Unraveling Vietnam: How American Arms and Diplomacy Failed in Southeast Asia

Military Review, Nov-Dec, 2006 by Paul B. Gardner

UNRAVELING VIETNAM: How American Arms and Diplomacy Failed in Southeast Asia, William R. Haycraft, McFarland and Co, Jefferson, NC, 2006, 263 pages, $35.00.

Unraveling Vietnam is a revisionist work that attempts to refute the idea that the war was a result of flawed foreign policy. William R. Haycraft argues that the war was necessary and would have been winnable under better circumstances and with better leadership. His purpose is to provide comprehensive coverage of the period from 1946 to 1975, and to challenge the orthodox position that the Vietnamese Communists were nationalists fighting to unify Vietnam while the United States immorally supported a separatist South Vietnam.

As a basis for refuting the view that the Viet Cong were nationalists, Haycraft presents a plausible version of what the enemy might have been thinking. He uses the Democratic Republic of Vietnam's Resolution 15, which placed the highest priority on achieving unification by revolutionary war in the South, as evidence of the Communist North's control of the Viet Cong. This connection, however, is more implied than proven.

Although Haycraft tries to put both sides' actions into context, he periodically misses the mark. For example, when addressing Pham Van Dong's four points for negotiation, he makes no reference to President Lyndon Johnson's complementary speech at Johns Hopkins University. Haycraft also states that during Tet there were "some PAVN [Peoples Army of Vietnam] attacks around the DMZ [demilitarized zone]," but he does not discuss Khe Sanh. Johnson's speech and Khe Sanh are covered later, but by then we have lost their connections to other events.

Another weakness of the book is its coverage of the subject of diplomacy, which is ironic considering its subtitle. Haycrafl provides only limited discussion of U.S. efforts to get the South Vietnamese Government to change its policies on such issues as land reform. Nor is there much discussion of U.S. national strategy, which Haycraft should have cited to connect diplomacy to the use of military power. The book does, however, underscore U.S. failures to understand the enemy and the type of war the Nation was fighting--failures that kept the United States from developing a viable political and military strategy.

Despite its flaws and the fact that its conclusions lack solid cause-and-effect relationships, Haycraft's book ultimately succeeds in calling into question much of the orthodox positions. Unraveling Vietnam does not broach much new information, but it is well-written and provides a good overview of the war. In short, this is a good work for the undergraduate and general reader, as well as those who want to gain an appreciation of the myriad issues involved in Vietnam.

LTC Paul B. Gardner, USA, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas