An Angry Book for an Angry Time

Gregory Daddis reviews Geoffrey Wawro’s “The Vietnam War: A Military History.”

By Gregory A. DaddisDecember 23, 2024

• History

AMERICANS TODAY are living in an angry moment. The polarization—political, cultural, social—is as palpable as it is profound. And while our angry moment might be unusual in its intensity, it hardly invalidates an academic truism: all history is written in the context of its own time.

Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that a new history of the American war in Vietnam mirrors, if not elevates, the social and political fury of the late 1960s and early 1970s. What better way to capture the indignation of a failed US war than by being angry oneself? Surely, many American veterans who wrote their memoirs in the aftermath of Saigon’s fall in April 1975 felt as much.

And so too, apparently, does Geoffrey Wawro, a historian at the University of North Texas who specializes in European wars. Wawro’s new book is his first foray into one of Southeast Asia’s most consequential Cold War conflicts, and his outrage is on full display from start to finish. The Vietnam War: A Military History is, in short, an angry book for an angry time.

For sure, some of that anger is justified, most certainly when critiquing an interventionist US foreign policy that underwrote much of the Cold War era. But seeing so much red colors Wawro’s vision of the past. From the opening gate, Wawro mounts his chariot of ire, and then never lets up the reins.

The denunciations drive relentlessly from one well-worn trope to the next: Lyndon B. Johnson embarking upon a “war of choice” for fear of appearing weak as he recklessly led the nation into an Asian quagmire; General William C. Westmoreland peddling “rosy nonsense” in an ill-advised “war of futility” that did little more than waste American lives and ravage the South Vietnamese countryside; Richard Nixon putting political interests above, well, everything else.

Offering a conventional, Americentric plotline, Wawro delivers nothing new about the multifaceted experience in Vietnam. He most certainly doesn’t offer any fresh revelations about the Vietnamese themselves. In fact, the author begins his story with the American commitment to South Vietnam, sidestepping a longer history of the Vietnamese civil war that was brewing long before American leaders saw Southeast Asia as fertile ground upon which to contain a supposedly global communist threat. In a line sure to make Vietnamese scholars wince, Wawro boldly claims that “South Vietnam had no history.”

Yet the civil war between and among the Vietnamese always mattered most, even if Cold War Americans missed that crucial point. Wawro tragically follows suit. He overlooks key road-to-war resolutions of the Vietnamese Workers’ Party in Hanoi, instead placing all the blame for escalating violence on the United States. The Republic of Vietnam is portrayed in comparably superficial fashion. In depicting the Saigon regime as a corrupt “artificial state” that lacked popular support, Wawro never mentions any South Vietnamese political party or makes reference to any of the recent, robust scholarship on South Vietnam. 

In this search-for-villains approach to history, it is always the Americans who matter most. Westmoreland, perhaps unsurprisingly, emerges as the damnable bête noire. The general has been an especially favorite scapegoat for a generation of military historians. Yet the hatchet job here is uncompromising. An “ambitious” and “ingratiating” Westmoreland trafficked “in fibs,” was “itching for war” and the “big promotion” that came with it, and, when the war turned sour, “tried to suppress or ignore the failures.” No sympathy is afforded this “island of gung-ho denial.”

Over and over again, Wawro deplores the military’s “search and destroy strategy”—Westmoreland actually never used that term to describe his strategic approach—without ever telling his readers that the general developed a far more comprehensive one that rested on nation-building, training the South Vietnamese armed forces, and attempting to foster political and social ties between Saigon and the rural Southern Vietnamese population. The sniping becomes tedious, a repetitive staccato of ad hominem attacks, page after page after dark, acerbic page.

In accusing the United States Armed Forces of fighting with no true strategy in Vietnam, Wawro dismisses the numerous campaign plans and official command histories, easily accessible in the archives, that detail those strategic concepts, however flawed they might have been. The fulminations evoke a disgruntled Vietnam-era veteran castigating meddling civilian overseers and double-dealing generals for their “graduated pressure” approach that tied soldiers’ hands behind their backs.

Indeed, shopworn counterfactuals echo across this weighty tome. If only LBJ and his advisers hadn’t engaged in “groupthink,” treating the war like a “political science seminar,” there would have been clearer objectives for which to fight. If only “wishy-washy” policymakers had unleashed the full fury of American power, victory could have been achieved in far less time at far less cost. If only Johnson had replicated Nixon’s 1972 “act of boldness” by bombing North Vietnam earlier, and with fewer restrictions, Hanoi’s will could have been broken.

All this discontent works against what presumably is the author’s main contention about the war: that it should have been fought more decisively, if at all. By focusing so much attention on the mendacity of supposedly dullard generals, Wawro dismisses the reality that a more thorough, more wide-ranging American strategy—not one simply beholden to search and destroy tactics—had also failed. Vietnam exposed the limits of American power abroad. But in obsessing over body counts and kill ratios, Wawro fails to engage fully with this far more useful, relevant notion.

Even when Wawro focuses his attention on the battlefield—the 1965 Battle of Ia Drang, for instance, or the 1968 siege of Khe Sanh—nothing original emerges. He describes operations in familiar detail, emphasizes and then excoriates questionable results, and finally admonishes senior military commanders for their stupidity. The process is rinsed and repeated, end to end. In this telling, the United States Army Officer Corps is little more than a cesspool of willful ignorance, gross incompetence, and outright lying.

Not that American civilian and military leaders were successful. They surely were not. They went to war because they wildly overestimated the dangers posed by Vietnam, wrongly believing the communist threat there would undermine US national security around the globe. They grossly underestimated the resolve and resourcefulness of their Vietnamese communist counterparts. They never unlocked the puzzle of combining constructive nation-building efforts with destructive military operations. And they demolished as much as they tried to build.

But their failure does not prove their gross ineptitude, as Wawro so fiercely wants us to believe. The leaders in Hanoi took a multilayered approach to the war, relying on both the conventional and the unconventional, on both the political and the military, to gain control of South Vietnam. They had learned well their hard-fought lessons during the long and devastating war against French imperialists. Wawro, however, simply won’t concede that the US military command understood this reality and did its best to build a viable strategy specifically to meet such a complex threat.

Pacification efforts thus get only a faint whiff of attention and, predictably, are used to further bash the military brass. Wawro ignores the multitudinous archival evidence showing how American units, following command guidance, conducted scores of civic actions and nonmilitary programs on a weekly and monthly basis, all in the hope of linking military operations to some sense of political and social progress. As just one example, we never hear of Westmoreland’s direction to one infantry division commander, newly arrived to Vietnam, that an “effective rural construction program” was “essential” to the United States mission there.

To be sure, such programs were ineffective for a host of reasons. Nation-building in a time of war is an exceptionally burdensome task. But for Wawro to acknowledge the effort beyond a “sink of computerized nonsense and obfuscation” would require him to admit that American commanders understood, and stated frequently, how the war turned on political matters as much as military ones.

Within this political struggle, the South Vietnamese also bear the brunt of Wawro’s wrath. The people of the Republic of Vietnam could not “kindle a spirit of resistance” and “shrank from the task” ahead of them, their crooked leaders “soft and doubting.” By contrast, the emaciated yet stalwart “hard-core” North Vietnamese soldiers were committed to the cause of Hanoi’s war. Indeed, communist troops lumbering into battle along the Ho Chi Minh Trail are the few, if only, actors for whom Wawro displays anything like empathy or compassion.

In his acknowledgments, Wawro references not one historian of Vietnam’s wars. The lack of consultation with more dispassionate and measured scholars shows. In short, there are no new arguments here, no novel interpretations, no thoughtful reanalyses or new research methods. This is less a book than 600-page diatribe. Wawro reduces an incredibly complex political-military contest to the barest simplicity: Vietnam was a bad war run by bad American leaders.

Of the historian’s craft, French historian Marc Bloch, a resistance leader killed by the Gestapo in 1944, argued that “‘understanding’ is the beacon light.” In Geoffrey Wawro’s case, scorn is the burning guide. Unfortunately, it’s a fitting illustration of the times in which so many angry Americans now are living and how that anger can make us blind.