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Summary: Outstanding
Review: It's hard to write the truth about Vietnam; so many in the Establishment have a vested interest in covering up their shameful conduct that it is difficult to dig down through the tons and tons of garbage they have dumped on the story of this war and those who fought it. Sorley does a masterful job of bringing up the truth. It is painful to read (America's betrayal of a gallant ally and its own sons still tears at me) but enlightening. Some of the other reviews of this fine book reveal a lot more about the reviewers' preconceptions than about the book itself -- or the truth. Thank you Mr. Sorley for writing such a fine history -- from one who was there as a soldier in 1968-69 Under GEN Abrams.
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Summary: This is source material of profound historical importance
Review: Let's get back to the real subject of importance which is the quality of this remarkable book. To put this work in historical perspective, if we had suddenly discovered literal records of the conversations between Napoleon, his Marshals and political advisers during the final years of the Napoleonic Wars, that would be hailed as earth-shattering. The mind boggles to think of the implications of the surfacing of materials of that magnitude relative to the events of the time. But this is exactly what Lewis Sorley has discovered and painstakingly revealed to us in regard to the war in Vietnam. Sorley's management of this material and his masterly presentation deserve the highest praise. This work merits a Pulitzer Prize!
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Summary: At last, the true perspective
Review: Lewis Sorley has made a lasting mark on how we will look at the Vietnam War, a perspective matured by time and enriched by impressive research into primary sorces. Virtually every previous work on the war, including my own, focuses primarily on the years up to and including 1998; Sorley looks at the years from 1998 through the end, and shows a picture rather different than the conventional one. Many writers and officials will resent this book, because it turns their own positions on end, but they can't honestly refute the facts. It is a shame that we could not have had this book twenty years ago, but it probably could not have been written before now. Adding to the brilliance of Sorley's research and interpretation is a sparkling writing style that makes the book a pleasure to read. It is a must for anyone who really wants to know how the war ended.
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Summary: Shameful Ending to a Righteous War
Review: Lewis Sorley, in his book "A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam", makes the boldest statement that I have heard or read regarding the Vietnam War. On page 217 Sorley writes, "There came a time when the war was won. The fighting wasn't over, but the war was won. This achievement can probably best be dated in late 1970..." This is a very provocative statement considering what we know the final result of the Vietnam War to be. With "A Better War" Sorley attempts to portray America's last years in Vietnam, a time period from roughly the emergence of Creighton Abrams right before he took command to when we pulled out, as a time when America held within its grasp, if not victory in Vietnam, then at least the potential for the same strategic stalemate we achieved in Korea. Sorley details how this victory slipped through our fingers as a result of political reverses at home and not military reverses in Indochina. While saying that we had the war won may not be entirely accurate, we were certainly doing better than what has been portrayed in most accounts of the war. We were approaching our ultimate goal of creating a viable nation state out of South Vietnam that would be a bulwark against the spread of communism in southeast Asia. It is Sorley's belief that we had mostly achieved that goal by late 1970. Sorley seems to think that the main reason we faired so poorly in Vietnam was because of failed tactics at the beginning of the conflict. He faults William Westmoreland for not paying enough attention to Vietnamese forces and by employing a strategic plan that was more interested in killing the enemy than in providing a secure environment for the Vietnamese people. Sorley also believes that a combination of civil unrest over Vietnam and biased reporting by the media, especially Walter Cronkite, was the main contributing factor in America losing the war. President Nixon was unwilling to expend the political capital to be able to undertake the necessary military actions that would bring the North Vietnamese to their knees. Each new "escalation" of the conflict brought ever stronger rebuke upon Nixon until he just stopped fighting against it and made the fateful decision to withdraw all American troops whether the South Vietnamese were ready to accept all the responsibility or not. The end of the Vietnam War is easily America's most shameful moment. It is so not because we fought there or even because we didn't achieve our objective. It is our national shame because of the way in which we bailed out on a people who were totally dependent upon us for their freedom and their lives. Without American assistance the South Vietnamese didn't stand a chance against the North Vietnamese onslaught. The American president knew this, the Congress knew this, and, worse yet, the people knew this and they just didn't care. The worst thing that was ever said by an American about the war was said by President Gerald Ford. At a time when North Vietnamese soldiers were overrunning the South Vietnamese countryside, terrorizing and killing the people at will, Ford said during a speech he was giving at Tulane University, "As far as the United States is concerned, the war in Vietnam is finished." Yes, President Ford, the war may be over but America's shame from abandoning the Vietnamese people will never go away.
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Summary: Here's An Analysis of a Single, Simple Paragraph
Review: On the fourth page of chapter six, there is a short paragraph on bombing statistics. I'll analyze this sentence-by-sentence as a lesson on the bigger picture of this book. The paragraph begins: "Although most of the controversy over bombing during the war was occasioned by bombing in North Vietnam, that is somewhat ironic, given the distribution of bombing operations." Sorley sets the stage for giving us statistics on the bombing distribution, which he describes next: "About 75 percent of Air Force missions during the war were flown in South Vietnam, to include close air support, airlift, search and rescue, defoliation, and courier missions." Note the list of mission types included in that 75 percent, especially "courier missions." Last sentence: "Another 15.2 percent consisted of interdiction and close air support in Laos, and 3 percent more in Cambodia, leaving just 6.7 percent applied in North Vietnam." Sorley's clear assumption is that every Air Force mission is of equal value, effect, and risk. He literally equates a Cessna mail delivery in a rear echelon area ("courier missions") with a B-52 bombing run over Hanoi. Whatever point Sorley is trying to make with this paragraph falls apart with only a bit of inspection. Much worse, however, is that the reader must now wonder if Sorley screws up such a simple statistics-to-conclusion analysis in this paragraph, how can we trust him on the far more complex and controversial points he purports to make in the central thesis of the book? Is Sorley being deliberately misleading in this paragraph, or is he simply incompetent in rudimentary logic and arithmetic? He can't win either way. Thus, with his credibility destroyed on so simple a matter, why should we believe anything else he has to say?
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Summary: Lewis Sorley is the American equivalent of Emile Zola.
Review: One hundred years ago Captain Alfred Dreyfus was exhonerated from conviction by a French military court that sentenced him to imprisonment on Devil's Island for treason. The reversal was generated by author Emile Zola who believed the honor of France should prevail over other considerations. Sorley performs a service of equal courage today. But traditional roles are reversed: many who opposed US involvement in the Vietnam war, vigorously characterizing our efforts as fascist-equivalent, still cannot let go of the myths. Regardless of facts available since the end of the war, they cling uncritically to the notion that the war was unjust, illegal and immoral. Maybe. And maybe not. Which is what Sorley's book is all about. Maybe there were some Vietmanese who really didn't want to live under a Hanoi-directed dictatorship. Maybe the indigeneous Viet Cong virtually ceased to exist, because they were either killed or converted. Maybe the corruption in South Vietnam wasn't wide-spread. Maybe the Army of South Vietnam was able to take on the North Vietnamese Army, until their ammo ran out. In the end, we cut off all support, while the USSR and China showered their client without restraint. Could the Saigon government have prevailed if the US were equally generous? This book poses such practical and ethical questions. If one's mind is closed, go somewhere else. If one believes that earlier contributions by Averell Harriman and Clark Clifford compensate for their diminished stature during the Vietnam era, this book will certainly offend. But the question lingers: what would Zola say? On a personal note, I was an advisor in Vietnam during the period the book describes. If I knew then what I know now, I would have worked harder and with greater conviction to make our final exit less disgraceful than it was. The Desert Storm victory did not erase the pain of Vietnam. The truth does.
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Summary: A Serious Problem with Getting Simple Facts Straight
Review: One of Mr. Sorley's claims to uniqueness in this book is his emphasis on the post-Tet offensive years. In the introduction he writes, "Most of the better-known treatments of the Vietnam War as a whole have given relatively little consideration the these later years." What he's claiming is that general histories of the Vietnam war ("treatments of the Vietnam War as a whole") give a disproportionately small amount of attention ("relatively little consideration") to the period of roughly March 1, 1968 to April 1975. Historians universally agree that the modern Vietnam conflict lasted from 1945 to 1975. The seven post-Tet years comprise 23% of this period. Thus, in the simplest possible way of thinking, a book's post-Tet page count needs to be close to 23% to give a proportionally fair amount of attention to those years. He then attempts to support this contention by analyzing the page counts for three well-known books. The following critique of his analysis is illuminating. Mr. Sorley writes: "Stanley Karnow's 'Vietnam: A History,' for example, does not get beyond Tet 1968 until page 567 out of 670...." The implication is that Karnow's post-Tet coverage is 93/670 = 14%. But that's far from the truth. First, Karnow's book actually spends 543 pages on the 1945 - 1975 time frame, not the full 670; most of the other pages are devoted to a history of pre-World War II Vietnam. Second, Karnow's post-Tet coverage is 117 pages, not 93. Thus the true proportion is 117/543 = 22%, which is very much in line with the 23% year-to-year proportion. Mr. Sorley continues: "George Herring's admirable academic treatment of the conflict, 'America's Longest War,' is similarly weighted toward the early years, with 221 pages devoted to the period through Tet 1968 and 60 pages to the rest of the war." The implication is that Herring's post-Tet coverage is 60/281 = 21%, which is very reasonable, but, again, far from the truth. Herring's post-Tet coverage actually begins on page 209, and continues to page 299. Thus the true proportion is 90/299 = 30%, which is clearly a very solid amount. Finally, Mr. Sorley analyzes Sheehan's great work: "The most pronounced example of concentration on the earlier years is Neil Sheehan's Pulitzer Prize-winning book, 'A Bright Shining Lie.' Sheehan devotes 725 pages to events through Tet 1968 and only 65 pages to the rest of the war...." There's no need to even analyze the page counts here. Those of us who have read 'A Bright Shining Lie' know it is not a general history of the war, and thus irrelevant for such an analysis. This embarrassingly amateur error follows two wildly incorrect page analyses (the average error of the two is 49%). Far from proving his point, Mr. Sorley has shown himself to be either incompetent or untrustworthy in providing facts which are easily checked. Why then should we trust his ideas which are not so easily checked?
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Summary: Sorely Misses the Big Picture
Review: Revisionist History At Its Worst: It's not only that the conclusions of this book are poorly supported, they miss the point even if they were completely correct. If the U.S. had stayed in Vietnam and "won," what would we have won? The South Vietnamese government was so bad that the U.S. would have had to stay in the country, for a long time, perhaps decades, acting as both soldiers and military police, until a stable political situation could be created (which may have been never). And what really bad geopolitical things happened as a result of us "losing" South Vietnam? None, of course, certainly none of the falling dominoes that were widely predicted. Sorley's conclusions are only relevant if you already believe America's involvement in Vietnam was the right thing. If you believe it was the wrong thing, then all of the people Sorley characterizes as villains (Washington politicians, the media, and the antiwar movement) are in fact heroes. Sorley's exposition leaves much to be desired. Many of his points are unoriginal, wildly overstated, or just downright silly. A big unoriginal point: that the U.S. military effort making significant gains in 1969 and 1971. This is widely known, and was accurately and concisely told in Ronald Spector's 1993 "After Tet." In addition, it's only partly due to General Abrams; much of our success in those years is a result of poor tactics by the North Vietnamese. Overstated: General Abrams, from reading this book, one might think that he is the best Army general since the Korean war, maybe since WWII. This might very well be true. The problem is that Sorley's unending, worship-like praise of Abrams quickly becomes tiresome, until the reader might conclude that Abrams' excellence is far overstated. Thus, Sorley torpedoes his hero by gushing over him so much; plus, the endless italics-punctuated quotes from Abrams are annoying and distracting. Downright silly: Sorley criticizes Walter Cronkite's objectivity by pulling a quote from Cronkite's autobiography, and comparing it to clearly-labeled editorial analyses that Cronkite did in the 60's. Sorley then claims that Cronkite was knowingly using his status during Vietnam to promote anti-war opinions. Not only is this comparison entirely inappropriate, but as I stated before, this is only a problem if you believe the war was a good thing. Otherwise, Cronkite was performing a great public service. (Besides all this, Cronkite's book is full of self-serving fluff, and as such is far from an accurate account of his reporting career.) In summary, this book's main conclusions are preaching to those who already believe his conclusions, and the conclusions are poorly supported and constructed. Go read some truthful Vietnam War history, such as Karnow's "Vietnam," Herring's "America's Longest War," or Hunt's "Lyndon Johnson's War."
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Summary: Just Another Useless Revisionist History
Review: Sorley adds nothing new to the 30-year-old pile of Vietnam Warrevisionist histories. He simply trots out the standard military lineof "we were winning, but the darned [President, politicians, media, protesters, drugs -- pick one or more] made us lose!" Claims of exploring new intellectual territory with important new sources are just sales hype. Touted of being "unique among histories of the Vietnam War in that it focuses on the second half of the conflict" ignores the obvious fact that one cannot analyze this part of the war in a vacuum -- the earlier years had tremendous influence on the conduct and success of later years. This book isn't even worth reading as an intellectual exercise -- as with all its revisionist predecessors, it's insulting to the complex and tortured reality of the Vietnam War.
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Summary: This book deserves a hearing!
Review: Sorley argues that the Vietnam War could have been won by the U.S. and South Vietnamese, but just at the point when the situation "on the ground" in 1969 was improving, the domestic situation in the U.S. (re support of war) was deteriorating. Hence, it was a race to solidify the military situation before the U.S. decided to "cut and run." Unfortunately, our Vietnamese allies were left high and dry, when Congress cut off aid (partially to spite Nixon, and partially just out of years of frustration and negative PR over the war). It was a war which could have, and should have been won by the U.S. To say the least, this book is controversial, and should be carefully considered by all those who think they understand Vietnam, and have dismissed the war as unwinnable, and the ARVN and GVN as worthless, or have exalted the North Vietnamese as unstoppable, or as somehow sainted under the nationalist banner.
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