Abandoning Vietnam: How America Left and South Vietnam Lost Its War

James H. Wilbanks has written one of the finest military histories to date of the final two stages of the Vietnam War: the period from the Tet Offensive in 1968 to the American withdrawal in 1972, and the bitter end game, 1972-1975. A retired U.S. Army officer and a professor at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, Wilbanks focuses much of his attention on the Nixon Administration's strategy of strengthening the Armed Forces of South Vietnam (RVNAF) while at the same time withdrawing American forces from the war. Known as "Vietnamization," the goal of the program was to make the RVNAF capable of standing alone against its Communist opponents. Why Vietnamization failed just two years after the United States withdrew its forces from Vietnam on 29 March 1973 is the central question of the book. Drawing on an impressive range of primary and secondary sources, Wilbanks charts the course of Vietnamization from its origin in 1969 until the fall of Saigon in 1972. In addition to providing superb summaries of the major military campaigns fought by the RVNAF during this period, Wilbanks also delves into some of the political-military elements of the story. We learn, for example, that General Creighton W. Abrams, the Commander of the U.S. Military Assistance Command Vietnam, warned the Nixon Administration in a 2 September 1969 memo that Vietnamization "would not permit" the South Vietnamese to handle the combined threat of a North Vietnamese invasion and the insurgency in the South (28). The main reasons for his pessimistic outlook were "poor leadership, high desertion rates, and corruption in the upper ranks of the RVNAF" (28). All the same, Nixon's Defense Secretary, Melvin Laird insisted on going forward with the strategy even though the "best that the United States could hope for was to build-up the South Vietnamese so that they could hold on for at least a decent interval after the American troops had been withdrawn" (28). Laird had to reject Abrams's assessment because accepting it would have meant admitting "that the United States could never gracefully exit Vietnam" and achieve Nixon's goal of "peace with honor" (28). In the end, Wilbanks reveals that Vietnamization "achieved neither peace nor honor"(4). Beginning with the Operation Lam Som 719 debacle in 1971 and ending North Vietnam's invasion of South Vietnam in 1975, Abandoning Vietnam carefully analyzes the final battles of the RVNAF. It is not a pretty story, but there were some shining moments such as the 1972 Easter Offensive, when the RVNAF managed to hold on against a 14-division North Vietnamese attack. Wilbanks, who fought at the besieged city of An Loc during this campaign, attributed much of the success of the RVNAF in 1972 to the presence of American advisors on the ground combined with American air power and naval gunfire support. Three years later when these American elements were not available to "save South Vietnam" (160), Saigon fell in a mere 55 days