Customer Reviews

The Village

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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.

The Marines had a model of intervention built around their justly famous Small Wars Manual (originally written with considerable help from the Army based on its Philippines experience from 1898-1913). Where General Westmoreland and the senior Army favored large units sweeping across areas and hunting for large Vietcong forces, the Marines had developed a small unit action program, which was uniquely effective.

"The Village" is about one squad of Marines in Binh Nghia village (actually a collection of villages numbering about 6,000 people.) As Bing West notes, "This is the story of fifteen Marines who lived and fought for two years inside a Vietnamese village. There was shooting almost every night: from across the river a seasoned Viet Cong battalion attacked repeatedly. In the village, the South Vietnamese farmers planted rice during the day and after dusk patrolled with the Marines....at the height of the Vietnam War a dozen U.S. Marines did live in the village and were generally accepted by 6,000 Vietnamese farmers."

West was sent by the Marine Corps to study this process in 1966. He writes, this is "what war is like when you fight guerrillas, and of how Americans behaved when they volunteered to fight among the people. It was a bloody and intensely personal war." West went back to the village in 2002 and has a new closing chapter on the memories of Americans that remain despite a generation of Communist dictatorship.

This book is a useful introduction to policing in third world settings and establishing security through small-unit, intensely local efforts that build knowledge of the community and a network of personal relationships.

Anyone interested in better understanding how to win societal wars at the tactical level will find this a helpful book.

This is a wonderful book. It tells the story of 15 marines assigned
to defend a hamlet, working with about the same number of Popular Force
militiamen. Of that original band, 7 are killed in the first half of
the book, most of them in a single firefight when their "fort" is
over-run. (The PFs suffer losses at roughly the same rate.) But
they love the work, get along fine with the villagers, and exact an
even higher toll on the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese units sent
against them.

Bing West is a gifted writer. Here he is, describing a
marine with a fifty-caliber machine gun:

"The drunken soldier was set now, having leaned his body over the
rear of the gun and swung the heavy barrel upward. It wavered around
the fort and then slowly swung out toward the paddies, like a compass
needle coming to rest. Then came the solid, belting jackhammer sound
of the weapon firing and the thick incendiary slugs, big as cigars,
burned out over the paddies."

He also knows what he's writing about: West was a platoon leader
in Vietnam; he visited the village often, and he led some of the
patrols he describes, though mostly the book is based on interviews
with the men of the combined-action squad.

Later, West was an assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan
administration. He wrote the superlative account of the 2003 Iraq
War, "The March Up", which is what led me
to this book. I'm glad I had the chance to discover it, and I
recommend it without reservation. -- Dan Ford

This book tells the story of a village and the marines and militia who defended it during the Vietnam War. It is filled with first hand accounts of fast paced fire-fights and battalion-sized battles. The action is riveting, and the story is endearing and heart-wrenching. A squad of marines and platoon of PF militia men fight night-after-night against local guerillas, and at times, VC main force battalions. The Americans become members of the village, eat in families' homes, play with their children, attend weddings, funerals, and holiday festivities. Their emotional ties hearten them, motivate them, and ultimately betray them.

The book was written by Francis J. West, a marine officer and RAND Corporation researcher sent to the village in the late 1960's to study its marine defenders. The marine squad -- seldom numbering more than a dozen -- was known throughout the Marine Corps. It encountered communist units more often than any other unit in the Corps; its members often fought twenty to thirty engagements a month, more than most U.S. battalions.

I've recommended this book to several men in the military, including my brother, a captian in the 10th SF group. All of them, in turn, recommended it to their friends, commanders, and subordinates.

"The Village" is as good as "Bravo Two Zero," "A Bright Shining Lie," and "We Were Soldiers Once, and Young." You won't put this book down until you're finished, and then, you'll read it again and again and give copies to your friends for Christmas.

"This is the story of a handful of Americans and Vietnamese who lived and fought together in a Vietnamese village. It is not a political book or a critique of national policy.... /// The story is not typical of military operations in Vietnam. Less than one percent of American forces there were employed in the [combined] fashion described in this book. Nor was the combat typical. Throughout Vietnam, one out of four hundred night patrols in the populated areas made contact; in this village, it was one out of every two." (p. xv) (Captain F. J. West, USMCR; from the preface to The Village) /// The Combined Action Program was an unconventional approach to pacification conceived by the Marine Corps and unique to the Vietnam War. Marine infantry squads (10-14 men) integrated with local militia units ("Popular Forces" or PFs) at the village and hamlet level in South Vietnam. Theoretically, the employment of the Marines in this fashion would increase the effectiveness of the PFs and gain the confidence of the Vietnamese by demonstrating a long-term commitment to their security. III Marine Amphibious Force first experimented with combined action in 1965. The experiment yielded positive results. Thus, the Combined Action Program was formally established and centered on the combined action platoon (CAP)-the Program's basic tactical unit. By 1970, more than 1,700 Marines, 100 Navy corpsmen and 3,000 PFs formed 113 CAPs in 102 villages throughout I Corps. This book tells the story of one such CAP stationed in the village of Binh Nghia. /// Binh Nghia was located in a highly contested area south of Chu Lai in Quang Ngai Province. Prior to the arrival of the Marines in 1966, the Viet Cong owned Binh Nghia-controlling five of the village's seven hamlets. The VC garrisoned one of their main force battalions on the far shore of the village's neighboring tidal river and used the waterway to transport their rice and supplies. Seventeen months after the arrival of the Marines, however, the Viet Cong were gone-largely due to the success of the Binh Nghia CAP. /// Four noncommissioned officers rotated command of the Marine garrison in Binh Nghia: Corporal Beebe, Sergeant Sullivan, Sergeant White, and Sergeant McGowan. West cites a key event during the tenure of each Marine as a turning point in the book. Corporal Beebe's rotation home in June 1966 coincided with the deaths of Private First Class Page, the first Marine death in Binh Nghia; Ap Thanh Lam, the village's highly regarded police chief; and Khoi, the younger of two PF brothers serving with the Marines. West asserts that the intended Viet Cong message never reached the Marines: "The Viet Cong had a problem....The villagers and the PFs who knew the history of Binh Nghia could clearly see the power of the Viet Cong manifested in the deaths of Khoi, Page, and Lam. /// Not so the Marines.... not knowing [Binh Nghia's history], they did not view the events as a prelude to the future. There is no evidence [that] the Marines shared the Vietnamese view of the situation in the village." (p. 47) /// Higher headquarters in Chu Lai dispatched Lieutenant O'Rourke to "observe" the CAP's activities in Binh Nghia during Sergeant Sullivan's tenure. As a direct result of O'Rourke's presence, the CAP patrolled more aggressively and achieved better results. But complacency set in after O'Rourke departed in August 1966. Less than thirty days later, the VC launched a successful attack against Fort Page. (Fort Page was the CAP stronghold in Binh Nghia named in memory of Private Page.) Sergeant White succeeded Sullivan after the attack and the Viet Cong increased their efforts to reclaim the village. During this crucial period, the CAP held out and defeated the VC (largely because of White's leadership). McGowan relieved Sergeant White in January 1967 and maintained command until October 1967-when the Binh Nghia CAP was disbanded because the Marines were no longer needed. /// Marine captains were not normally sent into villages to accompany CAP patrols (such as the author was). West took up the story of the Binh Nghia CAP because the Marine Corps had identified a need to study and disseminate small unit action "lessons learned" from Vietnam. West came back onto active duty during the summer of 1966 in fulfillment of this requirement. He was hand-selected for the job because of his military and academic credentials. (West already had an undergraduate degree in history and was a graduate student at the time he left for Vietnam.) These qualifications made West eminently qualified to tell the Binh Nghia CAP's story. /// West concludes that that the combined action effort in Binh Nghia was successful. After October 1967, the Viet Cong no longer dominated the village and the PFs were able to maintain security without the Marines. Although it is obvious that West is a proponent of combined action, he refrains from making any assertions beyond Binh Nghia regarding the Program. West does, however, state that the "strategic implications" of combined action "merit careful analysis" in "Fast Rifles," an article that appeared in the October 1967 issue of the Marine Corps Gazette (which served as the precursor to this book). Would the combined action strategy have been successful if it was implemented throughout all of Vietnam? Although it is a moot point, the issue does bear further analysis-particularly in light of the strong differences in opinion between top Marine and Army officials. For example, whereas General Walt (senior Marine commander in Vietnam) championed combined action in his Strange War, Strange Strategy (New York, 1970): "Of all our innovations in Vietnam none was as successful, as lasting in effect, or as useful for the future as the Combined Action Program." (Walt 1970, p. 105) /// General Westmoreland (senior Army commander) expressed otherwise in A Soldier Reports (New York, 1976): "Although I disseminated information on the [combined action] platoons and their success to other commands ... I simply had not enough numbers to put a squad of Americans in every village and hamlet; that would have been fragmenting resources and exposing them to defeat in detail." (Westmoreland 1976, p. 216) /// In summary, this book's greatest value lies in the author's prose. The Village was written for the enlisted Marine and junior officer. Although it is historically accurate and highly readable, the book is not intended for scholarly inspection. There is no bibliography or index. West's sole purpose is to demonstrate how the combined force of Marines and PFs were able to achieve success against the numerically superior Communists. To this end, he is successful. Although there has been an outpouring of literature written in the same vein, the Village still stands alone as the best eyewitness narrative of a combined action platoon. Those seeking a more scholarly, balanced account should see Michael Peterson's The Combined Action Platoons: The US Marines' Other War in Vietnam (New York: Praeger, 1989).

This book was recommended to me by a vet well before I found it. It is an non-fiction account of the experiences of one squad of Marines working in the "win their hearts and minds" program. The depictions of the bonds that are formed between the Marines and the Vietnamese villagers is reassuring and fresh. The book tells a very emotional tale of Marines dedicated to their cause and country. It is well written and illustrates some idiosyncrasies of trying to get things done in a military bureaucracy.

This book should be required reading for anyone who is interested in the topic of insurgency and counter-insurgency. The story is starkly at odds with the usual images of Vietnam that Americans have come to accept as the narrative of that conflict -- there are no airstrikes pummelling the enemy into submission, no leaping helicopter air assaults deep into the middle of nowhere on search and destroy missions, no recreational drug use by bewildered draftees and no rock and roll sound track.

There is, instead, the story of a small unit of United States Marines who combined with Vietnamese militia to form a Combined Action Platoon. The CAP concept was not of mobile forces overpowering the enemy with American technology and firepower. It was more of an armed constabulary -- forty, fifty men garrisoning a contested village. There was absolutely nothing high tech abouth the CAP or its techniques; the tactics and techniques were timeless: meet the people, treat them with respect, help them when you can, earn their trust, and ensure their safety. This impossibly simple approach very quickly drained away the protective cover of the Viet Cong, exposing them to the death of a thousand cuts as villagers began to provide actionable intelligence to the American and Vietnamese members of the CAP.

In reading this book one has to wonder how Vietnam might have turned out had this approach -- and the similar tactics of the Army Special Forces -- been given more support. There was strong opposition to such ideas among the conventionalist leadership within the Pentagon -- too much risk (and, to be fair, the CAP was a vulnerable target, as West's book reveals), too slow a pay off, etc. The worst part, perhaps, is that resistance to ideas like the CAP program was seen as a rejection of dangerous and innovative ideas in favor of the "traditional" American way of war, which for the proponents of such meant World War 2 -- and betrayed an utter ignorance of 90% of the country's military history when ideas like the CAP program were aptly on display in places like Haiti and Nicaragua, etc.

Anyone interested in understanding the current US military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan -- and getting beyond the simplistic "it's just another Vietnam" trope -- would be well advised to read this book. It is certain that most of the officers and NCOs leading the troops in combat have done so.

You will learn enough about the contents of this book on your own. What I want to communicate is the historical impact The Village has had and, rightfully, should have. If you're readng this review, you need to read this book. Its effectiveness is rooted in its simple approach and language-- leaves the B.S. for hollywood and the magazine excerpts. Hopefully as school children, college students, policy makers, and writers study in the future, they will increasingly turn to this book as an unfiltered account of one small part of the Vietnam War, which, I believe, transcends just that region, just that war, and into battles and struggles throughout time. Every 7-10 years it seems like pop culture decides to revisit Vietnam. In a way, I can only hope they continue to skip over The Village because it would only ruin the book's true impact. Worth the effort to find it.

This was one of the first books ever written about the Vietnam War (I have the paperback reprinted in the mid-80's), and it should be viewed as an incredible piece of history. It is about a small group of Marines living, defending, and perishing in a Vietnamese village. So many books written on the War have tainted baggage, either pro- or con- on the War, but West has put together an amazing account of what transipred, and leaves the reader to draw his/her own conclusions. So many people seem to be consumed with "what really happened over there"- I think The Village should be on the list of 3 or 4 books that captures the truth. Plus, the incredible fighting scenes and ultimate ending for the Marines is very dramatic, whether West had intended it to be or not. This should be required reading in college history classes; for the writing, the historiography, and the essence of what happened in Vietnam.

Let me start of by saying that I haven't read the whole book. This book came up in a search I was doing on my Uncle Larry. He died long before I was born, so I didn't know much more about him than that he died in Nam. On page 51 I read about how he died. On page 52 I learned that they named the fort after him. I started out looking for picture or comments posted by his friend and found his last moments instead. If anyone who knew Larry Page reads this, I would love it if you could comment and tell me about him. Thanks.

*Larry's date of death is wrong in the book. The book lists him as begin KIA on June 20, 1966. He actually died on June 22, 1966.

I am an active-duty Marine officer. I read this book in 1995 as a First Lieutenant aboard the USS Kearsarge on my way to the Adriatic Sea in 1995. [-- It was in the ship's library in a manuscript format. It looked like it had just come from the typewriter because the pages were 8 1/2 by 11 and the binding looked homemade.] When I finally left the boat, I lost the name of the book. I have been searching for it ever since. I have a fairly extensive library of Vietnam literature and I think "The Village" ranks number one in both content and storytelling. I rate it above even Philip Caputo's "A Rumour of War", James Webb's "Fields of Fire", and "Easter Offensive", all five-star books in their own right. Should be on the Commandant's required reading list (it may be, I'm not sure.)