And here's the remarkable thing: Out of his determination--or desperation--to stay on message, Owens overlooks fundamental contradictions between these two books. Moyar's hero is William Westmoreland. He is a hero because he rejected the idea of flexible, small, counterinsurgency patrols in favor of "using large conventional forces to search for and engage the Communists." Sorley despises Westmoreland. Indeed, A Better War was all but written to drive home this single idea: that using large conventional forces to search for and engage the Communists was what almost lost us the war. Sorley's heroes are heroes because they understand that a key to victory was to monitor and improve the political quality of the South Vietnamese government from top to bottom, the better to abet "their efforts to carry out--carry through--a social revolution." Moyar's Triumph Forsaken was all but written to excoriate such people, whose insistence on monitoring and improving the political quality of the South Vietnamese government almost lost us the war.
Moyar, Sorley and Vietnam Revisionism
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