A little more than a month ago, an article in the Wall Street Journal reported that two books representing two different views of the Vietnam debacle are, essentially, battling for the hearts and minds of those whose job it now is to chart the next step in Afghanistan (or, if you will, AfPak). The books were "A Better War," by Lewis Sorley, which was published in 1999, and "Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam," by Gordon M. Goldstein, published in 2008.
Sorley says (with some justification) that few now remember with any specificity anything that happened in Vietnam after the Tet Offensive in 1968. After that, the American public (or, at least, most of the American public that is still alive today) believed that the war was lost and that the U.S should get out, which, eventually, it did. Sorley's book reminds us that in 1968, Creighton Abrams took over from William Westmoreland. Abrams switched from "search and destroy" to "clear and hold" and took a number of other steps that, Sorley asserts, won the war. After U.S. forces pulled out, Congress refused to provide the South Vietnamese government with the support that had been promised, with the result that the Communists (the North Vietnamese with some support from the Viet Cong), took over the South. Sorley provides an excellent summary of his book in a Times op-ed piece dated October 17, 2009. As someone who in the late 1960s was of draft age and who in 1974 and 1975 was an apartment mate of a student whose father was a South Vietnamese government official, I do not recall the story line being quite as clean as Sorley makes it. But he does provide an intelligent and forceful exposition of his side of the story.
Goldstein's book is more like "Seven Habits of Highly Successful People," or whatever those books are called. In some ways, it supports Sorley's thesis, because it purports to draw lessons from the Vietnam disaster, but it stops in 1965, just as the U.S. was committing its first combat forces. The lessons of "Lessons" are all contained in its table of contents, which reads, in relevant part, as follows: (1) Counselors Advise but Presidents Decide; (2) Never Trust the Bureaucracy to Get It Right; (3) Politics Is the Enemy of Strategy; (4) Conviction Without Rigor Is a Strategy for Disaster; (5) Never Deploy Military means in Pursuit of Indeterminate Ends; and (6) Intervention Is a Presidential Choice, Not an Inevitability.
There, now that you have read the table of contents, you can skip that book and go on to a book that everybody, be he (or she) a Sorleyite or a Goldsteiner, should read before sending anybody anywhere to kill or be killed. That book is "The Good Soldiers," by David Finkel, published this year. It chronicles an infantry battalion's 15 months in Iraq as part the famous, and famously successful, "surge." Except that from close up, the surge does not look as successful as it does from half a world away. An example of information in this book that you will not get in many others: In Iraq, savvy passengers did not ride in Humvees with their feet side by side; they rode with one foot in front of the other. That way, when metal from an IED blasted through the side of the Humvee, there was at least a chance that the passenger would lose only one foot. There are plenty of lost feet, lost arms, lost legs, and lost lives described in the book. The men who populate it more justify the title.
