The Vietnam War: A Military History

By Geoffrey Wawro

Basic Books 2024

Military historian Geoffrey Wawro’s big new title, The Vietnam War: A Military History, new from Basic Books, tells the story of the war in a broad narrative format not seen in a popular press since Max Hastings did it back in 2018. Wawro’s book has a few black-and-white photos sprinkled throughout its pages, a couple of perfunctory maps, well over 70 glorious pages of scholarly notes, and enough narrative fire and panache on every page so that this book practically qualifies as a Dumas novel. It feels a few kinds of wrong to call a military history of the Vietnam War entertaining, but even so, this is the most page-turningly readable history of the war ever written. 

There are two central reasons for this. The first is the gentleman’s lie of the title: this is far more sweeping than ‘a military history’ sounds, obviously, since the thing has no military maps, much less any of the other trappings of genuine military history, and hardly a pair of pages passes without Wawro repairing to Washington DC to kick President Lyndon Johnson in the shins. This is a help rather than a hindrance; straight-up military histories are repulsive to the general readership this book very much deserves. 

The second reason for the book’s success is that Wawro has the courage to hate. He tells the full breadth of his story, writing evocatively about the nightmarish conditions faced by the rank-and-file soldiers who found themselves transported into a nightmare:

Even in clear weather, the American weapons were blunted in this mountainous, jungle-cloaked wilderness, where accurate map reading was difficult even from the air, and units on the ground struggled just to find their own location on a map. In this operation, like the ones before and after it, American units could hardly move. They followed jungle trails where they existed, but the need to place security elements on the flanks, where they had to hack their way through virgin forest and bamboo with machetes, meant that the rate of movement in these rainswept woods was less than 300 yards an hour.

And he’s equally gripping on the countless bloody tragedies experienced by US forces, such as the attack on the Lang Vei Special Forces camp by the North Vietnamese Army in February 1968:

Flushed from their bunkers by flamethrowers and satchel charges, the 24 Green Berets and 400 Montagnard troops at Lang Vei fought for their lives. The Green Beret commander called in air strikes and artillery on his own position. Half of his men were killed or captured; the survivors fled in the night toward the gates of Khe Sanh combat base, where 100 stragglers turned up early on February 7 pleading to be let inside.

But running through the book, regularly shouldering aside the pathos and the jungle fighting, is a glowing thread of hatred for one character: General William Westmoreland, the man in charge of US forces from 1964 to 1968. Wawro’s book has barely begun before the pillorying begins. “True to form, Westmoreland paved South Vietnam, built container ports and air bases, and positioned field artillery everywhere in the country, but never even sniffed victory,” Wawro writes. “He made the war about operational art, not strategy.” 

Every failure, every skirmish, every defeat, all of it finds its way back to Westmoreland, and as the book’s 600 pages wear on, as the war’s slogging futility becomes increasingly apparent, when “high American kill ratios were not bringing victory, the conditions for lasting peace, or even negotiations,” the villain of the piece is concerned not with adapting to circumstances but rather with salvaging his reputation, “drafting apologias for his own blundering conduct.” By the end, he’s literally trying to rewrite history:

Westy’s zeal to clean up his reputation was inexhaustible. Later, he would write the foreword to the Marine Corps history of Khe Sanh and fill it with self-serving nonsense about the value of the operation, his lawyerly edits revealing a fervid effort to cover his tracks after being duped by the North Vietnamese: “Please revise to say not that I took forces from ‘less critical’ areas but from areas under ‘less pressure.” In Westy’s mind, semantics like these were significant. 

All this surgical condemnation isn’t in the least bit inaccurate, and it also fills Wawro’s book with a bubbling, almost illicit kind of energy. For this historian, the tragedies of the war sprang entirely from the military bumbling of Westmoreland, which was in turn enabled by the political bumbling of President Johnson. The fact that there are thousands of dead men and women at the other end of that comedy of errors puts the sting in the book’s tail, as military histories but especially military histories of this war tend to have. 

As to the war itself, Wawro, a Distinguished Research Professor and director of the Military History Center at the University of North Texas, takes a 30,000-foot view. “Critics argued then, and still do, that had Johnson only permitted Westmoreland to do more – to attack Laos and Cambodia, to invade and pulverize North Vietnam – then the war could have been won,” he writes. “Beguiling as such arguments are, they are founded on nonsense.” Yes indeed, the very idea that directly attacking the enemy might have led to victory must be nonsense; certainly in the face of this book’s anger and sorrow, it would be pointless bad form to suggest otherwise. It was all so long ago, after all, and Westy’s been dead for 20 years. 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News