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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Very Thorough Read,
By A Customer
This review is from: Ten Thousand Day War: Vietnam : 1945-1975 (Paperback)
The Ten Thousand Day War is the best book on the subject I have ever read. As a student who already knew a good bit about the war, it deepened my knowledge, particulary in the French war in Indochina and America's involvement in it. The book is definitely fascinating and was written after the war ended, giving it a retrospective feel. The book is not extremely long but gives you all the information you will need to fully understand why French and American troops fought and died in a country that most people couldnt find on a map and why it is still a huge controversy to this day. Also, the book doesnt shove opinions down your throat, it is a history of the war and allows you to see the war from different viewpoints with reference to many of the important figures of the war. An excellent read that cuts through the controversy with the facts.
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Great Read,
By
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: The Ten Thousand Day War: Vietnam: 1945-1975 (Hardcover)
A friend recommended he book to me and I enjoyed the book, almost as much as the Vietnamese probably hated the 10,000 days of war they survived. The book does a great job of putting the war into the context of the post WWII collapse of colonial empire as well as the domestic political conditions that led to disasters in participation and execution.
The author's description of Ho's long term strategy and the contrast of that strategy with the US election cycle show the importance of understanding the enemy and reminds me that comics can Pogo got it right when he said: "We have met the enemy and the enemy is us."
16 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Inaccurate pro-Communist history,
By
This review is from: Ten Thousand Day War: Vietnam : 1945-1975 (Paperback)
As an avid student of the Vietnam War, I have read dozens of non-fiction histories and memoirs about the war. This is unequivocally one of the worst I have come across. Page 1 of the aknowledgements pretty much indicates what the quality of this book is going to be:
"This book was made possible in large measure by the extensive contribution of Peter Arnett . . . this book is based on [Arnett's] interviews." Since Arnett's journalistic work is the basis of this "history", let's take a moment to review Arnett's career: Arnett is a rabid America-basher who reported during the 1991 Gulf War that the USAF had bombed a baby milk factory in Baghdad. His evidence for this was a hand-painted sign reading "Baby Milk" in ENGLISH in front of the factory, and a lab coat with stitched lettering reading (again in ENGLISH) "BABY MILK PLANT IRAQ". In 1998 Arnett was fired by CNN for his "Operation Tailwind" story which falsely accused US forces of using sarin to kill US defectors in Laos in 1970. Most recently Arnett was fired by National Geographic and NBC for openly encouraging Iraqi forces on state TV from Baghdad during the Iraq invasion. He was then immediately hired by Britain's radical antiwar Daily Mirror. Maclear's reliance on him may explain the endless misleading and blatantly false assertions that appear in this book. Indeed, it is so filled with ludicrous assertions that I will only bother to address a few: Maclear obviously hero-worships Ho Chi Minh. He informs us of Ho's "compassion and lifetime patriotism (pg. 2)". He talks about how Ho "emotionally" told an OSS officer of the terrible suffering of the Vietnamese people during a recent famine (pg. 2). Maclear indicates that Ho's reading of the US Declaration of Independence during ceremonies in 1945 was heartfelt and genuine (pg. 18). He then presents this laughable tidbit from the OSS quoting Ho, as though it were an incredible piece of evidence that was deliberately hidden from the American public lest they realize what a decent, practicle guy he really was: "...although he formerly favored Communist ideals, he now realized that such ideals were impracticable for his country, and that his policy now was one of republican nationalism." (pg. 21). Basically, Ho was a flexible, decent Vietnamese George Washington who asked for America's help and was spurned because of their pathological anticommunism (despite the supposed fact that Ho wasn't a communist at all). Perhaps Mr. Maclear would like to explain the following: (1) If Ho gave up on communism as being "impracticable" then why did he not say so publicly and abolish the North Vietnamese Communist Party and Politburo? Why did he make himself a dictator and abolish all political parties save the Communist Party? Why did foreign leftists such as Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag and Francis Fitzgerald see unbiquitous pictures of Marx, Lenin and Stalin and hear Communist propaganda being emitted from loud-speakers? Why did he enact land-reform programs in the early 1950s that were an exact replica of Mao's? Why did Ho continue to use Marxist rhetoric on a regular basis? Is it at all pertinent that Ho was trained as an agent of the Comintern in Moscow in the 1920s? If not, why not? If yes, why didn't you mention it? Why, when Ho betrayed genuine Viet nationalists such as Phan Boi Chau to the French occupiers, did he justify his actions by claiming they were non-Communist Nationalists? (2) If Ho was such a patriot, so full of compassion for his people, why was he responsible for killing 50,000 peasants in the North through a Leninist "quota" system; 86% of Party members in countryside; 95% of cadres in anti-French resistance (so much for Viet nationalism); 3,000 in Hue (1968; many buried alive); and (indirectly) for the death of 600,000 boat people who drowned trying to escape Communist oppression? Why did he send 50,000 to 100,000 Vietnamese to "reeducation camps" upon coming to power? Why were 500,000 to 1 million Southerners sent to gulags by his successors? Why did Ho ostracize hundreds of thousands of family members of the "landlords" to isolated camps where many starved? And why did the North Vietnamese train, equip and infiltrate the radical Communist Khmer Rouge into Cambodia where they proceeded to murder millions in a systematic genocide? These facts and figures have been widely cited. See Courtois' "Black Book of Communism", Hung and Schecter's "The Palace File", Lewy's "America in Vietnam", Podhoretz's "Why We Were in Vietnam", Nixon's "No More Vietnams" among others. A few other corrections: (1) Maclear peddles the fiction that the NVA began infiltrating the South AFTER the US began escalating its involvement. He suggets the Communists didn't move South until late 1964 AFTER a 50% increase in US troop levels. In No More Vietnams (pg. 49), Nixon cites January 1959 as the date on which NVN decided to go to war to unite Vietnam and issued orders to that effect in May 1959 (pg.49). By 1963 (pg. 48) they had infiltrated 15,000+ of largely Southern cadres trained in the North across the border (at the 17th parallel). According to Zaffiri in "Westmoreland," COMUSMACV had conclusive evidence that the NVA 101st Regiment had arrived in the central highlands in December 1964 and that two more regiments were on their way. The first NVA regiment to arrive in the South had departed in September or October 1964 based on a leadership decision in July of that year, when COMUSMACV first received reports that NVA cadremen were participating in VC operations. Guenter Lewy, in "America in Vietnam," estimates there were 5,800 NVA troops fighting in the South in March 1965. In "Street Without Joy", Bernard Fall states (pg. 244) that columnist Joseph Alsop reported that US intelligence officers had identified the old 803d Vietminh Regiment, which destroyed French G.M. 100, as that which attacked and destroyed South Vietnamese garrisons at Kon-Brai and Dak-To in November 1961, having re-infiltrated from the North. In John Roche's "The Demise of Liberal Internationalism" (National Review, 3 May 1985, pg. 30): By the late Fifties, Hanoi had concluded that the locomotive of history had to be speeded up, and in 1959 the Party's 15th Plenum decided to mount a full-scale invasion of the South. Southern cadres who had gone to ground in 1954 were reactivated, and the VC guerilla movement began rapid expansion. Moreover, as General Vo Bam told a French television crew doing a history of the Ho Chi Minh Trail in 1983, "On May 19, 1959, I had the privilege of being designated by the Vietnamese Communist Party . . . to unleash a military attack on the South to liberate the South and reunify the fatherland." Moreover, the general added that by the beginning of 1961, when the US had 685 military advisors in the South, he had deployed thirty thousand North Vietnamese regulars in the region to set up the infrastructure for the Ho Chi Minh Trail. From that time to the fall of Saigon a decade ago, Hanoi was engaged in simple, naked aggression." (2) Maclear (pg. 65) states that elections to unite Vietnam were opposed by President Eisenhower and Secretary Dulles because they knew Ho Chi Minh would beat Ngo Dinh Diem. This is strictly true, but Maclear, in omitting key information, tries to imply that Ho had more popular support than Diem and that Eisenhower and Dulles were therefore attempting to subvert democracy in Vietnam. In fact, there was NO AGREEMENT to have elections at the Geneva Conference in 1954. The idea was raised but South Vietnam rejected it immediately. The US supported them because they knew that "free elections" would only be free in the South where multiple candidates would be run. In the North, only Ho would be on the ballot. Because the North had 55% of the Vietnamese population, Ho's victory was certain. NOT because he was widely revered. Indeed, this would not likely have been the case after having murdered 50,000 peasants after coming to power. (3) Maclear (pg.72): "... a US intelligence estimate, that 30,000 landlords and dissidents had been executed in the North. (According to American historian Gareth Porter, who analyzed the war in a book Peace Denied, this estimate was based on the reports of a Vietnamese exile who was receiving a US government grant. Porter himself estimates that executions in the North did not exceed 2,500." "Historian" Gareth Porter is co-author of "Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution" which has been hailed by Noam Chomsky. In the book Porter claimed that Pol Pot's horrendous cruelties "saved the lives of tens of thousands of people." He vigorously defended the Khmer Rouge after they forced the entire population of Phnom Penh into the jungle, marking the beginning of their holocaust of 2 million. As a member of the Indochina Resource Center, a radical lobby group, he fought to pressure Congress to cut all aid to South Vietnam after the American withdrawal. (4) Maclear (pg.314): "... Martin Luther King urged that all black and white Americans should declare themselves conscientious objectors. 'Negroes', he said, 'are dying in disproportionate numbers in Vietnam. Twice as many negroes as whites are in combat.' Research for this history shows that Martin Luther King was correct. Black Americans comprised 13% of the troop force in Vietnam - about equal to America's black population. But a disproportionate number of blacks, 28%, had combat assignments. Only 2% of officers were black." Ok, but if the figure of 28% of blacks in combat is correct, that's not the 65%? that MLK states. Unless MLK didn't mean... Read more ›
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