A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam. - Review - book review

Parameters, Autumn, 2000

A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam. By Lewis Sorley. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999. 507 pages. $28.00. Reviewed by Colonel Stuart A. Herrington, USA Ret., author of Stalking the Vietcong: Inside Operation Phoenix, and Traitors Among Us: Inside the Spy Catcher's World.

Twenty-five years after the tragic loss of the Vietnam War, distinguished historian and former soldier Lewis Sorley has added his voice to the growing chorus of revisionist historians who are telling it like it really was. In A Better War, Sorley hammers home a thesis not unfamiliar to many of us who served in Vietnam during the post-Tet years: that America's first lost war need not have ended in the ignominious departure of our Ambassador from the roof of his Embassy.

The bulk of Sorley's contribution is a riveting, well-sourced, and highly readable account of General Creighton Abrams' tenure as Commander, US Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (COMUSMACV). This is the drama of how General Abrams, Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker, John Paul Vann, and William Colby pursued a whole new, "catch-up ball" approach to the war in the wake of General William Westmoreland's discredited strategy of attrition, while in Washington, Pentacrats and congressmen alike were intent on extracting America from Vietnam rather than embracing a strategy or solution that would justify American and South Vietnamese sacrifices.

Sorley's work is in many ways a companion volume to the late William Colby's Lost Victory. Sorley supports Colby's contention that by 1969 the United States had finally "broken the code" to cope with Vietcong penetration of Vietnam's villages and hamlets. He also reminds us that Abrams' and Bunker's emphasis on pacification and its campaign to root out the Vietcong infrastructure was successful (so much so that Hanoi twice resorted to conventional warfare waged by its regular divisions in its relentless campaign to topple the South Vietnamese government).

Citing both South Vietnamese and Vietnamese communist sources, Sorley paints a picture quite familiar to those of us who served as advisors to the Vietnamese in the later years of the war. Instead of districts, villages, and hamlets--where, until 1969, bridges were out, roads were mined nightly, and the threat of ambush was ever-present--many of us served in bustling, prosperous rural areas where one could ride alone in a jeep on almost all roads (as I did in 1971-72 in Hau Nghia province). This was a countryside where farmers could grow multiple crops of miracle rice, often relieved of the burdensome taxation of the revolution. Vietcong shadow government cadre, deprived of support from Cambodian sanctuaries raided in 1970, rallied to the government in record numbers, while those who refused to give up were stalked by the territorial forces and the Phoenix program, often reduced to hiding in remote bunkers and swamps. This was the "better war," the way it should have been fought from the beginning.

Sorley's depiction of how General Abrams dedicated himself to this task is compelling. This meticulously researched work benefits greatly from his personal energy in transcribing thousands of hours of audio tapes made during General Abrams' four-year tour as COMUSMACV from 1968 to 1972, and working the system to declassify them.

Extensive verbatim quotes of the crusty general's remarks to his staff during regular intelligence update briefings lend authenticity to the account. They give the reader the sense of being present in the MACV Command Center as Abrams vents his frustrations while waging a two-front war--against the communists in Vietnam and against the coalition of defeatist Pentacrats and lawmakers in Washington (arguably the more dangerous of the two foes).

But the real story in A Better War is how Abrams waged a classic "do more with less" struggle. Sorley reminds us that Abrams assumed command in 1968 when 500,000 American military were in Vietnam, yet the Vietnamese countryside remained dangerous--a testament to the bankruptcy of the strategy of attrition. Four years later, when Abrams departed MACV to become Army Chief of Staff, only 50,000 Americans remained in country, but well over 90 percent of the countryside was secure. Pacification had worked, and although South Vietnam's imperfect democracy and military forces had vulnerabilities, Hanoi's go-for-broke 1972 Easter Offensive had failed, North Vietnam's army was in disarray, and it was our war to lose from that point forward.

Sorley's narration of opportunity lost cannot help but evoke sadness and frustration among readers who served in Vietnam or anyone who has wondered over the years how the superpower that could send men to the moon failed to prevail over an adversary that Lyndon Johnson called a "two-bit, penny-ante country." That we actually came closer to victory than most thought is Sorley's message, delivered with a powerful broadside aimed at the anti-war movement's love affair with their romanticized image of the Vietnamese communists, and punctuated by a well-aimed volley directed at the anti-war movement's allies in the US Congress.