Customer Reviews

The War for South Viet Nam

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This book by Professor Anthony Joes of St. Joseph University in Pennsylvania provides a good brief (just under 160 pages of text) overview of the United States' two decades of military involvement in South Viet Nam. Dr. Joes is appropriately critical of the strategic and tactical errors made by the political/military leaders of the United States and South Viet Nam (the assassination of Diem, failure to cut off the Ho Chi Minh Trail, difficulty of defending Hue and Da Nang, etc.) without romanticizing either the southern Viet Cong/NLF terrorist guerrillas or the totalitarian Stalinist regime of North Viet Nam. Dr. Joes' expressed sympathy for the plight of South Viet Nam and its people--the vast majority of whom did not want to be governed by a brutal and economically backward communist regime--is rare in works about the Viet Nam War. It is interesting to note that, but for the Watergate Scandal which prevented Presidents Nixon and, later, Ford from honoring U.S. committments to South Viet Nam after January 1973, there might still be an independent South Viet Nam today.

My only (and minor) criticism of Dr. Joes' book is the relative sparsity of the endnotes, which is unusual for academic writing about a subject as controversial and well-commented about as the Viet Nam War.