A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and the Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam

by Lewis Sorley

Book Overview

Award-winning military historian Lewis Sorley's A Better War is "an extraordinary piece of work that is bound to become a valuable part of historical documentation about the war in Vietnam. The first... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0151002665
• ISBN13: 9780151002665
• Release Date: June 1999
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Length: 528 Pages
• Weight: 2.04 lbs.
• Dimensions: 2.0" x 6.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

This is probably the BEST book I have read about the Vietnam War, bar none!

Often ignored lessons that are most applicable to Iraq

"A Better War" is one of two best books about the second half of the American military's involvement in Vietnam (1969-1973). It deals with the Vietnamization of the war, focusing on General Abrams' "clear and hold" approach as opposed to "search and destroy" tactics by General Westmoreland. I am biased because my father had served in the South Vietnamese military and this book is the ONLY work I could find that provides the facts, the successes and failures of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN). After running on a platform to end the protracted conflict, Nixon won the Oval Office at the height of the war in 1968. National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger began direct secret negotiations with the North Vietnamese behind the Saigon government's back. In 1965 the United States had taken over conduct of the war, with troop strength peaking at 560,000. Before that, the South Vietnamese had fought the brewing war themselves, with the help of American advisers who were first dispatched by President John F. Kennedy. South Vietnam also had a young but capable air force, along with a navy, Airborne troops, Rangers and Marines. The South Vietnamese military hurriedly expanded its capabilities with the goal of replicating the military philosophy, tactics and structure of their great ally. Unfortunately, this meant inheriting the associated cost, complexity and continued dependence on the United States. South Vietnam's military was tested in the biggest battles of the war, larger than anything U.S. ground troops had faced in previous years: Lam Son 719 (the incursion into Laos), the Easter Offensive (the largest battle of the war and one where the South Vietnamese withstood a 120,000-man assault, albeit with the help of U.S. advisers and air power), and the final offensive by the North in 1975. In January 1973, the Paris Peace Accords were signed; Kissinger took home the Nobel Peace Prize while his co-recipient and North Vietnamese counterpart rightfully declined. Three key provisions (or concessions) in the accords would contribute to the fall of Saigon. First, the North Vietnamese were allowed to keep 150,000 soldiers in the south. Second, the United States would retaliate if North Vietnam violated the accords. Finally, and most important, the United States would continue to aid South Vietnam unconditionally. The latter two provisions would never happen. America's withdrawal from Vietnam took place over four years. Two years later Saigon fell to a modern army, armed to the teeth with the latest Soviet-bloc weaponry. Had the war continued, one thing was certain about Vietnamization--the killing and dying would only be borne by Vietnamese, including those from my generation.

Sorley gets it right, again.

As one who served two tours with the 1st Air Cavalry Division in Vietnam, I concur with Dr. Sorley's thesis that we won the Vietnam War and then let the victory slip through our fingers by not living up to the pledges we made to the South Vietnamese Government. But there were earlier opportunties to have won a military victory as well. If we had been allowed to pursue the NVA in Cambodia right after the first and second battles of the Ia Drang in 1965 and 1966, respectively, we could have forced Hanoi to the negotiating table much earlier. While I too hold the late, great General Creighton Abrams and his approach to Vietnamization of the war in high regard, I think General Westmoreland deserves equal respect. If General Westmoreland had been given the geographical latitude he needed to prosecute a war of annihiltion, Westy would not have been forced to fight a war of attrition -- something Americans do not fight well at all. Nevertheless, Dr. Sorley brings to this book the same kind of dogged and thorough research that he brings to all of his writings. Clearly, a five-star addition to my personal library Wm. Hamilton, Ph.D.

Not revisionist history

I am writing in response to the many critical reviews of this book, as to the actual book. Many reviewers call this revisionist history, and claim that Lewis Sorley's admiration for General Abrams biases the work. Sorley is obviously a great fan of General Abrams, but hey, most people who knew him were fans of his. He was a great soldier, leader, and General. I studied guerrilla warfare before I went to Vietnam (1966-1967). I was part of the Westmoreland multi-battalion offensive actions against the communist forces. I returned to Vietnam (1970-1971) to experience the Abrams emphasis on population security and control. Both type operations are necessary to successfully win a guerrilla war, but Abrams emphasis was clearly the better long term strategy. I suspect that most of the critical comments about this book are written by those most against America's presence in Vietnam. I my opinion, Sorley speaks the truth here. He has done a masterful job of presenting the way the war was fought after the 1968 Tet offensive. Like it or not, that is the way it really was. It is a story that not enough people have heard.

Author Sorley Corrects the Record

Author Lewis Sorley has done all Americans, especially Vietnam veterans, a service by producing this meticulously researched, balanced study of the Vietnam War's final (post-Westmoreland) years. I served almost four years in Vietnam between January 1971 and the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. I rarely review books about the war because too many of them evoke the sentiment, "If that was Vietnam, where was I?" But as one who fought the Vietcong guerrillas and struggled to ferret out their shadow government, who felt the fury of the NVA's 1972 Easter Offensive, and who ultimately left Vietnam on a marine helicopter from the embassy roof, I can say without qualification that author Sorley has got it right. He is on the mark when he points out the success of Cambodian sanctuary raids in 1970 and the long-overdue, successful emphasis on pacification pushed by General Abrams and Ambassador Bunker. He is equally correct in his statement that, by late 1972, it was our war to lose as Hanoi's legions faltered in disarray in the wake of the 13-division attack on South Vietnam that had been launched to bolster sagging revolutionary morale in the South. I served in a province that, under the Westmoreland strategy, was a revolutionary hotbed, where a simple trip to pick up the mail was an invitation to ambush. When Abrams, Colby, Vann, and Bunker got their hands on the throttle, this same province became a different place, with significant increases in security, massive morale problems and defections among the Vietcong cadre who had once ruled the countryside, and a significant economic upturn. This was the Vietnam of Sorley's "Better War." Sadly, as some of the reviews of this fine work demonstrate, the truth about that tragic war is too painful to some aging, unreconstructed members of the antiwar movement, some of whom cannot, 25 years later, admit that their love affair with the feisty Vietcong was misplaced, or that their country's men and women in arms had sown the seeds of victory under General Abrams. Bravo Sorley!

A very good reexamination of the Vietnam conflict

We have been repeating certain truisms ad nauseum for the past twenty five years: "It was a civil war"; "The South Vietnamese fought reluctantly"; "The North Vietnamese fought a popular war"; "US tactics were ineffective." The Vietnam War has become a cliché in our historical memory.Lewis Sorley deflates each and every one of these truisms and helps to tell the real and much more tragic story of the Vietnam War. Through a thorough analysis of America's command strategy under Abrams he shows how Americans came to understand the war as it was and fought much more effectively. Sorley's experience as a military historian helps him to explain the course of the war on the battlefield, particularly the outcome of the Easter Invasion. Lacking the leftist biases of many Vietnam War historians also allows him to discuss the unsavory side of the Communist struggle - and the fact that they were just as dependent on their patrons as South Vietnam was on us. Additionally, his use of Communist sources details just how effectively the Allies fought after 1968.I picked up this book believing that we should have stayed out of Vietnam. I put it down feeling that our abandonment of the South was perhaps the most profound act of cowardice in American history. Sorley's book captures the tragedy of this abandonment - and the lost possibilities for millions of South Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians, too many of whom did not survive long after the "liberation".