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Rating: 
Summary: Quickie overview of Vietnam-era Uniforms
Review: I found this 40-odd page booklet to be a great disappointment. Mike Chappell has a decent ability to depict uniforms and equipment, but his faces are truly bizarre. The handful of colour plates, most of which do not depict issue uniforms, are not nearly sufficient to cover the various armies that fought in Vietnam. There are no separate depictions of weapons or equipment. There are tables of U.S. and Vietnames rank insignia, but they are in black and white.If you are looking for a first-hand account of modifications to U.S. uniforms, this booklet would be useful.
Rating:
Summary: Quickie overview of Vietnam-era Uniforms
Review: I found this 40-odd page booklet to be a great disappointment. Mike Chappell has a decent ability to depict uniforms and equipment, but his faces are truly bizarre. The handful of colour plates, most of which do not depict issue uniforms, are not nearly sufficient to cover the various armies that fought in Vietnam. There are no separate depictions of weapons or equipment. There are tables of U.S. and Vietnames rank insignia, but they are in black and white. If you are looking for a first-hand account of modifications to U.S. uniforms, this booklet would be useful.
Rating:
Summary: Superseded by Later More Detailed Works
Review: Though I have had this book for a long time, I have seldom looked at it. As a specialist in this period and a veteran of the Cold War Army I have studied this period in real time since the fifties.
In any case, the book is now obsolescent except for the color illustrations. At the age of 23 it has long been superseded by the works of Shelby Stanton (c.f.) and others.
The author did serve in Vietnam but since we were there for eight years, as often stated, due to the replacement system, we fought eight different one year wars, not one eight year war.
Those who were there in 1965 and earlier looked like those who served in the 1950s, by the end of the war, the soldiers' clothing and equipment was totally revised and had gone through two cycles of development and entering on a third which began during the last years of US participation and remained in use till the late eighties.
So you cannot generalize about VM, you need to know where someone was, and most important, when.
This book is simply not comprehensive enough nor is its companion in this series (#143), which was an attempt to fill in the gaps left by this one.
Every national contingent who served in VM could well support its own study, the Australians and the South Koreans come readily to mind.
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