Customer Reviews

People's Army of Vietnam

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4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This work is quite good, and I recommend it. It was the kind of book which a Vietnam veteran usually picks up with a lot of skepticism. It was probably better than a four-star work, but the chapter on Dau Tranh likely kept me from rating it with five stars. Pike's overall research was masterful, and for the year 1986 when the book was published, was very early on with analysis about not only why we (the U.S.) had to leave, but also why the Vietnamese in the north likely would never give up. Since their old die-hard leaders also wound up dying pretty old, there would have been a long time of misery for everyone.

I smiled at the Dau Tranh chapter, because communist governments and organizations always come up with names and slogans for the rationale of their irrationality, usually after the fact. It also didn't matter, as North Vietnam was run by xenophobes who kept their people away from the outside world, and the spirit of this Dau Tranh thing already existed at their poor infantryman's level all along. The soldiers and local cadre probably called it something else. In a way that we would call benignly perverted, these people were fighting for their independence on their terms, in spite of the xenophobes at the top. Independence makes a man fight hard.

I wish Dr. Pike had lived long enough to publish a sequel to PAVN. Much of what he said in his book turned out quite accurate and thoughtful. He missed on some other things, but so did we all. I suspect he would have been forthcoming about his misses, and very modest where he was right on.

Douglas Pike performed a valuable service to history by capturing the essence of the North Vietnamese strategy for victory in the Vietnam War. His explanation of the various techniques used to win not only victory on the battlefield, but, more importantly, strategic and political victories over both the American and South Vietnamese opponents, should be mandatory reading for anyone interested in how the United States lost this war. Well written and researched, this book is both enjoyable and disturbing.

A few years ago I wrote a positive review of Pike's PAVN. Since then, I have learned a few things about the historian's art, and I would like to ammend my earlier review.
Pike's work is not a well-researched scholarly approach to the Vietnam War, but is instead, a biased, poorly researched, emotion laden diatribe. Dau Tranh is not an established and proven strategy, as Pike would have us believe, but only a dream of old NVA generals, who would have liked to have won the war on their terms. That all of the Vietnamese actually lost the war, and are now enslaved in a Communist totalitarian regime, is the end of the war, not some glorious victory of an all-seeing, all-wise NVA strategy. Pike fails to prove his case, has little actual dcoumentary evidence, and his book should not be accepted as anything other than a diatribe.
The true story of the complex, long, bloody and difficult war in South East Asia remains to be told. However, the historiography of the nearly twenty years since this book was first published has shown that the outcome of the war was much more circumstantial and nuanced than Pike would have us believe. It was not this simple!