Vietnam

Spencer Tucker provides an overview of the causes, course, and effects of the numerous wars in Vietnam, many of them not generally known to Westerners. Concentrating on the period since WWII, he presents the Vietnamese perspective as well as the French and American, and clarifies the missed opportunities and false perceptions that led to American involvement.

Encompassing sociopolitical, economic, diplomatic, and cultural issues, Vietnam not only offers an excellent introduction to Vietnamese history but, perhaps more importantly, allows us to see America's involvement in the Vietnam War within the historical context in ways that are illuminating.

"This fascinating study provides a comprehensive overview of warfare throughout Vietnamese history, from the early efforts of the Vietnamese to establish their own state and free themselves from Chinese domination, down through the Indo-China and Vietnam Wars, the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia and the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese War, to the present. Vietnam provides an overview of the causes, course, and effects of the numerous wars in Vietnamese history, many of them not generally known to Westerners, such as the Black Flag/Tonkin Wars and the Franco-Thai War. Concentrating on the period after the Second World War, it treats matters from the Vietnamese perspective as much as from the French and American, and seeks to clarify the missed opportunities and false perceptions that led to warfare. Encompassing socio-political, economic, diplomatic, and cultural issues, Vietnam provides an excellent introduction to Vietnamese history as well as an in-depth look at the long record of warfare in that country. The Vietnam War was a traumatic event for America and a lesson for Americans on the limits of power. For the Vietnamese, however, it was but the most recent in a series of struggles against foreign domination.

Kirkus Reviews

A concise, analytical survey of Vietnamese military history that concentrates on the French and American 20th-century wars. Former US Army captain Tucker (Military History/Virginia Military Institute) presents a readable, fact-filled examination of the military history of Vietnam. He begins with a brief history of the Southeast Asian nation, starting with its legendary founding in the third century B.C. Tucker clearly shows that the dominant feature of Vietnam's first thousand years was nationalist rebellion against Chinese domination. Tucker offers detailed examinations of the French colonization of Vietnam and the 1946-1954 French Indochina War-two areas that most American Vietnam War histories treat perfunctorily at best. His treatment of the American war takes up more than half the book. Tucker sticks mainly to military matters in his analysis of that controversial, highly political war. He makes a case that, from the beginning, the American military strategy was flawed because it focused on conventional warfare and paid too little attention to counterinsurgency. The "inability" of the American military establishment "to forecast the [guerrilla] military threat" in the late 1950s "was the first great US military mistake in Vietnam," he says. Tucker strongly criticizes commanding general William Westmoreland and "officials in Washington"-especially President Richard Nixon and his national security adviser Henry Kissinger-for drastically underestimating the will of the North Vietnamese. Westmoreland's attrition strategy, Tucker says, was particularly ill suited against "the Communist strategy of protracted warfare." Tucker uses a good deal of statistical information throughout thiswell-documented book.