ARVN Nights, IA Days
That’s meant to be a hopeful note, that title, as American forces pull back from Iraqi cities under a neogotiated political deal that will test the new Iraqi Army. Maggie’s Farm glances back for an understanding of current events, looking at the much-maligned and ultimately abandoned Army of the Republic of Vietnam, as an example of what should not be allowed to happen in Iraq:
After Tet, a lot more South Vietnamese came off the fence and decided that they really didn’t want the North to come down and take them over, enlistments in the Army went way up, training got a lot better, and the general quality of the South’s military began to improve noticeably in ‘69-’71 …
By ‘72, when we were gone, the number of subpar units in the ARVN had become a minority, and many units were excellent, their 1st Division for one. And when the Easter Invasion hit from the North, 200,000 NVA regulars in several divisions, with 400 tanks, much better artillery than we’d left for the ARVN, and AA missiles and guns to shoot down the South’s planes, they wound up in a series of large pitched battles that were as intense but a lot longer lasting than any we ever fought. The siege of An Loc was a kind of ARVN Alamo, went on for weeks and weeks, destroyed the city completely, but the cut off ARVN fought like tigers and refused to surrender. They stopped NVA tanks by jumping on them under fire to stuff grenades in the view slits. US Advisors were there to witness it all, and there are some good books about it.
But of course by then the media (both US and international) didn’t have that much interest in what went on … by the final invasion of ‘75, with NVA forces twice as big as in ‘72, superbly equipped and supplied from massive bases in Cambodia, the ARVN were on limited fuel and ammo, half their tanks were down for repairs that depended on spare parts they couldn’t get any more, and they started to fold under the blitzkrieg. Their President made a poor decision to start an unplanned retreat, and things when to hell in just a few days, leading to the panic scenes of soldiers running after planes and hanging onto chopper rails in Da Nang. (What you didn’t hear about were the radio calls from VN Marine units in the hills, who never surrendered and fought to the death.)
Whole thing, including an RFK vs Marx quote throwdown for Obama to mull. Plus links and some great comments from vets who served with ARVN units. Speaking of Obama, how committed is he? Who knows, but there’s been some improvement.
Wehner at Commentary looks at yesterday’s milestone, Powerline adds some thoughts, and RealClearWorld begs to differ.
Ralph Peters at NYPost is calling it a victory. Tigerhawk on why victory, declared, is important.
Strategy Page with some tactical advice: Girls with Guns Get It.
Woodward in Afghanistan with Obama’s plan: Economic, Not Military. I dunno, how about military, plus economic. (And heads up, Obama, they aren’t big government fans. I bet the local hacks will enjoy the pork if you call it something like “special beef,” though.)
Patrick Devenny at Foreign Policy digs deep into history, 1845, for a British officer’s observations on training up local defense force in Afghanistan. via Small Wars Journal, which has a daily war zone news roundup and also is offering Tony Corn, From War Manager to Soldier Diplomats and the Marine Corps looking at its future in a time of irregular warfare, .
Sounds like a good place to start building another section for the bookshop, on one small but critical corner of the Vietnam-Iraq nexus:
The Battle of An Loc, James H. Willbanks. Excerpt and a review:
“The [North Vietnamese] now held most of Binh Long province from Chon Thanh north to the Cambodian border with the exception of the town of An Loc. It was clear that An Loc would be the scene of the next major North Vietnamese effort. A lot was at stake. Not only were the lives of the South Vietnamese soldiers and their American advisers on the line, but so too was the prestige of the South Vietnamese government. The loss of a province so close to Saigon would be a disastrous loss of face for President Thieu and his administration. From the American perspective, the battle would be the supreme test of Vietnamization and President Nixon’s policies in Vietnam. More than that, however, was the fact that very little stood between the North Vietnamese and Saigon except the forces at An Loc.”
The Battle of An Loc is a fine book with rich, vibrant descriptions of combat, weapons, and command decisions. Willbanks writes from an insider’s perspective, but demonstrates the discipline of a historian who knows what questions to ask.
And this reader review:
As one who was “there”, I recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand what was at stake in the Spring Offensive in III Corps and how close a fight that it really was. Even most of us who were in it had no real idea of what was going on. After 33 years, it’s time that someone provided a complete, unvarnished accounting of what happened. I have access to some of the same documents as the author and was involved in one the events that he describes. He has remained faithfull to the truth, even though it may have had to be pieced together from fragmentary and disparate accounts. Thankfully the author has stuck to verifiable events and resisted the temptation to highlight the horror of battle. However, even his “toned down” accounts are troubling to read. Many participants are named, and like me, some may find it disconcerting to see your experience in print open to family, friends and others.
Abandoning Vietnam: How America Left and South Vietnam Lost Its War, James H. Willbanks
Vietnam’s Forgotten Army: Heroism and Betrayal in the ARVN Andrew Wiest
This sympathetic biography of Pham Van Dinh and Tran Ngoc Hue, mid-level officers in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), provides a unique perspective among American war histories. Built by American advisers in 1955 to repel a conventional invasion, the ARVN was a Western-style force that actually spent most of its 25-year life battling a lightly armed insurgency. Ironically, its destruction came at the hands of a traditional invading army from North Vietnam, but by this time U.S. forces (which it had relied on for heavy artillery and airpower) were gone. Vietnam’s army suffered a chronic lack of imaginative leadership at the top, yet historian Wiest (Haig) makes a good case that it often fought well, especially at the battalion and regimental level, when led by good officers such as Dinh and Hue. Wiest describes their energetic leadership as the war intensified during the 1960s, but it is not a story that ends happily. Hue spent 13 years in a North Vietnamese prison after his capture in 1970. Dinh surrendered his regiment in 1972, finishing his career in the NVA. Readers who persist through dense nuts-and-bolts battle descriptions will gain new respect for the mishandled South Vietnamese army
A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam Lewis Sorley
There was a moment when the United States had the Vietnam War wrapped up, writes military historian Lewis Sorley (biographer of two Vietnam-era U.S. Army generals, Creighton Abrams and Harold Johnson). “The fighting wasn’t over, but the war was won,” he says in this convention-shaking book. “This achievement can probably best be dated in late 1970.” South Vietnam was ready to carry on the battle without American ground troops and only logistical and financial support. Sorley says that replacing General Westmoreland with Abrams in 1968 was the key. “The tactics changed within fifteen minutes of Abrams’s taking command,” remarked one officer. Abrams switched the war aims from destruction to control; he was less interested in counting enemy body bags than in securing South Vietnam’s villages.
A Better War is unique among histories of the Vietnam War in that it focuses on the second half of the conflict, roughly from Abrams’s arrival to the fall of Saigon in 1975. Other volumes, such as Stanley Karnow’s Vietnam and Neil Sheehan’s A Bright Shining Lie, tend to give short shrift to this period. Sorley shows how the often-overlooked Abrams strategy nearly succeeded–indeed, Sorley says it did succeed, at least until political leadership in the United States let victory slip away.
(One degree of separation, appropos of nothing: I was in the sixth grade with Abrams’ youngest kid in Bangkok. Good kid, bit of an air of a general himself, no shortage of confidence. I remember him showing some of us kids a picture of his old man as a tank commander in a book at Patton’s 3rd Army, which I think was more interesting to us than his Vietnam command. I believe he had an older brother serving in Vietnam, as well, and though there were a lot of kids in school whose dads were active duty with Vietnam combat experience, we rarely talked about that war.)
ARVN: Life And Death in the South Vietnamese Army Robert K. Bingham
Scorned by allies and enemies alike, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) was one of the most maligned fighting forces in modern history. Cobbled together by U.S. advisers from the remnants of the French-inspired Vietnamese National Army, it was effectively pushed aside by the Americans in 1965. When toward the end of the war the army was compelled to reassert itself, it was too little, too late for all concerned.
In this first in-depth history of the ARVN from 1955 to 1975, Robert Brigham takes readers into the barracks and training centers of the ARVN to plumb the hearts and souls of these forgotten soldiers. Through his masterly command of Vietnamese-language sources-diaries, memoirs, letters, oral interviews, and more-he explores the lives of ordinary men, focusing on troop morale and motivation within the context of traditional Vietnamese society and a regime that made impossible demands upon its soldiers.
Offering keen insights into ARVN veterans’ lives as both soldiers and devout kinsmen, Brigham reveals what they thought about their American allies, their Communist enemies, and their own government. He describes the conscription policy that forced these men into the army for indefinite periods with a shameful lack of training and battlefield preparation and examines how soldiers felt about barracks life in provinces far from their homes. He also explores the cultural causes of the ARVN’s estrangement from the government and describes key military engagements that defined the achievements, failures, and limitations of the ARVN as a fighting force. Along the way, he explodes some of the myths about ARVN soldiers’ cowardice, corruption, and lack of patriotism that have made the ARVN the scapegoat for America’s defeat.
Ultimately, as Brigham shows, without any real political commitment to a divided Vietnam or vision for the future, the ARVN retreated into a subnational culture that redefined the war’s meaning: saving their families.
Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam H.R.McMaster
For years the popular myth surrounding the Vietnam War was that the Joint Chiefs of Staff knew what it would take to win but were consistently thwarted or ignored by the politicians in power. Now H. R. McMaster shatters this and other misconceptions about the military and Vietnam in Dereliction of Duty. Himself a West Point graduate, McMaster painstakingly waded through every memo and report concerning Vietnam from every meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to build a comprehensive picture of a house divided against itself: a president and his coterie of advisors obsessed with keeping Vietnam from becoming a political issue versus the Joint Chiefs themselves, mired in interservice rivalries and unable to reach any unified goals or conclusions about the country’s conduct in the war.
Completing the historical circle with the present:
Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam John A. Nagl
Brutal in its criticism of the Vietnam-era Army as an organization that failed to learn from its mistakes and tried vainly to fight guerrilla insurgents the same way it fought World War II. In [Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife], Col. Nagl, who served a year in Iraq, contrasts the U.S. Army’’s failure with the British experience in Malaya in the 1950s. The difference: The British, who eventually prevailed, quickly saw the folly of using massive force to annihilate a shadowy communist enemy. . . . Col. Nagl’’s book is one of a half dozen Vietnam histories — most of them highly critical of the U.S. military in Vietnam — that are changing the military’’s views on how to fight guerrilla wars. . . .The tome has already had an influence on the ground in Iraq. Last winter, Gen. Casey opened a school for U.S. commanders in Iraq to help officers adjust to the demands of a guerrilla-style conflict in which the enemy hides among the people and tries to provoke an overreaction. The idea for the training center, says Gen. Casey, came in part from Col. Nagl’’s book, which chronicles how the British in Malaya used a similar school to educate British officers coming into the country. ”Pretty much everyone on Gen. Casey’’s staff had read Nagl’’s book,” says Lt. Col. Nathan Freier, who spent a year in Iraq as a strategist.
The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One David Kilcullen
Kilcullen, adviser on counterinsurgency to General Petraeus … uses Afghanistan and Iraq as primary case studies for a new kind of war that relies on an ability to provoke Western powers into protracted, exhausting, expensive interventions. Kilcullen presents two possible responses. Strategic disruption keeps existing terrorists off balance. Military assistance attacks the conditions producing accidental guerrillas. That may mean full-spectrum assistance, involving an entire society. Moving beyond a simplistic war on terror depends on rebalancing military and nonmilitary elements of power. It calls for a long view, a measured approach and a need to distinguish among various enemies.
Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq and The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008 by Tom Ricks. The essential histories on what went wrong and how it was turned around.
The Forever War Dexter Filkins. The essential Iraq War mood piece/complexity backgrounder.
The Strongest Tribe: War, Politics, and the Endgame in Iraq Bing West. From a Nagl review:
West calls it like he sees it, and there is probably no American not wearing a uniform who has seen more of this war. A large number of senior (mostly Army) generals come in for scathing reviews in The Strongest Tribe, but West reserves his most critical assessments for politicians and journalists. Democratic Congressman and former Marine John Murtha of Pennsylvania was responsible, with the assistance of the media, for “distorting and deliberately exaggerating” the Marine killings of civilians at Haditha. In West’s opinion, President Bush failed at his primary responsibility, which was “to persuade the American people to support the war” …
… the American exit strategy requires that the government of Iraq earn that appellation from its own people, and in this reviewer’s opinion the Iraqi government will become the strongest tribe in Iraq only if it enjoys the continued support of a U.S. advisory effort for a number of years. This was the course the United States adopted in Vietnam, but in the wake of Watergate, public support collapsed, advisers were withdrawn, and South Vietnam fell to the North.
The Village Bing West. Newt Gingrich review:
Anyone interested in understanding the challenges of security in Iraq and Afghanistan would do well to read Bing West’s “The Village.” This is the classic study of small unit anti-guerrilla activity in Vietnam.
Embedded: A Marine Corps Adviser Inside the Iraqi Army Wesley Gray
Marine Corps 2nd Lt. Gray recounts his eight-month tour as part of a Military Transition Team, working as an advisor to the Iraqi Army on location. Gray was fluent in Arabic prior to deployment, giving him enormous insight into the culture and worldview of Iraqis as citizens and soldiers and obvious advantages over colleagues (and competing memoirists) relying on translantors On many occasions, Gray encounters an Insh’ Allah philosophy, a mantra of “If God wills it” or “God willing” can strike Americans as lazy or unmotivated. Among other startling lessons, Gray discovered that loyalty to tribe supersedes duty to the state; the Iraqi Army soldiers he was training were spending their monthly leave in the ranks of local tribal militias. Gray details the cultural nuances and interpersonal relationships of occupied Iraq with such care and clarity, it’s a must-read for anyone interested in the the reconstruction, especially those set to deploy.
God Willing: My Wild Ride with the New Iraqi Army Capt. Eric Navarro.
Navarro is emphatic that on his first tour in Iraq the situation was dismal to beyond hope, partly because of the Iraqi soldiers’ fatalistic attitude (i.e., “if God wills it”) and their seeming refusal to take any responsibility for their own well being. However, he says that by the time he returned for a second tour, things had turned around more than he ever would have expected and that this improvement was largely a result of a change in U.S. policy. Where the U.S previously had been installing their own hand-picked leaders in Iraqi villages, they instead began working with the village chieftans, who already occupied positions of authority. This strategy produced much better results, and Navarro ended the book appearing optimistic about the future of the U.S. in Iraq. However, he was adamant that the U.S. must not leave Iraq, because to do so would create a power vacuum in the area that Iran would quickly exploit.
As always, your recommendations and reviews are welcome and will be added.
Topics: Iraq, military, vietnam
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 9:50 am on Wednesday, July 1, 2009
One Response to “ARVN Nights, IA Days”
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July 1st, 2009 at 7:15 pm
The abandonment of Vietnam was shameful and cowardly to be sure. But the abandonment of Iraq will surely lead to the downfall of western civilization, because the Middle East (which could be dominated by hostile, nuclear-armed Iran) holds vast reserves of the juice that fuels everything.