Book review - "A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam" by Lewis Sorley (1999)

The Vietnam War is America's most famous military defeat (only die hard history buffs recall the War of 1812). Growing up in the 80s I had a very definite image of the war from films and TV shows - rock and roll, rape, soldiers melting down in the hot sun being unable to tell friend from foe, fragging, race problems... And there was a historical basis to that myth. Even Sorley admits the societal problems infected the army - not helped by the constant influx of new troops and withdrawal of troops who knew what they were doing.

What Sorley does though, and very well, is to draw attention to the latter years of the war, the post-Tet years, when just as America finally figured out how to fight the war properly, the government and public got sick of supporting it, and withdrew... gradually at first, but then in a heap. Sorley argues there were a number of key changes - notably the fact that Creighton Abrams took over from Westmoreland. Abrams focused on security and population control rather than body count, took the fight to the enemy more - went into Cambodia and Laos, introduced the Phoenix Program, sped up Vietnamisation.

Ultimately he wasn't successful. He appears to have eradicated or at least minimised the guerilla threat of the VC and hurt the NVA but was. It  unable to deliver a fatal blow - he felt he could have in 1971 but it didn't happen. Could it ever have happened? Maybe. Maybe if Abrams had been in charge earlier. But with North Vietnam as a permanent bolt hole - and backed by China and the USSR - it was always going to be very hard. Sorley talks a lot about how Abrams got the countryside to quieten down - but the fighting power of North Vietnam never seemed to ebb. South Vietnam's capabilities improved as shown by their efforts in the 1972 offensive, but they needed US support and when that went they collapsed.

I'm intrigued by a theory I read on the internet once about an alternate strategy - "New South Vietnam" - which would created a smaller, more defendable version of South Vietnam south of the Mekong River.

It's a flawed work - very focused on Abrams, with little on America's allies (Australia is barely mentioned). It's very dry for a book on war with plenty of statistics when more colour would've have gone astray - even a slightly more detailed picture of the key players. But it is well researched and does an important job of challenging our assumptions on the war.