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Rating: 
Summary: An Outstanding Work
Review: I had the pleasure to work with then Colonel Herrington before he left the Army. This book is an outstanding work as a personal memoir, an insight into the Vietnam War, and an example of successful counter-insurgency operations. Stalking the Vietcong takes the reader into a relatively ignored, and perhaps the most important side, of the Phoenix program-the district level operations. Most other books on Phoenix tend to concentrate on sensationalized special forces operations or the alleged abuses of the Vietnamese populace. Read this book to get a more complete and accurate picture.
Rating:
Summary: An Outstanding Work
Review: I had the pleasure to work with then Colonel Herrington before he left the Army. This book is an outstanding work as a personal memoir, an insight into the Vietnam War, and an example of successful counter-insurgency operations. Stalking the Vietcong takes the reader into a relatively ignored, and perhaps the most important side, of the Phoenix program-the district level operations. Most other books on Phoenix tend to concentrate on sensationalized special forces operations or the alleged abuses of the Vietnamese populace. Read this book to get a more complete and accurate picture.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent book recommend purchasing
Review: I read a lot about Military History, almost exclusively about the Vietnam conflict. It takes me about one chapter or even less to determine
if a book is "good". Having read just under 50
pages, I can already tell that it is going to be an
excellent book. One is quickly put in the shoes
of the author and understands the challenges
he has to overcome. The content has been
accurate and interesting. Some authors spend a
good deal of time with regard to the rigors of military training, leaving home and friends etc... which is good. But, some authors do this well,
and others don't. In Herrington's case we are
almost instantly put into the surroundings in Vietnam and begin to feel a sense of intrigue and a hint of ominous events about to occur. Believe me, I think the emotional issues with regard to the conflict has significant impact, "We Were Soldiers Once... and Young" almost
made me cry. But, I have skipped entire sections of some books just to get to the content relevent to the individual(s) tour of Vietnam.
Rating:
Summary: Good books hard to find!
Review: It's great to see good books on special operations. Not many are written. Another couple of books that bring the reader into more contemporary special operations are "Black Hawk Down" by Mark Bowden, and "Danger Close" but Mike Yon. Keep writing!
Rating:
Summary: The Right Way To Do It
Review: Part memoir, part case study, part entertainment, "Stalking the Vietcong" is the most incisive look at the Vietnam War and the Vietnamese that I have seen. As an army intelligence officer, Stuart Herrington spent 20 months in the Hau Nghia province near Saigon plumbing assorted Vietcong defectors and POWs for information, and passing it on to the South Vietnamese military to act upon. Initially he is reluctant to go to Vietnam, being somewhat dovish and skeptical on the war. But by the end of the 20 months he has become so engrossed in his mission and so taken by Vietnamese culture that the only way to make him leave is a direct order from higher-ups at the Pentagon. It's evident that he, for one, came to believe strongly in the goal of preventing the second half of the Vietnamese people from being subjugated.
Herrington shows in his narrative not only what he was doing to eradicate the Vietcong, but also what the Vietcong were doing to make themselves need eradicating. The insidious spread of their "shadow government" meant dirt poor peasants had to pay a rice tax to them in addition to whatever they had to pay to the legitimate government. The young men of the villages and hamlets, if they somehow escaped being drafted into the army of South Vietnam, would be subject to conscription into the guerilla forces operating in the area. It is this shadow government that Herrington attacks, acting, as far as I can tell, in the mode of a classic spymaster in his utilization of defectors.
Though they are all poor, Herrington's informants do not rally to the government side for money, as in many other Cold War spy contests. Instead, they want a way out of the communist war machine which calls on them to spend years on end away from their families in swamps and jungles, fighting endlessly to "liberate" fellow Vietnamese who don't particularly want to be liberated. The overall impression I take from the half dozen cases discussed is of a peasantry, north and south, being forced to serve as cannon fodder for a dispute raging in the capitals of Russia and America and China and France. They are a people profoundly war weary who more than anything else just want to be left alone.
The attention to colorful and amusing detail is not something one would expect from an account written by an army intelligence operative, and some is unforgettable, like the North Vietnamese POW kicking "off his Ho Chi Minh sandals and squatting barefoot on the (American) general's couch. I barked at him in Vietnamese to get his feet off the furniture...". Equally memorable is the account of the feast of "Dog Cooked Seven Ways" where Herrington, striving as always to respect local customs, plows his way "through dog fondue, dog spareribs, and canine cutlets..." The seventh and most nutritious course is probably not suitable to discuss on a page that may be read by college town vegetarians. Suffice it to say that it brings to mind another ancient civilization, that of the Chinese, where the cuisine blends aboriginal delicacies with highly refined culinary methods.
Herrington's enthusiastic consumption of the feast served to show his Vietnamese friends that not every American conforms to the stereotype, widely held among Asians, that Americans love their dogs more than their wives. But it also highlights the lengths to which he would go to understand the Vietnamese and thereby better accomplish his mission. It's a pity Kennedy and Johnson didn't first send a few "advisors" like him to check things out before committing tens of thousands of infantry "advisors". As well, today's military intelligence people could benefit by the reading of this account, particularly Herrington's emphasis on obtaining information from traumatized survivors through small kindnesses and soothing talk rather than abuse and brutal incarceration.
Rating:
Summary: Good books hard to find!
Review: What's so different here is the intelligence of the author, his sensitivity to and curiosity about the Vietnamese. It's too bad he wasn't a policy-maker. Intensely interesting, entertaining history. I was truly sorry when it was over. I wanted more.
Rating:
Summary: In microcosm, this book explains the entire war.
Review: What's so different here is the intelligence of the author, his sensitivity to and curiosity about the Vietnamese. It's too bad he wasn't a policy-maker. Intensely interesting, entertaining history. I was truly sorry when it was over. I wanted more.
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