The Vietnam War: Digging Deeply, If Not Widely

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 M. P. Bradley, Imagining Vietnam and America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam, 1919–1950 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2000) and Vietnam at War (New York, 2009). R. D. Dean, Imperial Manhood: Gender and the Making of Cold War Foreign Policy (Amherst, MA, 2001). S. Jacobs, America's Miracle Man in Vietnam: Ndo Dinh Diem, Religion, Race, and US Intervention in Southeast Asia (Durham, N.C., 2004). 2 H. R. McMaster, Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies that Led to Vietnam (New York, 1997). 3 A new entry on that score is General TranVan Nhut, with Christian L. Arevian, An Loc: The Unfinished War (Lubbock, 2009), by a former General in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam who lives in California and offers as much a full memoir as a study of the 1972 battle cited in the somewhat misleading title. Respectful of the mobilizing capacity of the southern insurgency and the North Vietnamese regime, Tran Van Nhut regrets their victory but avoids the stridency we might expect in such a memoir, just as he avoids arguing that Saigon might have won the war if the US Congress had not pulled the plug on US support. Instead, his major comment on the 1975 endgame is the acid assertion that Henry Kissinger, the Secretary of State, ‘had been insulted enough times by Thieu not to give a damn for Thieu's fate or to put up an effective fight for South Vietnam's survival’ (p. 196). Alas, the editor's preface acknowledges, ‘Nhut's interpretations of the war may not posit anything particularly new’ (pp. x–xi).