A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and the Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam [Hardcover]

Lewis Sorley (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 3, 1999

Neglected by scholars and journalists alike, the years of conflict in Vietnam from 1968 to 1975 offer surprises not only about how the war was fought, but about what was achieved. Drawing on authoritative materials not previously available, including thousands of hours of tape-recorded allied councils of war, award-winning military historian Lewis Sorley has given us what has long been needed-an insightful, factual, and superbly documented history of these important years. Among his findings is that the war was being won on the ground even as it was being lost at the peace table and in the U.S. Congress. The story is a great human drama of purposeful and principled service in the face of an agonizing succession of lost opportunities, told with uncommon understanding and compassion. Sorley documents the dramatic differences in conception, conduct, and-at least for a time-results between the early and the later war. Meticulously researched and movingly told, A Better War is sure to stimulate controversy as it sheds brilliant new light on the war in Vietnam.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

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. Sorley cites other problems, too, such as low morale among troops in the field, plus the harmful effects of drug abuse, racial disharmony, and poor discipline. In the end, the mighty willpower of Abrams and diplomatic allies Ellsworth Bunker and William Colby was not enough. But, with its strong case that they came pretty close to winning, A Better War is sure to spark controversy. --John J. Miller

From Publishers Weekly

Using a host of oral interviews, 455 tape recordings made in Vietnam during the years 1968-1972 and numerous other sources, military historian Sorley has produced a first-rate challenge to the conventional wisdom about American military performance in Vietnam. Essentially, this is a close examination of the years during which General Creighton Abrams was in command, having succeeded William Westmoreland. Sorley contends that Abrams completely transformed the war effort and in the process won the war on the battlefield. The North Vietnamese 1968 Tet offensive was bloodily repulsed, he explains, as was a similar offensive in 1969. Together, the 1970 American incursion into Cambodia and a 1971 Laotian operation succeeded in reducing enemy combat effectiveness. Renewed American bombing of the North and Abrams's use of air power to assist ground operations further reduced Hanoi's ability to wage war. Sorley argues that the combination of anti-war protests in America and a complete misunderstanding of the actual combat situation by the diplomats negotiating the 1973 Paris accords wasted American military victories. In spite of drug use and other problems, Sorley maintains, the army in Vietnam performed capably and efficiently, but in vain, for South Vietnam was sold out by the 1973 cease-fire, America's pullout and the failure of Congress to provide further military assistance to the South. Sure to provoke both passionate and reasoned objection, Sorley's book is as important a reexamination of the operational course of the war as Robert McNamara's In Retrospect is of the conflict's moral and political history. Maps and photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 528 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1ST edition (June 3, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0151002665
• ISBN-13: 978-0151002665
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 7.7 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (78 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #431,655 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Lewis Sorley, a former soldier, is a graduate of West Point and holds a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins. His Army service included tank and armored cavalry units in Germany, Vietnam, and the U.S., Pentagon staff duty, and teaching at West Point and the Army War College.

His books include two biographies, Thunderbolt: General Creighton Abrams and the Army of His Times and Honorable Warrior: General Harold K. Johnson and the Ethics of Command. The Johnson biography received the Army Historical Foundation's Distinguished Book Award. An excerpt of the Abrams biography won the Peterson Prize as the year's best scholarly article on military history. He has also been awarded the General Andrew Goodpaster Prize for military scholarship by the American Veterans Center.

His book A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. His edited work Vietnam Chronicles: The Abrams Tapes, 1968-1972 received the Army Historical Foundation's Trefry Prize for providing a unique perspective on the art of command. He has also written Honor Bright: History and Origins of the West Point Honor Code and System and edited a two-volume work entitled Press On! Selected Works of General Donn A. Starry. He is currently researching a biography of General William C. Westmoreland.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

101 of 110 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Author Sorley Corrects the Record, May 16, 2000

By 

Stuart A. Herrington (Carlsbad, California) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and the Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam (Hardcover)

Author Lewis Sorley has done all Americans, especially Vietnam veterans, a service by producing this meticulously researched, balanced study of the Vietnam War's final (post-Westmoreland) years. I served almost four years in Vietnam between January 1971 and the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. I rarely review books about the war because too many of them evoke the sentiment, "If that was Vietnam, where was I?" But as one who fought the Vietcong guerrillas and struggled to ferret out their shadow government, who felt the fury of the NVA's 1972 Easter Offensive, and who ultimately left Vietnam on a marine helicopter from the embassy roof, I can say without qualification that author Sorley has got it right. He is on the mark when he points out the success of Cambodian sanctuary raids in 1970 and the long-overdue, successful emphasis on pacification pushed by General Abrams and Ambassador Bunker. He is equally correct in his statement that, by late 1972, it was our war to lose as Hanoi's legions faltered in disarray in the wake of the 13-division attack on South Vietnam that had been launched to bolster sagging revolutionary morale in the South. I served in a province that, under the Westmoreland strategy, was a revolutionary hotbed, where a simple trip to pick up the mail was an invitation to ambush. When Abrams, Colby, Vann, and Bunker got their hands on the throttle, this same province became a different place, with significant increases in security, massive morale problems and defections among the Vietcong cadre who had once ruled the countryside, and a significant economic upturn. This was the Vietnam of Sorley's "Better War." Sadly, as some of the reviews of this fine work demonstrate, the truth about that tragic war is too painful to some aging, unreconstructed members of the antiwar movement, some of whom cannot, 25 years later, admit that their love affair with the feisty Vietcong was misplaced, or that their country's men and women in arms had sown the seeds of victory under General Abrams. Bravo Sorley!

104 of 119 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A very good reexamination of the Vietnam conflict, May 2, 2000

By 

Thomas Veil "thomasveil" (Cleveland, OH) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and the Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam (Hardcover)

We have been repeating certain truisms ad nauseum for the past twenty five years: "It was a civil war"; "The South Vietnamese fought reluctantly"; "The North Vietnamese fought a popular war"; "US tactics were ineffective." The Vietnam War has become a cliché in our historical memory.

Lewis Sorley deflates each and every one of these truisms and helps to tell the real and much more tragic story of the Vietnam War. Through a thorough analysis of America's command strategy under Abrams he shows how Americans came to understand the war as it was and fought much more effectively. Sorley's experience as a military historian helps him to explain the course of the war on the battlefield, particularly the outcome of the Easter Invasion. Lacking the leftist biases of many Vietnam War historians also allows him to discuss the unsavory side of the Communist struggle - and the fact that they were just as dependent on their patrons as South Vietnam was on us. Additionally, his use of Communist sources details just how effectively the Allies fought after 1968.

I picked up this book believing that we should have stayed out of Vietnam. I put it down feeling that our abandonment of the South was perhaps the most profound act of cowardice in American history. Sorley's book captures the tragedy of this abandonment - and the lost possibilities for millions of South Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians, too many of whom did not survive long after the "liberation".

59 of 67 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sorley gets it right, again., May 1, 2001

By 

William A. Hamilton (Granby, CO United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and the Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam (Hardcover)

As one who served two tours with the 1st Air Cavalry Division in Vietnam, I concur with Dr. Sorley's thesis that we won the Vietnam War and then let the victory slip through our fingers by not living up to the pledges we made to the South Vietnamese Government. But there were earlier opportunties to have won a military victory as well. If we had been allowed to pursue the NVA in Cambodia right after the first and second battles of the Ia Drang in 1965 and 1966, respectively, we could have forced Hanoi to the negotiating table much earlier. While I too hold the late, great General Creighton Abrams and his approach to Vietnamization of the war in high regard, I think General Westmoreland deserves equal respect. If General Westmoreland had been given the geographical latitude he needed to prosecute a war of annihiltion, Westy would not have been forced to fight a war of attrition -- something Americans do not fight well at all. Nevertheless, Dr. Sorley brings to this book the same kind of dogged and thorough research that he brings to all of his writings. Clearly, a five-star addition to my personal library Wm. Hamilton, Ph.D.