Vietnam Wars 1945-19

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Summary: A mandatory history lesson for any American living in Asia.
Review: Born in 1961, and in my mid-teens when the bombing stopped, I was your typical naive product of whitebread suburbarn America. When I moved to Asia, I realized I was woefully ignorant about this war. This book was exactly what I was looking for.

It is as clear, well-written and documented, informative, and disturbing as any book on this terrible chapter in American history should be.

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Summary: The Herioc-Tragedy of Vietnam
Review: Every Vietnam veteran should read this book. As a 19 year old kid serving in Vietnam, I actually believed I was helping to defend the freedom of the South Vietnamese people to choose the kind of government they wanted. What a shock to find that we were there to prevent that from happening. Thank you Ms Young.

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Summary: Hubris: America in Veitnam
Review: It is rare that I will read a book twice, but Marilyn B. Young's history of American involvement in Vietnam is so packed with information and so clearly written, that I recently felt compelled to read it once again. It plots, very logically, how America went down the slippery slope that was Veitnam. Our foreign policy towards Vietnam was based on a culture never understood, and assumptions never questioned. I've read a dozen books on Vietnam in the past ten years, and this is by far the best.

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Summary: U.S. imperialism getting out of hand
Review: Let me give you an idea of the discussion in this powerful and well-written book on the Vietnam war by Prof. Dr. Marilyn Young.

In 1954, the French had to withdrawl and the Genevea accords were signed. This called for Ho Chi Minh and his group to withdrawl to the North of the country and the French puppet Bao Dai's government to be in control of the South. A provisional line separated North and South Vietnam, to be completely eliminated when elections for the reunification of the country took place in July 1956. The Americans then moved from supplying arms to the French to taking over the whole effort to crush independent nationalism in Vietnam.

The U.S., she shows, understood that the Viet Minh would win any free and fair election and that Ho Chi Minh was more of a nationalist than a communist. Therefore, it was necessary to set up a permanent separate nation in South Vietnam, under the dictatorship of Ngo Dinh Diem, who launched a campaign of slaughter and terror against his opponents, leftist or otherwise. In an endnote she quotes Diem's former chief of staff as saying that had the Diem regime confined the police state terror and torture to only communists or communist sympathizers, one could symphathize with them for such persons inherently deserved such treatment. But his terror spread to other political parties, people who simply did not like his government and those resisting extortion by government officials. Despite being constantly slobbered over as a great humanitarian statesman in the U.S. media and among American liberals, conservaties in South Vietnam were beginning to openly oppose his regime, worrying U.S. officials about his regime's stability.

Finally in 1959, Hanoi authorized the Viet Minh in the South to resist in self-defense the terror of Diem's government. A couple thousand North Vietnamese, most of them natives of the South, began infiltrating the country. In 1960 the National Liberation Front (NLF) was formed amongst many South Vietnamese dissidents led by the former Viet Minh ("viet cong" in U.S. propaganda).

Diem's biggest problem from the U.S. perspective was that he had begun negotiations with North Vietnam on the withdrawl of U.S. troops from South Vietnam and agreeing to allow for the NLf to join South Vietnamese policial life and disucss possible reunification of the country in the future. This was a real horror to U.S. officials as comes up many times in the documents the author quotes.

In any case Diem was overthrown and killed on November 1'st 1963 in a U.S. backed coup. The problem was that the U.S. had trouble finding any military officer that was not intent on continuing Diem's efforts to reach agreement with the NLF and North Vietnam. They installed a series of military dicatatorships over the next few years until they finally found one sufficiently pliable represented by Ky and Thieu.

The U.S. extended its bombing to North Vietnam, then launched an all out invasion of South Vietnam, accelerating its program of mass murder. Some of the more interesting documents quoted in this book come from the Rand corporation. The infamous "strategic hamlet" program is examined in the village of Duc Lap in one document. Another notes that villages in militarily contested areas often felt hostility towards both the GVN (South Vietnamese government)and the NLF but hostiliy towards the NLF tended to be based on the U.S.-GVN bombing that its presences in villages caused, excess taxation, and sometimes military defeat. Anger towards the NLF was based more on despair than hatred. On the other hand hositlity towards the government of South Vietnam was based on a "a more basic hostility resulting from GVN aims and behavior..." Another document spoke of increased support for the NLF resulting from the massive defoliation program launched by the U.S., allegedly to deny food sources to the NLF which it did not do but greatly devastated peasant farmers. This exacerbated the feeling that the U.S/ GVN were "at best minimally concerned with the peasant's welfare."

The author quotes the elite political scientist Samuel Huntington who was deeply impressed by the massive refugee exodus to the cities caused by the American terror bombing of the countryside. It was good because it was the only way to deprive the Vietcong of its supporters, the people of rural South Vietnam for the Viet cong was a powerful organization which could not be separated from its "constituency" so long as the constintuency continued to exist.

The author goes on to discuss the domestic aspects of the Vietnam war as well as the mass murder operations conducted in Laos and Cambodia. She notes that the U.S., as in South Vietnam, avoided opportunities to make peace by backing the forming of  a coalition government with the left wing insurtgents there as proposed by the dictator Prince Siahnouk. Siahnouk had been overthrown in early 1970 because he was vehemently opposed to the U.S. bombing his country despite U.S. claims that he supported it. When the U.S. bombing reached its horrific peak in 1973, Cambodia's infrastructure and moderate and progressive  civil society were just about completely destroyed, leaving the harshest and most brutal elements, in this case the Khmer Rouge, previously a very fringe wacko group of the insurgency, to take power.

Thieu's regime fell in 1975. The author notes that in his final pathetic words in power, he attacked Kissinger for allegedly selling out South Vietnam in the January 1973 peace agreement though the author notes that Thieu continued to attack and seize territory held by the NLF, continuing the war as if there had been no peace agreement with U.S. support. The U.S. gave him all the military aid in the world but Thieu was opposed by virtually all sectors of South Vietnamese society and he could arrest and kill tens of thousands of people and steal every election but the fundamental illegitamacy of his regime could not be hid.

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Summary: The worst book on Vietnam I've ever read!
Review: Please, if you want to know something about the Vietnam War, this is not the book to read. It is so heavily-biased that I stopped believing in the validity of what the author was saying after a few chapters. Unfortunately, I was forced to read this for a college course. I am a book-lover who keeps the dumbest of novels because I can't throw a book away, but this goes right into the trash when I finish the course next week. Thankfully, the book will no longer be used by the college after my class is ended.

First of all, Young draws on a lot of resources to give you her story. Sometimes these resources are not identified and you wonder if a friend of hers may have been quoted. She quotes people who have the worst of things to say, but you never know who these people are to say such things. She blames the US for everything awful that ever happened in Vietnam and the vicinity. (on pages 283-284 she actually blames US bombing for the horrors commited by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge!) Chapter 8, which begins US ground troops in Vietnam, starts out with, "The growing disaster..." Disaster? The war hasn't even gotten underway and already it's a disaster. She omits the crimes of the Viet Cong or the NVA or sometimes skims over them as if they were no big deal.

I have always been fully aware that the US did some awful things in Vietnam, but this book insists that we were the devil at all times who were out only to murder and terrorize the Vietnamese, while the NLF were angels who only wanted to do what was best for the poor people. 2 million people fled Vietnam in boats after the communist take-over of the country, across cruel ocean waters, but according to the book (page 310) they did so because of the US trade embargo.

This is an author with an agenda that means more to her than fairness or accuracy. It does not give you the Vietnamese side of the story, but an anti-American side of the story and that's not the same thing. Please, if you want to learn something about the Vietnam War, do yourself a favor and read something else.

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Summary: One of the BEST books on Vietnam i have ever read.
Review: The book has a bias. i will agree to this, however the book does show the reader patterns in the conflicts that need to be seen by a student of history. if you are looking for a book about battles and generals look somewhere else. this book is about vietnam its people and the policys that killed millions of them. i hope and pray by reading this book it will never happen again.

Rating:
Summary: I wish i could give negative stars
Review: This book should not be read by anyone, it simply rehashes every old myth about Vietnam. Read "Vietnam: The Neccessary War" or "The Defeat of the Vietcong and North Vietnamese Army" to get the truth and not his liberal axe-grinding ... that has passed for history for over 25 years.

Rating:
Summary: A very informative and disturbing book
Review: Young details the war well, so that a reader who does not know anything about Vietnam will finish the book having a good idea of the issues that drove the war and the questions that are still asked about it today. History buffs should find this book informative and journalists will enjoy Young's inclusion of the press in her story. I particularly enjoyed Young's examination of events in Cambodia and the perfidy of President Richard Nixon. However, while I agree with Young's inclusion of material that serves to call into question America's actions during the war, I think that her bias as an author against the war was a little too obvious. As an academic, I guess she is entitled to argue against the war rather than simply presenting the facts on both sides, but at points the book reads more like an editoriral rather than an article you would find in the news section of your local newspaper. Nevertheless, the book is chock full of facts, good observations and is clearly written. It certainly gets my reccomendation.