Unheralded Victory: The Defeat of the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army, 1961-1973

Infantry Magazine, Jan-April, 2000 by Joe P. Dunn

Unheralded Victory: The Defeat of the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army, 1961-1973. By Mark W. Woodruff. Vandamere Press, 1999. 338 Pages. $24.95.

Unheralded Victory complements a recent spate of books, the best of which are Michael Lind's Vietnam: The Necessary War and Lewis Sorley's A Better War, which attack the myth that the U.S. military was defeated by the communist forces in Vietnam. The respective authors stress that U.S. forces defeated the enemy in the field; nevertheless, victory was not achieved. The thesis is unquestionably correct, but the real issue that separates scholarly analysis from polemic is the way each author explains the reason for failure.

Mark Woodruff served with the 3d Marine Regiment in Vietnam, and later moved to Australia where he holds a reserve commission as a lieutenant commander and practices as a psychologist with the Royal Australian Navy and the Vietnam Veterans Counseling Service in Perth, Western Australia. Drawing exclusively on printed sources, especially first-person memoir accounts, he briefly traces the U.S. campaign against the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army, which he discusses separately. He also incorporates the role of the Australians into the account.

The crisp, tight, interesting narrative serves as a good survey of the military campaigns of the war for the novice reader. And Woodruff makes a spirited case for his thesis. He concludes that for Vietnam veterans "full credit must be given them for their magnificent performance.... In their victory, which to this day remains unheralded, they annihilated forever the Viet Cong and soundly defeated the North Vietnamese Army."

The final third of the book is devoted to what the author considers other myths of the war and the continuing dich van campaign of misinformation. Although he makes some interesting and valid points, his own finger-pointing and selective use of evidence and quotations put the book--unlike Lind's and Sorley's--more in the polemical than the scholarly camp.

Although I found the book useful and quite engaging, the anecdotal development of the thesis is simplistic, and the author is also guilty of his own myth perpetuation. His argument contains elements of truth, but to declare military victory over the communist forces is superficial, naive, and--to invoke the famous rejoinder made to Harry Summers when he first ventured this interpretation to a North Vietnamese general--"it is also irrelevant." The novice reader will find some valuable statistical and explanatory detail, but one should treat the larger purpose of the book with the same skepticism that Woodruff demands of competing interpretations of the war.