Vietnam War Collection: books plus

[Steve Blair]

I'd say any reasonable assessment of the GVN's progress under Diem was that it was losing ground, not gaining it. The Strategic Hamlets Diem set up that were composed of Catholic refugees from the North were indeed fairly successful...but the others were not. Also, Diem continued the tradition of bungling relations with the hill tribes (Montagnards)...a group that could have really helped the GVN secure many border areas.

Diem's poor governance did the GVN few favors. What the VCI saw when he was assassinated was not the demise of a feared and effective opponent, but rather a chance to take advantage of the chaos that would certainly (and did) follow it.

And stanley, you might want to take a moment to introduce yourself.

[stanleywinthrop]

I'd say any reasonable assessment of the GVN's progress under Diem was that it was losing ground, not gaining it. The Strategic Hamlets Diem set up that were composed of Catholic refugees from the North were indeed fairly successful...but the others were not. Also, Diem continued the tradition of bungling relations with the hill tribes (Montagnards)...a group that could have really helped the GVN secure many border areas.

Diem's poor governance did the GVN few favors. What the VCI saw when he was assassinated was not the demise of a feared and effective opponent, but rather a chance to take advantage of the chaos that would certainly (and did) follow it.

And stanley, you might want to take a moment to introduce yourself.

One might make the comparison between "Strategic Hamlets" and Killcullen's "oilspot" concept. The idea, albiet imperfectly implemented in Vietnam (especially in the delta region), is a sound prinicple in COIN. One can obviously take issue with Moyar's assesment of the war's status just prior too the coup, but Moyar's assesment that whatever the status prior, the war took a decided turn for the worse after the coup and GVN became even more incapable of dealing with the insurgency, which led to the direct intervention of U.S. forces.

I certainly agree that if Diem had engaged the Montagnards it could have helped the war effort, but expecting him to do so would have required him to cross a cultural and racial divide, an indealistic naiveness that we Americans are famous for.

What is not helpful is gross mischaractizatons of Moyar like tequila above.

[John Grenier]

Has taken a lot of heat from the community of professional historians. It is a fine revision in that no one can rightly say that the US won the VN War (58K KIA, God only knows how many WIA, 1M+ VN dead, our economy thrown in the toilet, and our ability to contain communism--the stated aim of the war) so Moyar decided to write that we should have won the war. Well, I should have done a lot of things in life, but I didn't. Very few historians are taking this book seriously and have identified Moyar as a player in the Culture Wars. I recommend Andy Wiest's excellent book if you wanted to understanding the thinking of historians about the VN War. BTW, how do you write a book on how we should have won the VN War without reading a single Vietnamese source? We should have won the war, perhaps. But didn't the Vietnamese (NVA, ARVN, NLF, VC, etc) also get a vote?

[Sigaba]

Very few historians are taking this book seriously and have identified Moyar as a player in the Culture Wars.

FWIW, on the other side of the coin, John Prados's Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 1945-1975 (2009) has drawn criticism for its presentism and political biases.

As the saying goes, the comprehensive, definitive history of the Vietnam War remains to be written.

[Ken White]

...

... What the VCI saw when he was assassinated was not the demise of a feared and effective opponent, but rather a chance to take advantage of the chaos that would certainly (and did) follow it.
. . .

by folks with more idealism and arrogance than good sense who approved that coup and the almost guaranteed assassination that followed.

Diem was not particularly popular with the hoi polloi (and particularly the Buddhists) -- but he was theirs and the US hand in the assassination was well known. It did not do us any favors and the South Viet Namese would not trust us after that. Probably smart. I talked to a number of SVN Officers who expressed some anger over elements of the Coup...

Moyars and Sorley wrote essentially decent if slightly biased (ALL historians have bias) history IMO. Pearlstein uses them in an attempt to produce a preemptive political strike. Not very well but I guess he deserves credit for trying...