Rating: 
Summary: A Must Read
Review: This book reads like an adventure novel. It certainly helps one understand the kind of boneheaded thinking that came out of Washington during the and immediately following the Vietnam war. It shows Gerald Ford in a whole new light. And to think that many of the same decision makers who brought us this debacle are in the current administration.
Rating:
Summary: lessons as yet unlearned
Review: We entered Indochina to save a country, and ended by rescuing a ship.
-Henry KissingerWith America now the world's unchallenged superpower, it is all too easy to forget the depths to
which we had sunk in the 1970s. Ralph Wetterhahn's Last Battle is a healthy reminder of how deep
and of some of the reasons why. The book succeeds in three disparate tasks. First, Wetterhahn, a former Air Force pilot, reconstructs
the rarely told--and, his research suggests, never completely told before--story of the Mayaguez
"rescue", in May 1975, adeptly switching back and forth between the deadly military action and the
political games being played in the Ford White House. The stark contrast between the bravery of the
men on the ground and the conniving of Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger, in particular, is an ugly
reminder of how disconnected the private political concerns of Washington politicians had become
from the reality of sending men to die in Southeast Asia. It is hard to avoid the conclusion, and
Wetterhahn makes it even harder, that the Mayaguez affair was scene by Gerald Ford as an easy and
cheap way to deflect attention from the ignominious Fall of Saigon two weeks earlier and from his
disastrous pardon of Richard Nixon. Even more maddening is the level of chaos and incompetence that Wetterhahn depicts at the highest
levels of the decision making process. From attacking the wrong island to commencing after the
Cambodians had already announced they would release the ship to President Ford actually issuing
orders to pilots during the attack, the whole mess is one long example of how not to use American
military might. One illustrative moment, which would be funny if it weren't so frightening, sees the
White House photographer speak up during a meeting to suggest that the massive retaliation Ford is
contemplating might be inappropriate. And the most shocking portions of the book detail the
administration's willingness to cover up how many men were lost in the engagement--41, including 23
Air Force servicemen killed in a helicopter crash which was treated as if it had nothing to do with the
exercise--and the fact that three Marines, still alive and fighting when last seen, were left behind on
Koh Tang Island. Wetterhahn does an excellent job of dissecting the whole morass and drawing out lessons from it. He
also makes a convincing case that the failure to openly discuss the problems at the time may well have
contributed to future disasters like the botched Iranian hostage rescue in the Carter administration. The final portion of the book is the most poignant though, as Wetterhahn, by now pretty much
obsessed with the fate of those three marines, spends years ping-ponging between the US government
and Cambodia, trying to determine their fate and recover them or their remains. Here the story takes
on both the nature of a mystery tale, the fate of the three at the heart of it, and of a psychological
thriller, with Wetterhahn's own need to reach finality practically taking control of his life. Mr. Wetterhahn deserves great credit for sinking his teeth into this story and refusing to let go. His
determination pays off in the fullest portrait we're likely to get of a relatively minor incident that
reveals more than we might like to know about the shabby way we treated our military forces during
the Vietnam era. In the end, it reveals the terrible costs, in human lives, human emotions, and the
continuance of faulty, even deadly, procedures, that is paid when government refuses to honestly face
up to the consequences of its actions. Though the events herein happened almost thirty years ago, the
lessons to be learned are always timely. And it is never too late to honor the sacrifices made by our
fighting men. For three brave Marines--Danny G. Marshall, Joseph Nelson Hargrove, and Gary Lee
Hall--that recognition has waited until now, but they well deserve it. GRADE : A
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