The Vietnam War: A Military History

This comprehensive, stylishly written account of the American war in Vietnam from historian Wawro (Sons of Freedom) concentrates on military tactics and political calculations that impacted developments on the battlefield. Though Wawro lays blame for the war’s descent into quagmire at the feet of American politicians, whom he asserts intentionally prolonged what they knew was an unwinnable conflict, he also excoriates Gen. William Westmoreland, who commanded U.S. forces in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968, for the “waste, aimlessness and folly” of his “robotic” building of more and more bases from which to launch often fruitless and strategically dubious “search-and-destroy” missions. (The plan—mathematically impossible as well as immoral—was for “American-inflicted casualties” to outpace Viet Cong recruiting, Wawro notes.) Also skewerered are Lyndon Johnson’s hawkish war advisers—among them Robert S. McNamara and Dean Rusk—along with Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger for their traitorous backchannel negotiations to prolong the war. Though Wawro has little good to say about South Vietnam’s authoritarian president Nguyen Van Thieu, he likewise does not sugarcoat the ruthlessness and deceit of North Vietnamese leaders, especially the “audacious” Le Duan, who pushed aside an ailing Ho Chi Minh (“modest, affable, self-effacing”) in 1967. Written in fluid, artful prose (“Galbraith [told] JFK... ‘We shall bleed as the French did’.... Three weeks later, Kennedy himself lay bleeding”), this is well worth checking out. (Oct.)