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136 of 148 people found the following review helpful
Author Sorley Corrects the Record
By Stuart A. Herrington on May 16, 2000
Format: 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!
