It has some nice pictures. Plenty of guys in Cavalry hats. But I really got very little idea on what they did in Vietnam and the battles they fought. I gather they were pretty important but the book told me little.

From beginning to end this book is a must read for anyone interested in helicopters and helicopter warfare! Some good photos too!jim

Required reading for Viet Nam history buffs. The Air Cavalry as only a Cavalryman knows. Ride with the crazy, really, Scout pilots as they do the impossible. The history of the Air Cav's formation and it's lessons learned in combat by one who was there. Will make you want to get your "chicken plate," helment, and grab the stick and go. Let's all meet over the valley just West of Dak To. "If you ain't cav, ---"

I would recommentd this book for all to read. This book tells a little about some of us that were part of the original people assigned to Vietnam prior to 1964. This was one of the first books to tell about myself, having been captured on 24 December 1961 and held for six months. Most people do not want to talk about those of us that were part of The Expeditionary Forces of the time.

while you wrap yourself in your flag and say I would go and fight,
others already have. in current times we all try to get a meaning or a sense of our America, this book blows anything you have ever read of war away...when we are all searching for the human element most of the time it is lost and unreachale yet here
like rolling echoes of thunder from a distant shore real liVes and heroic acts of soldiers so revered.....so moving if you ever needed a motivating force, this book is it. and yet were is the elusive Ray Bows

I would like to recommend "Vietnam Military Lore - Legends, Shadows and Heroes" for a lot of reasons but especially to Army aviators because there is quite a bit of coverage of the first Helicopter transportation companies that were sent to Vietnam way back in 1961 and 1962, namely the 8th, 57th, 33d and the 45th, which later became the 117th, 120th, 118th, 121st and 145th Helicopter Companies. I know the old timers will recognize a lot of names of aviators that Bows has written about. I thereofre recommend this book to all those interested in Army helicopter aviation. I recommended this book to Art Conroy, Publisher of the Transportation Corps Army Aviation Newsletter. Bentley Herbert

From a literary standpoint, War Story is very disjointed and rambling. Side bars are frequent and often pointless. The book starts out with the author arriving in Nam for his second tour, then goes into a flashback of the first tour that lasts a third of the book, without telling what's going on. There are very few dates and no maps. There is not near as much action as most of the popular Viet Nam books, and the story is largely one of the author's frustration at not being allowed to command a combat team for more than a couple operations. The book may be of value for its unique content about Montagnard advisors before regular troops arrived, and the author certainly speaks from the heart.

Published only four years after the fall of Saigon, War Story, was the first of what has become a plethora of non-fiction Vietnam War memoirs. But because of the political climate at the time of its initial publication this potential blockbuster bestseller was all but ignored by the New York publishing houses. While Robin Moore's The Green Berets was such a sensation in 1965 that it inspired a John Wayne movie, and the same photo of Army Special Forces Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler would grace both the book's paperback cover and Sadler's top hit record, by the early 1970's when Morris wrote War Story the attitude towards the Vietnam War and America's elite warriors was colored by the anti-war movement, My Lai, the bombing of Cambodia, and the media's slanted reporting on Tet. Vietnam wasn't a popular literary topic.
Morris begins his memoir with the emotionally charged details of his re-occurring nightmare, a vivid and detailed replay of the firefight in which he had his left testicle shot off and was almost killed. In the nightmare though he is eventually killed. He ends the book with an emotionally charged memory also. In a heart-tugging coda, Morris recounts the scene. While standing in an Army hospital, his crippled right arm hanging at his side, his useless fingers attached to a mechanical brace he watches as the sun sets and the color guard lowers the flag; and tells us that as the flag is lowered "a feeling of almost overwhelming sadness, almost grief, came over me." As Morris attempts to salute the colors with his damaged right hand he stands "crying like a baby because I couldn't do it right."
A professional soldier who began military school as an eleven-year-old, Morris joined the Army and Special Forces where he rose to the rank of major. He volunteered for three tours in Vietnam and received four Purple Hearts and four Bronze Stars among numerous other decorations before a medical discharge for wounds cut his career short.
Jim Morris is a gifted story-teller and this book should be read for his Ludwig Faistenhammer and Larry Dring war stories alone. But at its heart War Story is the tale of Jim Morris, not an examination of the Vietnam War or even the role of Special Forces. It is, admittedly, a participant's interpretation of events. He offers up a good account of what it was like to be on the ground during the Montagnard revolt, to fight for survival during the Tet Offensive in Nha Trang, and to serve in the US Army's Special Forces during its hey-day in Vietnam. Summing up his Vietnam experience Morris quotes Michael Herr's Dispatches, "Vietnam was what we had instead of happy childhoods."
This is a book by a soldier who is proud of his service, an experienced and consummate warrior who without a second thought or any moral retrospection whatsoever begs God to please send him some VC to kill for his birthday. But Morris is a thinking man's warrior (he opens his book sections with quotes from the works of Carlos Castaneda) and philosophizes about other men like himself: "I think perhaps Special Forces guys and other people like them have depressed metabolisms and they have to be exposed to some sort of danger to feel normal ... before going to Nam I didn't know that everyone wasn't paralyzed by boredom all the time."
Paralyzed with boredom is the last thing you'll be while reading War Story, a real standout amongst the burgeoning pile of popular literature on the Vietnam war. Morris' prose is oftentimes humorous, always entertaining, and never boring, self-serving, or pedantic. A good example of his dry wit is how he describes his arrival at Ta Ko to take command of the Special Forces camp where "...the Strike Force had been for two years without going home or seeing a woman. Half of them had long hair and half of them had short hair and they were all real friendly with each other. But not with Americans. Every so often somebody threw a grenade into the team house." War Story is replete with a soldier's black humor on death and killing. One of the best lines in the book is: "I won't describe the operation because it was one of the most frustrating experiences of my military career, a compendium of tactical errors and blown chances grotesque enough to break the heart of anybody who likes to kill people."
But Vietnam wasn't all fun and games for Jim Morris. The loss he suffered, besides his physical and emotional wounds, includes the deaths of comrades and close Army friends in the close and brutal combat which marked Special Forces operations in Vietnam. Special Forces was a close community and the death of a "green beret" meant a personal loss. He agonizes over the fate of, Phillipe Drouin, one of his Montagnard comrades and a leader of FULRO, the Montagnard independence movement, who was a kindred spirit and Morris' close friend. Despite the disparity of the two cultures Morris formed a deep and long lasting attachment to the Montagnards during his three tours in Vietnam and was well connected to FULRO. While on an operation with the "Yards" at the end of his third tour, though suffering a life-threatening wound, he refused medical evacuation and proceeded to supervise the evacuation of his wounded Montagnards. His dedication to the Montagnard cause provided him with his paradigm for perfect happiness. "Get involved in something that is more important to you than your own life."
Special Forces' most ardent White House supporter, President John F. Kennedy, said, "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country." Professional SF soldiers like Morris answered that call to duty and War Story gives us a glimpse of what our country asked of some of its young men and what they gave. For some it was too much. Others, like Morris, are still measuring the cost.

This is THE book to read if you were never involved with Special Forces and wonder what it is like to be in SF. This is also the book to read if you WERE in SF in SE Asia and you find it hard to find books that relate people and events in a meaningful way to your own experiences, a clearer perspective than when we lived them. Besides all that, War Story a great read. Like candy or whatever you like best, a real treat page turner.

The frightening aspect of this work is that it is simply another glazing over of what Americans call the Vietnam War. The sources consulted do not constitute anything resembling a full scope of available scholarship. Americans do not understand the Indochina conflict because they are only allowed to see one side. This book is simply another work in a long line of American political lore which has created convenient rationalization for complex events in Southeast Asia. There are significant scholarly works available for the reader who desires true understanding. This work is certainly not to be held among them.

David Kaiser has accessed newly released documents to write an excellent book. He has chronologed the day by day decisions and opinions of the men at the upper levels of the government that led America into the Vietnam War. We see how Eisenhower's men wanted to commit troops to stop the expansion of communism in Southeast Asia, especially in Laos. Then we see how Kennedy's people continued these policies, while Kennedy reigned them in and wanted to move more carefully.
Kaiser shows us the different agendas. How Diem did not want to use his troops against the Viet Cong, but rather to keep him in power. Diem refused to give any of his military officers enough power to fight the Viet Cong for fear they would plot a coup. He only gave his officers enough force to show the governments strength, keeping Diem and his family in power.
After Kennedy was assassinated Lyndon Johnson inherited Kennedy's advisors, but did not keep a reign on them, so the government made commitments to send troops into Vietnam. Even after Diems death, the Vietnamese only wanted to continue their troops in their power plays instead of fighting the Viet Cong. McNamara and Rusk continued to lead us into war and Lyndon Johnson agreed with them. Ball continuously tried to slow the slide to commitment down, but Johnson and his advisors ignored him.
Kaiser argues that the opinions each man held depended on when he was born. He explains that some were born, and grew up during the 30s and 40s during what he calls the GI generation. Because of this they believed that the United States could achieve anything. Kaiser also points out that the arrival of World War 2 also affected their opinions. Rusk devoutly believed that we had to stop the communists in Vietnam, or there would be another World War. Johnson also held this all or nothing viewpoint. Kennedy on the other hand held a more sophisticated view, placing Vietnam behind other problems, unlike Johnson.
Kaiser shows how Johnson and his advisors refused to negotiate with North Vietnam unless North Vietnam gave us everything we asked for first. An unlikely event. Eventually Johnson and others lied about the problems to keep the commitments increasing. Johnson also tended to ignore other foreign policy problems.
Kaiser's writing usually moves easily so it is not as hard to read as it might have been, given the complexity and detail of the subject matter.

Professor David Kaiser of the Strategy and Policy Department of the Naval War College tells us the real story behind the bureaucrats who put us into Vietnam, and in doing so lives up to the highest traditions of the U.S. Navy and U.S. Marine Corps which have generally been far ahead of the other services in their resistance to bureaucratic pressures from politicians. The CIA refused to provide Kaiser with anything but token documents, violating the Freedom of Information Act. Kaiser shows how politicians including Presidents Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson grew up under the spell of Churchill's anti-appeasement speeches to believe that the USA had to become the World Policeman. When he became President, Eisenhower began U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia covertly and the Joint Chiefs of Staff except General Shoup of the Marines were badgered into accepting this. When John F. Kennedy became President, both his Senate and Navy service led him to oppose intervention for a long time, in agreement with the U.S. Senate Democrats (Mansfield, Humphrey, etc.) and isolationist Republicans (Dirksen, etc.). The State Department Bureaucrats (who controlled the CIA) and their allies in related departments and the Joint Chiefs so badgered and pressured Kennedy that he eventually collapsed under their bombardment and agreed to intervention in Laos. When Johnson came in as President, he made full scale intervention. Some readers may recall that I have reviewed biographies of Field Marshalls Montgomery and Slim of Great Britain and Marshall/General Zhukov of Russia but not Eisenhower. The Allies produced 4 creative geniuses in World WarII: Montgomery, Slim, Zhukov, and Admiral Nimitz. Eisenhower was not one of them. He was then and later more suited to bureaucratic Ingenious Follower status than to individual Creative Genius status, like Lyndon Johnson. Our British and French allies opposed the intervention (Churchill would probably have opposed it too) not because of De Gaulle's *intransigence* as the news media claimed, but because they are the two nations with the most creative geniuses (along with Italy) in world history. When all is said and done, World War II was needed to defend the USA, but most wars are not and were not (like World War I, which was a bureaucratic war and nothing more). I hope that we start thinking more about jobs and education and environment at home and less about creating overseas what we cannot do at home.

I was a proud member of Co.C, 504th MP Battalion, spending most of my tour in Bong Son in the Central Highlands. This book not only explains the various roles of the combat MP, but it allows us to see what other units were doing.

I was a Military Policeman in Viet Nam. I enjoyed this book very much as it was factual and informative. It's about time the MP's got the recognition they deserve. How can I contact the author?

I was in Vietnam in 1968, 1969 and 1971 serving with the 194th MP Co, 557th MP Co and the 560th MP Co in such places as Bin Hoa, Pr'Line Mountain (Dalat), Phu Tai, An Khe and Pleiku. It is remarkable that the US Army overlooked the Military Police role in Vietnam or at best it was an after thought. Night after night, day after day, I saw my fellow soldiers conduct themselves with dignity, restraint, and sacrifice. Being an MP in Vietnam (were everyone had a gun and knife) required the best of police work and the most a soldier has to give. From delivery of babies along side the road, to law enforcement and breaking up infiltration of the enemy forces and ambushes of convoys, all of these men performed extraordinarily in a harsh and hostile environment that we call war. Recognition for a job well done is long overdue, Thanks, Rick for recording this piece of history.

I've read Rescue Under Fire several times and heartily recommend it as an overview of the history of Dustoff (aeromedical evacuation) in Vietnam. I served two tours as a Dustoff pilot and the book contained a great deal of historical information that I had never known and wouldn't have ever learned without John Cook's well researched book. I've given copies of the book to my father and both of my sons so that they can better understand what I did in Vietnam. Perhaps even more incredible than the missions under fire, which were performed over and over on a daily basis, is the effort that the early Dustoff pilots and commanders had to go through just to provide the kind of support that eventually became the standard by which present aeromedical evacuation procedures are measured. Far too frequently the egos of high level commanders stood in the way of dedicated Dustoff crews simply trying to do their job and to get the equipment and support necessary to do so. Two Dustoff pilots were awarded the Medal of Honor, but that doesn't even begin to recognize the job that was done by each and every Dustoff crew. I'm proud to have been a part of it and I thank Colonel John Moore for telling our story so eloquently.

As the son a Major Charles Kelly, I am gratified that there is a least one mainstream book that tells the story of the Dustoff pilots. It is sad that their story does not have the widespread recongition it deserves. I have access to hundreds of personal documents and have spoken with many of the men that flew with my father and as far as I can tell this book is very, very authentic and relies on fact not fiction as some articles have done. Not only that, but it is very well written and written from the heart. Thank you John Cook from the entire Kelly family......

Do recommendations matter? You bet. After reading what the two pilots said below, the way I figured it was, they had to know what they were talking about. So, I read Rescue Under Fire. Once I started, I could not put it down. John Cook made the Vietnam war make sense, something no one else had ever done for me. He tells one hell of a story and he does not let up. He takes the reader on a fantastic ride and, at the end, you wind up staring out the window for a long time. One word of caution--if you are not willing to deal with what Cook has to say, don't read this book. If you are a bleeding heart liberal, he will shatter all your myths and leave you in a bloody heap. However, if you can deal with the truth of what Vietnam was all about, then I suggest you read this book. Cook tells the story of the real heros of Vietnam, the men who flew the evacuation mission, under fire. The part that got me was the end, where he lists the names of all the men who died performing this dangerous mission. He didn't have to do this, but he did. If you only read one book about Vietnam, make it this one.

Donald E. Bordenkircher, like many veterans of the Vietnam War, waited over twenty years to write his personal memoir. Not a soldier in the traditional sense, he served as a police advisor who supervised and administrated the complicated Vietnamese policing effort throughout South Vietnam during the war years. The author was a civilian advisor and part of the Phoenix/ICEX program about which much negative reporting emanated from Vietnam late in the war and was directly connected with the civilian prison on Con Son Island. This fascinating and well documented book is his bitter response to what he believes was a deliberate attempt by America's antiwar radicals to distort what really took place in the advisory effort which not only turned hard won success into failure but also played directly into the hands of North Vietnam's propaganda machine.

Unlike civilian policing at home Bordenkircher was faced with several classes of prisoners other than common criminals: military offenders, mostly deserters from the South Vietnamese Army; communist prisoners who were captured unarmed but were known sympathizers with the National Liberation Front; members of the covert Viet Cong Infrastructure, and other categories of prisoners who presented direct challenges to the sovereignty of the government of South Vietnam (48-51). For anyone who studies the intricacies of the Vietnam War seriously, this book acts as an essential tool that brings to light the successes, failures, and in-fighting within the State Department rather than the military or the covert world of spies and evil-doers.

From 1967 to 1972, Don Bordenkircher was a senior adviser to the director of South Vietnam's correction system. He was tasked to help reform, improve, and update Southern Vietnam's 41 correctional centers including Con Son prison (location of the Tiger Cages).

As could be expected, the centers that he surveyed had a myriad of problems ranging from bad to deplorable and in great need of care. Bordenkircher and his fellow assistants, in the time that they had, did make significant strides in improving the overall situation but not without sacrifice. On Con Son island, the center there had detention cells known as Tiger Cages for the most unruly and problematic of the inmates. These holding areas were deemed adequate by most known standards at the time considering their location.

Unfortunately, that's not what was told and shown to the world by an unscrupulous and damning media sideshow. In 1970, a congressional delegation made up of Congressmen Gus Hawkins and William Anderson, then aide Tom Harkins (now Senator Harkins), and journalist Don Luce, visited Con Son Island on a "fact finding mission", so to speak. Their ulitmate aim was to exploit the Tiger Cages in an inflammatory way using distortions, lies, deceit and misinformation. The story manufactured by the delegation was to the effect that the Con Son Tiger Cages were barbaric and that prison conditions on the island were horrific in every way. Contrary to the facts.

After selling this piece of fiction to the media, a firestorm of controversy ensued and probably at no worse a time as the anti-American sentiment of the Vietnamese war was already at a boiling point. Subsequent attempts to reveal the complete truth to the world was shunned by the U.S. government and the mainstream media.

Despite the destructive criticism and propaganda thrown at Don Bordenkircher and his team, they continually fought an uphill battle for the remainder of their time in Vietnam and were able to make some large strides for the betterment of the South Vietnamese correction system.

Tiger Cage is a well written and documented book and a hidden chapter of the Vietnam war that absolutely needed to be told. Much credit is due to Don and Shirley Bordenkircher for their courage and perseverance and honesty in bringing this to story to light. This is a highly recommended read.

The book is a personal, first-hand account of the tiger cage incident of the Vietnam War. This event filled the screens and newspapers of American TV and reinforced a basic negative view of US involvement in the war. The author tells a well documented saga of the realities of Vietnam; the politics involved; events leading up to the revelation of the "Tiger Cages"; and the aftermath. I thought it was written in a positive and patriotic, yet truthful manner. I appreciated that at the outset, the author said there was a web of agencies involved, each with different initials and that could be burdensome, but not to get bogged down in them and to refer to the appendix where they are clearly listed. If you keep that in mind and concentrate on the people involved and their dedication, it reads easily. It's redeeming reading for those who served in the war; fascinating for the history buffs; and reinforcing to those who are are cynical about politics.

First of all, I 'd like to say Thank you to Canadian Maple Leaf for your excellent commenting job on that Communist. I praise you for having by far such a good knowledge of Viet Nam history. You're the few Westerners who truly know what you're talking about when it comes to South-East Asia.
Ironically, the person who knows the most about Viet Nam is not Vietnamese and the person who lives in Vietnam doesn't know anything about the country he lives in.
The Communists in Viet Nam either have put our intellectuals, scientists, religious and political leaders (others than Communists) in jail or Re-education camps or chased them off from the country.
The Communists, much like Hitler did for Germany, have vowed to clean Viet Nam from all its cultural values and history by burning books and tearing down monuments and re-write Viet Nam history according to them.
So you can only expect so much when it comes to logical arguments or even good knowledge of history or political subjects when talking to one of them.
This is just to give you all a perspective of what is happening.

Well... enough of the political side. Back to the book.

It is an awesome book people! Read it if you'd like to learn more about Viet Nam History. A great job by the author in putting together so much details and researches. Many Foreigners as much as Vietnamese will learn a lot from this book.
Viet Nam has 4,000 years of history; much of it has been lost during the last 50 years, mainly because of the war and cleansing by the Communists.
This book compiled a great deal of information for people like me who'd like to start piecing together the "whole picture". Because I would have not been allowed to do so in Viet Nam.

Thanks.

I don't think one needs to engage in chest-thumping nationalism to praise Taylor's work. The book is a beautiful example of solid scholarship. Taylor uses both Chinese and Vietnamese primary sources and compares them to give a more realistic picture behind the nationalist myths that Vietnamese schoolchildren (both North and South) have been taught for decades. Taylor also draws upon a large body of secondary sources in Chinese, Vietnamese, French, English, and Japanese. I doubt that there is ANY scholarship on this period of Vietnamese history in either Vietnamese or English that is of a higher quality than this. A work of lucid writing founded on excellent research.

this book will let the world knows who were the true one that came up with such inventions instead of the Chinese as previously thought.

Leigh Wade, a young half-assed, arrogant kid tells us of his journey from being a swaggering know-it-all ("Tan Phu," volume 1 of this trilogy) to becoming a terrified -- and, incidentally, brave, U.S. Special Forces soldier fighting a war no one wanted. In the second volume, "The Protected Will Never Know," Wade's voice had matured, but there was still a scared kid beneath the more assured outer man. The descriptions of "insertions" behind enemy lines, while a nearly everyday occurrence to these young men, are chilling. And now comes "Assault on Dak Pek," and its descriptions of horrific battles and the understated heroism of these Special Forces. The voice has matured and the weariness and futility of the war no one could win comes through. This trilogy gives the reader a rare opportunity to experience Wade's coming of age and to feel how the overweening demands of war nearly destroyed him. We live with him through the frustrations of his return to an unwelcoming homeland. By pure chance, I was in Washington, D.C. the weekend of the dedication of the Viet Nam Ware Memorial. From the back steps of the Museum of American History, I stood watching the smartly uniformed troops marching in strict cadence. The street was lined with ramrod straight service men and women saluting as each unit passed. But I still get goosebumps when I remember how the small straggling group of View Nam veterans, most dressed in jeans, some with long hair, some in wheelchairs pushed by comrades, passed. A drumroll of heartfelt applause thundered up the avenue as they came. The onlookers in the bleachers stood up and cheered. Leigh Wade should have been in that group of survivors. I highly recommend this book to both adults and teenagers considering the military as a career.

Leigh Wade's third book on his experiences in Vietnam is a "must" for all serious historians and readers of the Vietnam War. His trilogy, beginning with "Tan Phu" and "The Protected Will Never Know", is brought to a conclusion in "Assault on Dak Pek". From 1963 to 1971, the author shares with his readers his experiences of being a member of the United States Army Special Forces A-Team. We, as Americans, should always be proud of the courage and bravery that these men displayed in the face of death. After reading all three books, I have much respect for the men who so bravely serve our country.

Talk about a surprise. This book was nothing like what I expected and yet FOR SOME REASON i liked it. I was assuming this would be a book written about a single action, graphic in its detail, and filled with warfare throughout...but that is not the case. The summary tells of a bloody bunker to bunker clean up and weeks of heroic action filled fighting but that is not what i found. Yes the book has this but it fills a much smaller portion of the book than I thought it would. Most of the book is filled with the ordinary, day to day life of a special forces soldier and yet, maybe, this is the reason that I liked it. I for one like a book to be action packed but there was just something about wade and his experience, even his visits to town or his quiet patrols, that was extremely interesting. For the first time I got a look at life for a viet vet outside the normal experience. Wade spent time in Thailand, especially Bangkok, and his experiences there are far from ordinary and far from boring. And even when, in 1970, Wade was back 'in country' he retells all of his experience, terrifying or monotonous, in an extremely interesting fashion. And to put the icing on the cake Wade gives a postwar history of himself and gives us a first hand account of the battle against normalcy in America when he returned that in some ways was tougher than his battle in Vietnam. His rejection by so many he had fought for effected him for decades and this narration is extremely useful to both the Vet and non-Vet. He concludes by giving his advice on how to return from war without bringing the war with you...great stuff.
So in summary, even though it was not as action packed as I had envisioned, for some reason I thoroughly enjoyed this book and I have no doubt you will too!!!! Pick this cheap book up cuz it is a winner.

This book should not be read by anyone, it simply rehashes every old myth about Vietnam. Read "Vietnam: The Neccessary War" or "The Defeat of the Vietcong and North Vietnamese Army" to get the truth and not his liberal axe-grinding ... that has passed for history for over 25 years.

Let me give you an idea of the discussion in this powerful and well-written book on the Vietnam war by Prof. Dr. Marilyn Young.

In 1954, the French had to withdrawl and the Genevea accords were signed. This called for Ho Chi Minh and his group to withdrawl to the North of the country and the French puppet Bao Dai's government to be in control of the South. A provisional line separated North and South Vietnam, to be completely eliminated when elections for the reunification of the country took place in July 1956. The Americans then moved from supplying arms to the French to taking over the whole effort to crush independent nationalism in Vietnam.

The U.S., she shows, understood that the Viet Minh would win any free and fair election and that Ho Chi Minh was more of a nationalist than a communist. Therefore, it was necessary to set up a permanent separate nation in South Vietnam, under the dictatorship of Ngo Dinh Diem, who launched a campaign of slaughter and terror against his opponents, leftist or otherwise. In an endnote she quotes Diem's former chief of staff as saying that had the Diem regime confined the police state terror and torture to only communists or communist sympathizers, one could symphathize with them for such persons inherently deserved such treatment. But his terror spread to other political parties, people who simply did not like his government and those resisting extortion by government officials. Despite being constantly slobbered over as a great humanitarian statesman in the U.S. media and among American liberals, conservaties in South Vietnam were beginning to openly oppose his regime, worrying U.S. officials about his regime's stability.

Finally in 1959, Hanoi authorized the Viet Minh in the South to resist in self-defense the terror of Diem's government. A couple thousand North Vietnamese, most of them natives of the South, began infiltrating the country. In 1960 the National Liberation Front (NLF) was formed amongst many South Vietnamese dissidents led by the former Viet Minh ("viet cong" in U.S. propaganda).

Diem's biggest problem from the U.S. perspective was that he had begun negotiations with North Vietnam on the withdrawl of U.S. troops from South Vietnam and agreeing to allow for the NLf to join South Vietnamese policial life and disucss possible reunification of the country in the future. This was a real horror to U.S. officials as comes up many times in the documents the author quotes.

In any case Diem was overthrown and killed on November 1'st 1963 in a U.S. backed coup. The problem was that the U.S. had trouble finding any military officer that was not intent on continuing Diem's efforts to reach agreement with the NLF and North Vietnam. They installed a series of military dicatatorships over the next few years until they finally found one sufficiently pliable represented by Ky and Thieu.

The U.S. extended its bombing to North Vietnam, then launched an all out invasion of South Vietnam, accelerating its program of mass murder. Some of the more interesting documents quoted in this book come from the Rand corporation. The infamous "strategic hamlet" program is examined in the village of Duc Lap in one document. Another notes that villages in militarily contested areas often felt hostility towards both the GVN (South Vietnamese government)and the NLF but hostiliy towards the NLF tended to be based on the U.S.-GVN bombing that its presences in villages caused, excess taxation, and sometimes military defeat. Anger towards the NLF was based more on despair than hatred. On the other hand hositlity towards the government of South Vietnam was based on a "a more basic hostility resulting from GVN aims and behavior..." Another document spoke of increased support for the NLF resulting from the massive defoliation program launched by the U.S., allegedly to deny food sources to the NLF which it did not do but greatly devastated peasant farmers. This exacerbated the feeling that the U.S/ GVN were "at best minimally concerned with the peasant's welfare."

The author quotes the elite political scientist Samuel Huntington who was deeply impressed by the massive refugee exodus to the cities caused by the American terror bombing of the countryside. It was good because it was the only way to deprive the Vietcong of its supporters, the people of rural South Vietnam for the Viet cong was a powerful organization which could not be separated from its "constituency" so long as the constintuency continued to exist.

The author goes on to discuss the domestic aspects of the Vietnam war as well as the mass murder operations conducted in Laos and Cambodia. She notes that the U.S., as in South Vietnam, avoided opportunities to make peace by backing the forming of  a coalition government with the left wing insurtgents there as proposed by the dictator Prince Siahnouk. Siahnouk had been overthrown in early 1970 because he was vehemently opposed to the U.S. bombing his country despite U.S. claims that he supported it. When the U.S. bombing reached its horrific peak in 1973, Cambodia's infrastructure and moderate and progressive  civil society were just about completely destroyed, leaving the harshest and most brutal elements, in this case the Khmer Rouge, previously a very fringe wacko group of the insurgency, to take power.

Thieu's regime fell in 1975. The author notes that in his final pathetic words in power, he attacked Kissinger for allegedly selling out South Vietnam in the January 1973 peace agreement though the author notes that Thieu continued to attack and seize territory held by the NLF, continuing the war as if there had been no peace agreement with U.S. support. The U.S. gave him all the military aid in the world but Thieu was opposed by virtually all sectors of South Vietnamese society and he could arrest and kill tens of thousands of people and steal every election but the fundamental illegitamacy of his regime could not be hid.

Young details the war well, so that a reader who does not know anything about Vietnam will finish the book having a good idea of the issues that drove the war and the questions that are still asked about it today. History buffs should find this book informative and journalists will enjoy Young's inclusion of the press in her story. I particularly enjoyed Young's examination of events in Cambodia and the perfidy of President Richard Nixon. However, while I agree with Young's inclusion of material that serves to call into question America's actions during the war, I think that her bias as an author against the war was a little too obvious. As an academic, I guess she is entitled to argue against the war rather than simply presenting the facts on both sides, but at points the book reads more like an editoriral rather than an article you would find in the news section of your local newspaper. Nevertheless, the book is chock full of facts, good observations and is clearly written. It certainly gets my reccomendation.