: The Military and the Media, 1962-1968 also covers two particularly interesting periods, both the “Americanization” of the war in 1964 and 1965 and the collapse of public support for the war after the Tet offensive. In the end, Hammond concludes, “Most of the public affairs problems that confronted the United States in South Vietnam stemmed from the contradictions implicit in Lyndon Johnson’s strategy for the war” (p. 385). Because Johnson wanted to commit the country to war without jeopardizing either America’s global commitments or his own domestic agenda, Hammond writes, Johnson placed public affairs personnel in Vietnam in an impossible position.

Public Affairs: The Military and the Media, 1962-1968 is excellent, meticulously crafted history. The rigor with which William Hammond has reconstructed the actors and decisions that shaped the government’s message in Vietnam is without equal. Yet, the book suffers for its perspective. This book was, after all, written for the US Army Center for Military History; throughout the book, Hammond is overtly sympathetic to the government/military perspective. Again and again, Hammond details the ways in which the US mission in Saigon and MACV, tried to hide, slant, or outright misrepresent the situation in South Vietnam to favor the government position. He unapologetically paints both the military and State Department as enthusiastically complicit in hiding both the scope and the nature of the war. Yet, at the same time, he paints the press as unreasonably adversarial, as if one were not connected to the other. Hammond’s underlying premise is that the role of military and embassy public affairs is not to inform, but to influence the American public--a premise roundly rejected both by other writers on the subject and modern military public affairs doctrine (largely shaped by the lessons of Vietnam).

Even if one disagrees with Hammond’s perspective, this is still very well executed history. In that respect, Public Affairs: The Military and the Media, 1962-1968 is a must read for anyone interested in media coverage of the Vietnam War.

The American Way of War

Donald J. Mrozek, Air Power and the Ground War in Vietnam, Honolulu, HI: University Press of the Pacific, 2002, 216 pages.


Much has been written about the particulars of the air war in Vietnam, from the massive bombing campaigns over North Vietnam to the use of strategic and tactical bombers in support of ground forces in South Vietnam. But the majority of work in these areas has been focused on the technical aspects of the use of air power--tactics, types of aircraft, and types of munitions. In Air Power and the Ground War in Vietnam, Donald Mrozek goes beyond the “how” of the use of airpower in Vietnam to answer the much more interesting question of why it was used in this way.  In the process, Mrozek ends up using air power as a tool to illustrate a much larger point about the American way of war.

Air Power and the Ground War in Vietnam begins by examining the evolution of air power theory up to the start of the Vietnam War.  The book then delves into the struggle to make profoundly conventional American air power fit with the various conceptions of the nature of the Vietnam War.  Where Mrozek takes a fascinating turn is when he departs from the well-worn discussion of tactics for the use of air power and delves into the organizational pressures, both internal to the Air Force and between the services, as they fought for predominance in the control and use of various types of air assets inside the Southeast Asian theater of operations.

Mrozek concludes, among other things, that American air power was in some circumstances a poor fit for Vietnam.  For instance, helicopters used in air mobile operations were antithetical to counterinsurgency, which required a clear-and-hold methodology.  In other circumstances, Mrozek concludes that air power was misused.  The Johnson administration, in particular, repeatedly tried to use strategic bombers as a method to send political signals to the North Vietnamese--messages that were often inscrutable to the communists.  Finally, Mrozek concludes, “The starting point for all appraisals of the Vietnam War on the tactical and operational level--the realm of means and instruments--must be that it was fundamentally a failure in conception and vision on the strategic level” (p. 155).

In this final conclusion lies the only problem with an otherwise excellent book.  At the end of an in depth examination of why air power was used as it was in Vietnam, Mrozek then concludes that the strategic ends America chose for the war were fundamentally flawed.  The concluding chapter of Air Power and the Ground War in Vietnam raises a number of excellent points about the basic strategic conception of the Vietnam War that the rest of the book, because it is ultimately a book about uses of air power, is not able to explore.  One is left wishing for another book to discuss these broader conclusions in detail.

The Making of a Quagmire

Jeffrey P. Kimball, To Reason Why: The Debate about the Causes of U.S. Involvement in the Vietnam War, Eugene, OR: Resource, 1990, 384 pages.

To Reason Why is a collection of answers to a single question: how did America become embroiled in the Vietnam War?  Unlike Jeffrey Record’s The Wrong War, which reviews schools of thought on a similar question (why did America lose the Vietnam War?) in order to reach its own, independent conclusion, Jeffrey Kimball simply catalogues the answers of others, with no attempt to answer the question himself.  The book begins with a very thorough historiography that organizes the arguments of scholars, politicians, and opinion leaders into schools of thought.  The remainder of the book consists of excerpts of the actual arguments as written by the people who made them.

Jeffrey Kimball groups all of the arguments in To Reason Why into seven broad categories--“the official view” (containment and the “domino theory”), “states of mind” (leaders became fixated on the Cold War context of the Vietnam War), “the process of involvement” (once escalation began, it took on a momentum all its own), “the buck stops here” (the presidents were the driving force behind escalating involvement), “the advisers” (the men closest to the president drove the country into war), “pressures and aims” (political and economic forces propelled American leaders into the war), and “ways of living” (the interaction of American and Vietnamese culture drove America into the war).
While Kimball never posits an answer of his own to the question of why the US became involved in the Vietnam War, this is not to say he does not have or express an opinion.  While he never indicates to which school of thought he subscribes, Kimball dismisses out of hand what he calls the “official view,” that America fought the Vietnam War as part of its policy to contain the expansion of communism.  Kimball writes, “Most academics would probably maintain that the official argument is on the whole false and not worthy of serious consideration. Yet others continue to use it to explain why the U.S. government intervened in Vietnam and should intervene in other ‘Vietnams’” (p. 22).

By not advocating a point of view himself, Kimball leaves the reader free to draw his own conclusions.  This might be frustrating for the more casual reader who might prefer a thesis-argument-conclusion presentation to the more open-ended form that To Reason Why provides.  Additionally, while Kimball’s historiography is very thorough, the excerpts he provides are sometimes not long enough for the reader to thoroughly evaluate the merits each argument.  However, as an exercise in cataloguing the many answers to the question of why American became trapped in the quagmire of the Vietnam War--which is, to be fair, Jeffrey Kimball’s intent--To Reason Why is beyond reproach.

All out in Vietnam?

Jeffrey Record, The Wrong War: Why We Lost in Vietnam, Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1998, 217 pages.


The Wrong War is not a book about the Vietnam War, but rather a book about everything that has been said about the Vietnam War since it ended. Author Jeffrey Record reviews each of the arguments that have emerged for why America failed in Vietnam, and then challenges each of them on their merits. The book is light on history of the war itself; it assumes some entry level of knowledge about the particulars of the war. Instead, it concentrates on surveying multitude of conclusions writers have drawn since the end of the war, from those who blame the anti-war movement and the press to those that feel the US never truly tried to win.

While he mentions the book only once, Jeffrey Record dwells quite extensively on the arguments in Harry Summers’ On Strategy, along with a number of other authors that, like Summers, argued that the United States did not go “all out” in Vietnam. The Wrong War also lingers on the argument, championed by H.R. McMaster and others, that Johnson’s failure to call up reserves or rally the American people behind the war doomed it to failure. It is in refuting these two, complementary arguments that The Wrong War truly shines. Record dismantles both of these arguments by placing the reader in the context of the times in which the Vietnam War was fought. In the context of the Cold War, Record concludes, limited war was the logical means to reach the limited ends sought in Vietnam.

After examining these and many other arguments, Record writes that America failed in Vietnam because it misunderstood the nature of the war on which it had embarked, the relative will of the North Vietnamese and American people, and the fundamental lack of legitimacy of the South Vietnamese regime. Record rejects the contention that the war was unwinnable, yet concludes that winning would have required massive, unrestricted bombing of the North Vietnamese populace or an invasion of North Vietnam, neither of which was politically feasible, domestically or internationally.

The Wrong War covers so much ground and so many different schools of thought that it would have been helpful to have an additional chapter just to catalogue all of the arguments and the people that have made them. Likewise, the reader could benefit from a longer, more thorough explanation of the arguments these authors make. Record does his best to describe and attribute the arguments as he goes, but the sheer number of opinions with which he deals quickly becomes overwhelming. The Wrong War, in its current form, assumes the reader comes having already read many of the cited work. However, these are minor problems with an excellent book. Jeffrey Record’s conclusion on the reasons for America’s failure in Vietnam are as sound as any yet written.

On the Ground in Cambodia

John M. Shaw, The Cambodian Campaign: The 1970 Offensive and America’s Vietnam War. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2005, 222 pages.

Much of the history that has been written about the Cambodian incursion in 1970 examines the event through the lens of the domestic upheaval it produced in the United States. Such is not the case with The Cambodian Campaign, which largely ignores the uproar the operation caused in Congress and on college campuses across America. Instead it focuses on the operation itself and the units--both US and South Vietnamese--that executed it. Where The Cambodian Campaign does discuss strategy, it provides just enough detail to help the reader understand why operational decisions were made. The commentary on national politics the book does include is focused mostly on how it affected actions on the ground in South Vietnam and Cambodia.

While the period covered in The Cambodian Campaign begins and ends in 1970, President Lyndon Johnson is still the book’s villain. According to Shaw, because Johnson sought “to build the Great Society and secure his own place in American history, he begrudged anything that diverted attention, energy, or resources from his programs. Johnson could not ignore Vietnam, but he was unwilling to pay the necessary price to win decisively there” (p. 2). Gen. Westmoreland is excused culpability for the war because Johnson defined “victory as ‘not losing or interfering with the Great Society,’ and [tried] to do it on the cheap without forcing the Congress to choose between guns or butter, [which] set an impossible goal for his commanders” (p 7). Shaw’s Nixon, on the other hand, unleashed his commanders and allowed them to fight the war without restraint. As a result, Shaw concludes, “The Cambodian incursion was, as Nixon correctly described it, ‘the most successful military operation of the Vietnam War’” (p. 153). As for the protests that the incursion sparked back in the US, Shaw concludes that the ends justified the means. The Cambodian incursion, he writes saved lives in Vietnam and “those soldiers’ and South Vietnamese civilians’ lives were no less valuable because they were not American college students” (p. 155-6).

The Cambodian Campaign shines as a military history of the operational and tactical decisions made at the corps and division level during the Cambodian incursion. But this detailed, clinical history is sandwiched between an introduction and conclusion packed with opinionated assertions about political leaders that the body of the book does nothing to support. The efficiency with which the campaign was conducted and the losses it inflicted on North Vietnam are in no way connected to whether the incursion was the justified. Not once in over 200 pages does Shaw address the question of the Nixon’s congressional authority to prosecute the incursion, a central question in the domestic debate at the time. John Shaw’s strident political judgments seem out of place next to the otherwise well-executed campaign history in the middle of the book.

Armchair General Review of "Media War"

The interactive history magazine, Armchair General just posted a review by Peter Suciu of my first full-length book, Media War: The Media-Enabled Insurgency in Iraq.

"A fascinating book that news junkies will appreciate deeply."

To read the full review, click here.

Media War is available for the Amazon Kindle and as a Google eBook.

Vietnam: A Chronology

Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History, New York: Penguin, 1997, 768 pages.

Perhaps no single person has had as lasting an impact on the collective American perception of the Vietnam War as Stanley Karnow. As a correspondent on the ground in Vietnam for such publications as Time, Life, the Washington Post, and the Saturday Evening Post, he shaped the perception of the war as it was being fought. After the war, as chief correspondent for the early eighties WGBH television series “Vietnam: A Television History” (later repackaged as a PBS American Experience series) he compiled the collection of images that has become America’s visual understanding of the war. His written companion to this television series was Vietnam: A History. With well over a million copies in print, it is the most pervasive, if not the most comprehensive, history of the war. The first third of the book recounts the French experience in Vietnam, beginning with first colonization and ending with the Paris Accords that finally brought France’s exit from the country. The rest of the book is dedicated to America’s involvement in the conflict, culminating in the evacuation of the US embassy and the North’s conquest of South Vietnam.

On one level, Karnow has done a much better job than many other journalists-turned-historians in detaching himself emotionally from the conflict. He has avoided many of the heavy-handed caricatures of the American leaders who prosecuted the war found in other Vietnam histories. But on another level, the book is firmly grounded in his personal perception of the war as a journalist. He often cited his own conversations with players in Vietnam at the time to illustrate his points. Furthermore, from places where the narrative dwells, one can clearly identify among his sources, even when unnamed, men such as Lt.Col. John Paul Vann, with whom he had extensive interaction during the war. Still, Karnow did do a good job of reexamining several common misconceptions that had emerged by the early 1980s about the conflict. For instance, he admitted that the Phoenix program--a CIA program to infiltrate and eradicate the Vietcong “shadow government” in rural South Vietnam--was much more effective than he acknowledged at the time (p. 617).

Like other journalists chronicling the war, Karnow included little analysis of the Vetnamese perspective on the conflict. Vietnamese perspectives come only in retrospective quotations from North Vietnamese leaders, clouded by years of historical revision by the communist government that now rules Vietnam. Karnow’s Vietnam also suffers for its breadth. Faced with the daunting task of covering nearly two centuries of history in just under 800 pages, Karnow could not linger on any single topic. Events where he did linger were chosen arbitrarily based on interesting anecdotes he could impart, rather than on their significance. Most fundamentally, however, Karnow had no argument to make. He simply retold the story of Vietnam. As a result, Karnow’s Vietnam: A History ends up being less a history than a chronology.

Vietnam: A Narrative History

A.J. Langguth, Our Vietnam: The War 1954-1975, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000, 766 pages.

As a journalist in Vietnam from 1964 to 1970, A.J. Langguth was one of the architects of the way the Vietnam War was perceived in America. The news he produced for the New York Times, first as a reporter and then as the Saigon bureau chief, was a fundamental building block of what eventually became the common American understanding of the war. In Our Vietnam, A.J. Langguth goes one step further, attempting to capture the entirety of that common understanding in one text. The book, which begins with the closing days of the Eisenhower administration and ends with the unceremonious closure of the American embassy in Saigon, is only about America’s experience in Vietnam. The book dedicates less than ten pages to the thousand year history of Vietnamese resistance before or the painful years of communist totalitarianism after the American War in Vietnam.

Langguth’s Vietnam War was a tragedy caused by “America’s leaders, [who] for thirty years, had failed the people of the North, the people of the South, and the people of the United States” (p. 668). Truman and Eisenhower saw Vietnam as a way to keep France, a Cold War ally, strong. Their successors--Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon--saw South Vietnam as a bulwark against the expansion of communism into Southeast Asia. Moreover, Langguth writes, “One reason for [these] three American presidents to wage war in Vietnam had been to ensure a second term, a term that none of the three was destined to complete” (p. 637). At the Pentagon, the “Never Again Club” (p. 124) demanded ever more forceful measures to fight the war, while successive presidents tried to placate the public and prevent the entry of the Chinese into the conflict by limiting the war’s scale. All of them, Langguth argues in Our Vietnam, missed the true nature of the war, a nationalist struggle to unify Vietnam and sweep away a puppet regime. Langguth concludes, “North Vietnam’s leaders had deserved to win. South Vietnam’s leaders had deserved to lose” (p. 668).

Our Vietnam is light on history and heavy on opinion. As an eye-witness to the American escalation and withdrawal from Vietnam, Langguth can certainly be forgiven having an opinion. But A.J. Langguth frequently substitutes direct observation or commonly held belief for historical proof. In that respect, Our Vietnam is more a collection of commonly held beliefs about the Vietnam War than a history. Furthermore, with the exception of a few anecdotes from North Vietnamese leaders and gut-wrenching stories of the suffering of the Vietnamese on both sides, there is little analysis of the Vietnamese perspective on the conflict. Our Vietnam is a great introduction to the war for those with no background in the conflict, but refuses to question any of the popular assumptions that have become the national narrative about America’s Vietnam War.

The General Offensive/General Uprising

Ronnie E. Ford, Tet 1968: Understanding the Surprise. New York: Frank Cass, 1995, 194 pages.

The Tet Offensive is perhaps the most examined period of the Vietnam War. That is not surprising since it is nearly universally acknowledged as a turning point in the war, the “high-water mark” of the American effort in Vietnam. Yet the history of this climatic campaign has been written by the West, through Western eyes. In most treatments of the offensive, North Vietnamese and Vietcong motives are as obscure as they were to the American military at the time. Enter Tet 1968 by Ronnie E. Ford. This book is both a fascinating examination of the motives and decisions behind the Tet Offensive from Hanoi’s perspective and a reflection on the indicators the West had and why they were missed. Ford has gathered an impressive array of sources, from North Vietnamese strategy documents to interviews with key American and South Vietnamese intelligence figures, who were looking at the same evidence on the eve of the Tet Offensive.

Ronnie Ford portrays the Tet Offensive (or General Offensive/General Uprising as it was called by the communists) as a uniquely Vietnamese answer to the strategic stalemate that had developed in South Vietnam in 1967. In Hanoi’s estimation, the Americans had reached the apex of their capability and were still unable to dislodge the Southern insurgency. The time had arrived to shift from simply fighting to “fighting while negotiating” in order to achieve a settlement favorable to the North. To negotiate from a position of strength, Hanoi needed to generate a “General Uprising”--a mythic goal deeply rooted in the Vietnamese identity of perpetual resistance to foreign interference--in which the entire nation would rise up against the foreign invaders. Ultimately, Ford concludes, “MACV was fully aware that there had been a change in Communist strategy, and that Hanoi was planning something big,” but because of the West’s inability to understand this uniquely Vietnamese concept, the “actual intent and limited objectives were misinterpreted” (p. 194).

Tet 1968 is a fresh, intriguing take on the Tet Offensive. It departs so drastically from the well-worn path of other books, such as the focus on the dramatic media coverage and on Washington’s disastrous attempts at damage control, that one almost forgets that Ford is talking about the same campaign that has been so scrutinized over the past forty years. And herein lies the only complaint with the book. Perhaps the most central debate of the Tet Offensive is over its target: did the North Vietnamese intend to shock the leaders in Washington or, as actually happened, the American people? Ford’s Tet 1968 ventures so far afield from the commonly examined sources and questions that he never actually addresses this question. One might guess he would conclude that the actual target of the Tet Offensive was the South Vietnamese people, but Ford never provides the reader with an answer. This missed opportunity aside, Tet 1968 is an essential read for any Vietnam historian.

THE ABBREVIATED LBJ

Michael H. Hunt, Lyndon Johnson’s War: America’s Cold War Crusade in Vietnam 1945-1968, New York: Hill and Wang, 1996, 128 pages.

While the history of the “Americanization” of the Vietnam War is well-tread territory, there have been few books that have applied the same laser-focus to the topic seen in Lyndon Johnson’s War. In this book, Michael H. Hunt explores the period between the so-called Gulf of Tonkin incident and the decision to send an air mobile division in July 1965, which made formal (if not declared) the ground war that the United States had already been waging in Vietnam for months. In contrast to his detailed treatment of the escalation, Hunt dedicates only a few dozen pages to the Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy years before or the years that followed. Hunt’s Lyndon Johnson’s War is, at its heart, an examination of the psychology that led Johnson and a team of brilliant advisors to act “largely ignorant of Vietnam itself and with only lukewarm public approval” (p. 107) in plunging America into war in Vietnam.

Hunt’s critique does not focus on containment or Cold War ideology itself, but rather their application to Vietnam, a nationalist, anti-colonial war painted in Cold War colors. Hunt argues that Johnson and his advisors, as had their predecessors, saw Vietnam in “well-worn Cold War terms” (p. 79). Ultimately, Hunt argues, Johnson’s reasons for entering the conflict “amounted to Cold War clichés” (p. 93). But, while Johnson’s policies were the logical extension of his predecessors’, Hunt does not excuse Johnson of culpability in the final outcome of the war. His concise retelling of the period highlights the ways in which Johnson chose to stave off disaster in Vietnam, rather than truly commit to winning. Because “he did not want Vietnam to interfere with his domestic program” (p. 99), he gave Vietnam just enough attention to keep it from falling during his term.

Surprisingly, Lyndon Johnson’s War does not suffer for its brevity. While one could easily choose other events during the period or other of the administration’s choices to reinforce these points, Hunt has very successfully distilled this period to those essential elements that highlight the perceptions of the parties most directly responsible for the escalation. His summation and critique of the standard charges made against the Johnson administration (in the fourth chapter of the book) is as solid an analysis as can be found in any lengthier work. Neither villain nor tragic hero, Hunt’s Johnson was a man weathering the forces of domestic and international politics, trying and failing to chart a middle course for the nation between war with China and appeasement to Communism, ignorant of the nature of the enemy he actually faced. Political forces drove him toward self-preservation and legacy-building while international forces drove him to resist extremists on both sides of the aisle. In the end, however, Hunt’s Lyndon Johnson was consumed by these forces he tried to hold at bay.

ASSIGNING BLAME

H.R. McMaster, Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam, New York: HarperCollins, 1997, 352 pages.

Even if he had never written Dereliction of Duty, H.R. McMaster would still go down in history as one of the most colorful American military figures of his generation. His exploits as a tank company commander at the Battle of the 73 Easting in the Gulf War, as commander of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment in Tal Afar in the Iraq war (immortalized in Thomas Ricks’ Fiasco), and as a driving force behind the 2007 surge strategy that may well have salvaged the Iraq war (immortalized in Bob Woodward’s The War Within) have already cemented his place in American military lore. His authorship of Dereliction of Duty only adds to his legend. In writing this book, McMaster applied the same super-natural ability to be in the right place at the right time that has marked his military career; just as he began Dereliction of Duty, many of President Johnson’s records and oval office recordings were released to the public . The result is an intriguing, if opinionated, portrait of the decision-makers that lead the United States into war in Vietnam.

Dereliction of Duty covers the critical period between 1964 and 1965 when the Vietnam War transformed from a Vietnamese war into an American war. In his analysis, H.R. McMaster finds plenty of blame to spread around. At the top , “Johnson’s preoccupation with his domestic legislative program led him to obscure from the public and the Congress the extent of the difficulties in Vietnam” (p. 210). Robert McNamara repeatedly “misled the senators and representatives by misrepresenting America’s role” in Vietnam (p. 134). But McMaster reserves his most damning indictments for Gen. Wheeler and the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), because “the president’s plan of deception depended on tacit approval or silence from the JCS” (p. 330). In short, the JCS’ failure to speak out when their recommendations were misrepresented amounted to a dereliction of duty.

From the title to the final page, Dereliction of Duty exudes H.R. McMaster’s personality. To the audacious cavalryman, inaction and indecision are even more grievous sins than wrong action or wrong decision. While McMaster gives a very thorough treatment to the public statements of the actors during this key period, he neglects even a cursory discussion of memoirs or private documents that might have yielded a much richer appreciation of the uncertainty and pressures with which they were faced. In his effort to clearly assign blame and argue the guilt of the accused, McMaster loses an opportunity to provide an understanding of the forces that ultimately thrust America into the Vietnam War.

That having been said, Dereliction of Duty makes a compelling case. One can argue with its omissions, but not its scholarship . It is an exemplary work and deserves a place in any Vietnam War collection.

UNDERSTANDING VIETNAM

Neil L. Jamieson, Understanding Vietnam. Berkley, CA: University of California, 1994, 428 pages.

Four decades of oppression by a brutal communist regime have not erased Vietnam’s rich literary history. From the oldest written record of Vietnamese creation myths to the underground poetry smuggled out of the country through embassies and emigrants , literature has marked the troubled history of Vietnam. In Understanding Vietnam, Neil L. Jamieson combines his extensive knowledge of this rich literary history with personal insights gained during over four years of work as a civilian advisor in Vietnam during and after the war to provide a rare look at Vietnam from Vietnamese perspectives. The book begins with the dawn of Vietnam’s quoc ngu--anglicized written Vietnamese--literary history (at the beginning of the French colonial period) and concludes at the beginning of the 1990s. But beyond being a history, Understanding Vietnam also provides a unique window into how the Vietnamese saw and still see the world.

Jamieson contends that the Vietnamese have framed every conflict in their history in the context of this world view . The tides of insurgency and liberalism marked the waxing and waning of yin (the feminine, informal, and chaotic) and yang (the masculine, formal, and ordered) in nature’s attempt to balance the Tao. The governments of North and South--and the individual’s obligation to each--were seen in the context of filial obligation (hieu), class-based right behavior (nghia), and the centrality of the village. The arrival of the French and Western values called all of these values into question. Jamieson describes both the French Indochinese War and the subsequent American war in Vietnam as, ultimately, foreign intervention in the internal conflict between competing Vietnamese “super-villages” (competing ideological camps ) to reset the “thermostat” of the Vietnamese value system.

If one could find any fault with Understanding Vietanm, it would be in its heavy-reliance, to the near-exclusion of all other media , on quoc ngu literature. The pre-quoc ngu history he describes was told by people who lived in the shadow of French colonists. Surely this influenced what history was told or lost, which works were translated or not from the older, pictographic, Sinic Vietnamese. Likewise, Jamieson touches briefly on Vietnam War-era television, but completely excludes film or radio sources. These mass-media sources might paint a much different picture of the Vietnamese public’s perceptions, North and South, especially during the war.

These are minor complaints about an otherwise exemplary book. Understanding Vietnam eschews the common intellectual short-hand about causes for the Vietnam War--Cold War clichés and dogmatic comments on counter-insurgency or international relations. In fact, this book eschews assigning cause at all. Instead, as he concludes, Jamieson masterfully ties the ancient concept of the Tao, yin and yang, to modern systems theory to reveal that, rather than an effect of some discreet cause, the Vietnam War was an emergent phenomenon that existed in an “evolving context,” the context of the Vietnamese world view.