Customer Reviews

Armies of the Vietnam War 1962-75 (Men-at-Arms) (Bk.1)

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Though I have had this book for a long time, I have seldom looked at it. As a specialist in this period and a veteran of the Cold War Army I have studied this period in real time since the fifties.
In any case, the book is now obsolescent except for the color illustrations. At the age of 23 it has long been superseded by the works of Shelby Stanton (c.f.) and others.
The author did serve in Vietnam but since we were there for eight years, as often stated, due to the replacement system, we fought eight different one year wars, not one eight year war.
Those who were there in 1965 and earlier looked like those who served in the 1950s, by the end of the war, the soldiers' clothing and equipment was totally revised and had gone through two cycles of development and entering on a third which began during the last years of US participation and remained in use till the late eighties.
So you cannot generalize about VM, you need to know where someone was, and most important, when.
This book is simply not comprehensive enough nor is its companion in this series (#143), which was an attempt to fill in the gaps left by this one.
Every national contingent who served in VM could well support its own study, the Australians and the South Koreans come readily to mind.