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Books in Review
Reviews by Marc Leepson
Rufus Phillips was sent to South Vietnam
in 1954 as a member of the first CIA team there, led by Col.
Edward Lansdale. The young Virginian spent most of the next
decade doing undercover and pacification work in Vietnam.
Phillips played an important behind-the-scenes advisory role
in the high-level power struggle that developed over how
the United States would help South Vietnam defeat the communist
Viet Cong and North Vietnamese.
Phillips was a strong proponent
of what came to be known as the “hearts and minds” approach:
helping build a stable democratic government in the south,
one that the people of South Vietnam would put their lives
on the line to preserve. At the same time, he (like his mentor
Lansdale) spoke out strongly and consistently against sending
in American combat troops.
In Why Vietnam Matters: An Eyewitness
Account of Lessons Not Learned (Naval Institute, 384 pp.,
$38.95), a revealing inside-baseball memoir, Phillips provides
a fascinating look at how the Kennedy and Johnson administrations
never gave the pacification approach more than lip service.
Phillips offers intimate, revealing portraits of the legendary
Lansdale himself, the colorful CIA operative Lucien Conein,
South Vietnamese Premier Ngo Dinh Diem, Ambassador Henry
Cabot Lodge, President John F. Kennedy, Defense Secretary
Robert S. McNamara, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and a slew
of other Kennedy and Johnson higher-ups. Phillips clearly
shows that those best and brightest, especially McNamara,
exhibited “poor judgment, bureaucratic prejudice, and
personal hubris” as they steered Vietnam War policy
in a disastrous course. Phillips adds a short chapter on
lessons learned from the Vietnam War calamity. It should
be mandatory reading in Washington, D.C.
McGeorge Bundy was
the prototypical best-and-brightest Vietnam War policymaker
in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. As JFK and LBJ’s
national security adviser, Bundy was a key player in Vietnam
War policymaking from 1961-66. The “administration’s
pre-eminent intellectual,” as foreign policy scholar
Gordon M. Goldstein calls Bundy in Lessons
in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam (Times Books, 288 pp.,
$25), Bundy was an out-and-out hawk. He “again and
again demonstrated a willingness, if not an eagerness, to
deploy military means” in Vietnam, as Goldstein notes
in this warts-and-all examination and analysis of Bundy’s
role in formulating American policy in the Vietnam War.
Goldstein
worked with Bundy in the year before his death on his memoir
and “retrospective analysis of America’s
path to war.” After Bundy died in 1996, Goldstein completed
a book based on his collaboration. That book has not been
published. Lessons in Disaster is something different. It
is based on the author’s experience with Bundy, but
also contains Goldstein’s own conclusions.
Goldstein
painstakingly recounts Bundy’s role as national
security adviser, sprinkling in Bundy’s “retrospective
views,” along with his own analyses. Among the surprising
revelations: Bundy late in life came to regret his hawkish
ways, although he maintained to the end that Kennedy and
Johnson—not their advisers—were primarily responsible
for the outcome of the war. Vietnam, Bundy said, was “overall,
a war we should not have fought.” The
doves, he said, “were right.”
NONFICTION IN BRIEF
Not one American prisoner of war was rescued by the U.S.
military from North Vietnamese or Viet Cong POW camps during
the Vietnam War. Not for want of trying, though. In Operation
Thunderhead: The True Story of Vietnam’s Final POW
Mission and the Last Navy SEAL Killed In Country (Berkley
Caliber, 304 pp., $25.95), military historian and SEAL specialist
Kevin Dockery writes about the little-known last Vietnam
War POW rescue mission. The ill-fated attempt took place
in June 1972 and resulted in the death of U.S. Navy Lieutenant
Melvin Spence Dry, one of the special operations officers
who undertook the dangerous mission.
Dockery writes about
the mission, but only in the last four chapters of this book.
The first 26 chapters are devoted mainly to the amazing story
of U.S. Air Force Capt. John Dramesi, who was shot down April
2, 1967, and taken prisoner by the North Vietnamese. Dramesi
escaped twice, once from the Hanoi Hilton, only to be recaptured
and tortured mercilessly. He was a main player in the planning
of the ill-fated Operation Thunderhead.
Shelby Stanton, the
former Vietnam War Green Beret, has written a slew of military
history books, including the classic Vietnam Order of Battle
and, in 1990, Special Forces at War:
An Illustrated History, Southeast Asia, 1957-1975, a coffee table book that contains
scores of images and illuminating text. This fact-filled
and valuable reference book has just been reprinted by Zenith
Press (382 pp., $40).
Kenneth N. Jordan, Sr.’s Marines
Under Fire: Alpha 1/1 in Vietnam: From
Con Thien to Hue and Khe Sanh (Publish America, 514 pp.,
$28.50) is an in-depth look at the 1st Marine Division’s
Company A, 1st Battalion, 1st Marines from January 1967 to
the Siege of Khe Sanh in the spring of 1968.
Jordan’s
book “uses
the words of the men who were there experiencing those tragic
events that helped shape (or scar) their lives forever,” said
VVA member Terry Strassburg, who served with Alpha 1/1 from
June 1967 to August 1968.
The latest well-illustrated and
excellent Vietnam War military hardware paperbacks from Osprey
Publishing are both written by Gordon L. Rottman, who did
a 1969-70 tour with the 5th Special
Forces Group: The U.S. Army in the Vietnam War, 1965-73 (96 pp., $18.95) and U.S.
Helicopter Pilot In Vietnam (64 pp., $18.95). VVA member
Gary D. Jestes and Jay A. Graybeal’s Tours
of Duty: Carroll County and the Vietnam War (Historical Society of
Carroll County, 276 pp., $29, paper) is a lovingly produced
tribute to the Vietnam veterans, both living and dead, from
that Maryland county near Baltimore. To order, write: Historical
Society of Carroll County, 210 E. Main St., Westminster,
MD 21157.
Christopher J. Fettweis, who teaches security studies
at Tulane, often refers to the Vietnam War in Losing
Hurts: The Four States of Moving Beyond Iraq (Norton, 270 pp., $25.95),
a sober look at what he believes will happen in this country
after the end of the war in Iraq. Fettweis says that there
are ways to avoid an “Iraq Syndrome,” and he
sets them out in this interesting mixture of psychological
and historical analysis.
Veteran journalist Mike Sager’s
Wounded Warriors: Those For Whom the
War Never Ends (Da Capo,
260 pp., $16.95, paper) is a compilation of his articles
that includes “Thailand’s
Home for Wayward Vets,” which first appeared in Rolling
Stone in 1983.
Billy Barnz’s Voices From Vietnam:
The Stories of New Zealanders Who Served Their Country
in Vietnam (Willson Scott, 339 pp., $49.99) tells the stories of 34
New Zealanders before, during, and following their tours
of duty in the Vietnam War. For ordering info, go to www.willsonscott.biz Barnz, aka William Barnes, served with the RNZAF 161 Battery
in Vietnam in 1970-71. Also from Willson Scott by Barnz:
The Goat Hunter: Ho Chi Minh: A Kiwi
Ruins His War (239 pp.,
$30), an irreverent war and postwar memoir.
If you’re
interested in the 21st century socialist interpretation of
the American war in Vietnam, go no further than Joe Allen’s
Vietnam: The (Last) War the U.S. Lost (Haymarket Books, 253
pp., $14, paper). One example: In his analysis of the aftermath
of Tet ’68, Allen says that
it was “only the opening shot of a year in which the
U.S. ruling class faced its most severe challenges in a generation.”
If
you’d like to know how a middle-class young woman
from Connecticut wound up making explosives to protest the
Vietnam War as a member of the Weather Underground (and nearly
blew herself up on March 6, 1970, when her townhouse in Greenwich
Village exploded), Cathy Wilkerson offers up Flying Close
to the Sun (Seven Stories, 422 pp., $26.95). In it, Wilkerson
explains what led her to the violent fringe of the antiwar
movement and how her ideas about using violence to protest
war changed after her brush with death and going underground.
MEMOIRS,
ETC., IN BRIEF
Stephen R. Gray, who flew more than 250 A-4 Skyhawk combat
missions in 1967 with the Navy’s Attack Squadron 212
in Vietnam, offers his account of that experience in Rampant
Raider: An A-4 Skyhawk Pilot in Vietnam (Naval Institute,
284 pp., $32.50).
Jack Lyndon Thomas, who served as an officer
and Mobile Advisory Team adviser to the RUFF/PUFFS in 1969-70
in Vietnam, tells his war and postwar stories, complete with
his own poetry and color photos from back in the day, in
Coyote Jack: Drawing Meaning from Life
and Vietnam: A Memoir (Lyndonjacks, 313 pp., $28.95).
VVA Member Joe Teel, Jr.’s
Welcome Home, Joe (Outskirts Press, 224 pp., $19.95, paper)
recounts his tours of duty in Vietnam with the 101st Airborne’s
First Brigade in 1967-68 and the 82nd Airborne in 1968-69,
along with his rocky homecoming, which was ameliorated after
he found peace through religion.
James and Kathleen Lada’s
The Up Side of Being Down (lulu.com, 177 pp., $18, paper)
focuses on James Lada’s economic difficulties in recent
times. He served a 1967-68 Vietnam War tour with the First
Marine Air Wing in Danang as an aviation hydraulic mechanic.
J.
Richard Watkins’s Vietnam: No
Regrets: One Soldier’s
Tour of Duty (Bay State Publishing, 244 pp., $17.95, paper)
looks at the author’s 1969-70 tour of duty with the
25th Infantry Division’s A Co., 1/27th, the “Wolfhounds.” The
author’s website is www.vietnamnoregrets.com
Retired
Army Maj. Bud Yost’s Hard Core (RoseDog Books, 114
pp., $53, paper) deals with his second of three Vietnam War
tours with C Co., 2/502nd of the 101st Airborne’s 1st
Brigade in 1967, including an incident with a stalking Bengal
tiger near Song Mau.
Jerry S. Horton’s The Shake ’n’ Bake
Sergeant: True Story of Infantry Sergeants in Vietnam (Trafford,
321 pp., $20, paper) is a memoir of his 1968-69 Vietnam tour
as a newly minted Sgt. E-5 with A Co., 1st Battalion, 8th
Infantry of the Army’s 4th Infantry Division, at the
end of which he was severely wounded. His website is www.shakenbakesergeant.com
Steve Wilken’s Why Didn’t You Have to Go
to Vietnam Daddy? (Outskirts Press, 142 pp., $11.95, paper)
is a memoir of his 1969-71 Army career, including 13 months
at Central Finance in Long Binh.
In Hai Dang Nguyen’s
Get Up One More Time (H&T
Publishers, 275 pp., $18.95, paper) the author includes a
history of the Vietnam wars, along with his personal story,
which includes fleeing Northern Vietnam when the communists
took over in 1954 and fleeing Saigon in April of 1975. Along
the way, Hai Nguyen rose to the post of Assistant Minister
of State in the Prime Minister’s Office of South Vietnam.
Retired
Marine LTC William C. Howey served three tours in Vietnam
in 1964-69 with counterintelligence units. Later he taught
high school history for twelve years. Howey tells all in
Hard Knocks and Straight Talk: From
the Jungles of Vietnam to the American Classroom (Keller Publishing, 339 pp., $29.95).
John
Jamison’s Answer to Hell (Xlibris, 146 pp., $31.72)
is the sad story of Paul Sgroi, a Vietnam veteran suffering
from severe postwar emotional problems who killed himself
in 1988 at a campground outside Santa Barbara, California.
Donald
J. Farinacci’s Last Full Measure
of Devotion: A Tribute to America’s Heroes of the Vietnam
War (Author
House, 122 pp., $11.99, paper) contains profiles of a group
of Vietnam veterans who acted heroically in the war. The
list includes Rocky Versace, Gen. Hal Moore, Roy Benaidez,
Bob Kerrey, and Louis Rocco.
Reclaiming God’s Peace
Within (Wine Press Group, 68 pp., $31.99) is a collection
of photographs by Mitzie Deike, who served as an Army nurse
in the Vietnam War, and Susie Johnson, a professional counselor.
The photos of serene outdoor scenes reflect Deike’s
recovery from post-traumatic stress disorder
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