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Customer Reviews of Vietnam

A Military History of Vietnam
The history of Vietnam is obscure to most Westerners, at least prior to the Indo-China war of the fifties. This book attempts to fill that gap, and provide a short overview of the history of the nation over the last thousand years or so. Given that it's a short book (text runs to just over 200 pages) it does a good job.

Vietnam has been wracked by wars and conquests during most of the period covered by the book, and make no mistake, that's the author's focus. There's nothing about culture, literature, art, science, or ordinary life in this book: it's about politics, and warfare. The author spends one chapter dealing with the period pre-French conquest, and a second covering the period of French colonialism. The rest of the book covers the Vietnam Wars from 1946-1975, with a brief chapter after chronicling the country's history since the end of the war.

This is a good book, given its limited scope. The author has much to say about the war, most of it critical of American and South Vietnamese leadership. Hey, they did lose the war! The book also doesn't flinch from recounting atrocities by both sides, recounting them judiciously, and not taking sides.

If I have a criticism of the book, it's that it's too short. Two hundred pages doesn't do justice to the history of the war at less than an overview level, and trying to fit the last thousand years in there too was perhaps a bit much. I found myself wishing for more.

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Good Overview of Military History
As someone who grew up during the Vietnam era, I wanted to read a book that would give me some understanding of what went on during the Vietnam war. I was a bit too young to really comprehend the current events as they were happening but too old for the Vietnam war to be covered in the history books I studied in school.

This book provides a good, succinct overview of the military aspects of the war. While there are allusions to events outside the military realm (the protests back in the U.S., Kennedy's assasination, etc.) the focus is definitely on the war itself. While the main focus is on the period in which the U.S. was involved in Vietnam, a significant part of the book is devoted to setting the context for that period (wars in Vietnam during ancient times and, especially the French Indo-China wars). There is also a short section on what happened after the U.S. left Vietnam. This context is interesting since the author points out how many of the mistakes made by the U.S. had been made by others during earlier times.

The book is quite brief (204 pages), so the author does not go into great depth on anything. For example, the My Lai massacre takes up only a very brief paragraph. If you're looking for an in depth analysis of the war, you would probably be better off with another book. However, as a brief overview, I thought the book was quite well done.