Once Upon a Distant War : David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan, Peter Arnett--Young War Correspondents and Their Early Vietnam Battles

Rating:
Summary: Good history of an overlooked past
Review: To many, Vietnam is a time seen through living color images of American boys in rice paddies, jungles and hanging out the side of UH-1 Huey helicopters. Many don't remember that there was a time before large scale troop deployments brought hundreds of thousands of Americans to Vietnam.
This book captures that era pretty well. The drama clearly has to do with several young reporters trying to get at the story of how American military influence in Vietnam was working: mostly it wasn't -- working.
The battle of Ap Bac was pretty well described and the affect this had on the young reporters. Until Ap Bac, people here didn't pay much attention to Vietnam. Then when the American trained South Vietnamese forces lost the battle of Ap Bac due to numerous failings on the part of many commanders, people started to think South Vietnam was taking a turn for the worse.
It was interesting to see that the Viet Cong controlled most of South Vietnam at the time, and mostly the South Vietnamese forces, or American allies, were generally used as coup protection for the ruling Diem brothers.
I found Prochnau's work pretty revealing when it came to the subterfuge of the American command in Vietnam at the time, the Kennedy Administrations waffling in that area and the plots hatched to get rid of the rulling Diem brothers. Mostly, Kennedy skates by criticism of Vietnam these days and Lyndon Johnson is blamed for the big war build up. It was Kennedy's Sec. of State Dean Rusk and Sec. of Defense Robert McNamarra who guided us down the Vietnam trail.
The book potrays the American commanders, namely Gen. Paul Harkins, as being an inept yes man sending back to Washington only a rosey picture when the truth was far more murky. I don't know if he was or wasn't inept, but somebody passed back faulty information about how well the South Vietnamese forces were fighting in the jungle when mostly they were hanging out in Saigon as palace guards.
The book also does a good job showing the complex relationship between the various ruling bodies in South Vietnam -- the Budhists, Catholics, the South Vietnamese government and the American command.
In the end, though, this book is not a history, but a realy readable work on those who shaped American policy in Southeast Asia -- military commanders, young journalists, diplomats and the White House -- during the 1960s.