Facing the Phoenix

This book is a contender for the title of "Best Book on the Vietnam War." This is not a "war story" book or a record of military fights on the battlefield. Instead, it recounts the struggles among the allies, both in Indochina and in Washington, D.C., to find and pursue a strategy. The fact that it took the U.S. so long to come to a winning strategy explains why the American Congress eventually lost enthusiasm for the war and pulled the plug just when the South Vietnamese had risen to the point of viability as an independent nation capable of self-defense against the determined enemy that controlled the people of the North. The title of this book is questionable because it's not a good guide to the wide range of subjects treated authoritatively by the book, nor does it deal exclusively with the CIA's role as the title might suggest. It is taken from the name of the allied effort to crush the communists' war-directing apparatus among the thousands of South Vietnamese villages. That effort was intially conceived by a South Vietamese military officer who had served in the North Vietnamese military forces before becoming disillusioned with the communists' heavy-handed approach to dominion over all the nationalist groups working for independence. The author pegs his story around the history of that officer. The book's special strength is in the first-hand information obtained by the author's interviews of key actors in the key events of the war. It is also of importance that the author picks up the story at the end of World War II. Without that background, it is difficult to put later developments into meaningful context, or to see the continuity of the French and American wars. The French had been in Indochina for over a century, and the drive to wrest independence from the French -- and, later, to maintain it in the face of well-intended but often misdirected U.S. invervention -- was fundamental to the Vietnamese motivations throughout the war. From the Vietnamese point of view there was simply one war -- a 40-year war for independence. From the Western perspective, there was first the "French War" and then the "American War." The major American strategic gaffes are made evident, along with the background that explains how they happened. The gaffes include America's misguided and high-handed killing of South Vietnam's president, Ngo Dinh Diem (and the author provides the evidence that U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge was instrumental in eliminating Diem and his entire government), the only South Vietnamese patriot of sufficient stature to have had a chance of rallying the moral opposition to the communists under Ho Chi Minh in the North; the introduction of American fighting forces onto a field that should have been occupied only by the contending North and South Vietnamese (and the corollary neglect of the essential political and military mobilization of the South Vietnamese); and, ultimately, the U.S.'s egregious