Dirty Wars: Counterinsurgency in Vietnam and Today

In the foreword to Douglas Blaufarb, The Counterinsurgency Era: U.S. Doctrine and Performance, 1950 to the Present (New York: Free Press, 1977), William Bundy writes that "counterinsurgency" was coined "by John and Robert Kennedy (or those close to them)" (ibid., x). Also see Michael Shafer , Deadly Paradigms: The Failure of US Counterinsurgency Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), chap. 9.

Roger Hilsman , To Move a Nation: The Politics of Foreign Policy in the Administration of John F. Kennedy (New York: Delta , 1967), 426 and 432. Rostow’s comments are cited in Michael Latham , Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and "Nation Building" in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 2. On counterinsurgency in its cold war context, see Blaufarb , Counterinsurgency Era, 1-9.

An impression formed after 1975 that U.S. defeat in Vietnam spelled the end of counterinsurgency doctrine. "The term ‘counterinsurgency,’" wrote Blaufarb, "conveys today, in the late 1970s, various impressions mostly having to do with cold war attitudes, now considered outdated, and specifically with U.S. intervention, now considered misguided, to prevent revolutions in distant lands." (ibid., 1). In the 1980s, when Shafer was working on his book Deadly Paradigms, for which he chose the subtitle "The Failure of U.S. Counterinsurgency Policy," many regarded the topic as no more than "a footnote to a rapidly fading and best forgotten moment in American foreign policy" (ix).

David Petraeus et al., The U.S. Army-Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), xxxiii, xxii, xlvi, 1.

Ibid., xxxv and xxxix.

Blaufarb, Counterinsurgency Era, 107-8 (on the Civil Guard and the Self-Defense Corps), 217 (Chieu Hoi), and 56, 65, and 76 (Special Forces). Much of the U.S. military incorporation of counterinsurgency doctrine was cosmetic, as in the rechristening of "light" tanks and "lean" artillery: Andrew Krepinevich, The Army and Vietnam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 42.

On Kennedy’s temporizing approach to counterinsurgency, see Blaufarb, Counterinsurgency Era, 102; on strategic hamlets, see Philip Catton, Diem’s Final Failure: Prelude to America’s War in Vietnam (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002). Oscar Salemink provides an analysis of the Special Forces and an excellent general treatment of French pacification and U.S. counterinsurgency in The Ethnography of Vietnam’s Central Highlanders: A Historical Contextualization, 1850-1990 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2003).

On the change from counterinsurgency to pacification, see Blaufarb, Counterinsurgency Era, 206; Eric Bergerud, The Dynamics of Defeat: The Vietnam War in Hau Nghia Province (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1991), 143; and William Colby, Lost Victory: A Firsthand Account of America’s Sixteen-Year Involvement in Vietnam (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1989), 214-15.

For details and evidence on U.S. war making, see David Hunt, Vietnam’s Southern Revolution: From Peasant Insurrection to Total War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008), chap. 7-9. According to Michael Clodfelter, "70% of all U.S. artillery rounds expended were fired on harassment and interdiction or when there was little or no contact with the enemy." Vietnam in Military Statistics: A History of the Indochina Wars, 1772-1991 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1995), 240.

Lewy documented his claim with references to statements from the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the State Department; see Guenter Lewy , America in Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 99, 259, 65, 111; for an eye-witness account, see Jonathan Schell , The Village of Ben Suc (New York: Knopf, 1967) and The Military Half: An Account of Destruction in Quang Ngai and Quang Tin (New York: Vintage , 1968).

William Westmoreland , "The Refugee Problem," memorandum, January 4, 1968, Westmoreland papers, box 15, folder 28, history file I, document 23, LBJ Library; and A Soldier Reports (New York: Da Capo Press, 1976/1980/1989 ), 152-53. The Westmoreland memorandum is cited in David Elliott , The Vietnamese War: Revolution and Social Change in the Mekong Delta, 1930-1975 ( New York: Sharpe, 2003), 1133-34.

The Program for the Pacification and Long Term Development of South Vietnam (PROVN) is cited in Pentagon Papers: The Defense Department History of United States Decision-making on Vietnam (Boston: Beacon, 1971), II, 501.

Ibid. The passage on "manipulation" is cited in Bergerud, Dynamics of Defeat, 110. In this and other clashes, General Westmoreland proved to be somewhat more concerned about Republic of South Vietnam (RVN) sovereignty than were John Paul Vann, Robert Komer, and others in the PROVN camp. According to Bergerud, Westmoreland did not want ill-prepared U.S. advisers interfering with the work of their counterparts. By contrast, "Vann and his supporters believed that the insurgency was the natural consequence of the misguided policies of a corrupt and archaic regime. Therefore, they were quite willing to risk the consequences, both in Vietnam and abroad, of having the Americans labeled ‘imperialists’ and the GVN marked as a U.S. ‘puppet,’ especially because foreign and domestic opponents of U.S. policy already were describing the situation in exactly those terms." Bergerud goes on to note that "American imperialism" was a talking point for "the Buddhist struggle movement that culminated in near anarchy in Danang and Hue in early 1966" (Dynamics of Defeat, 112-13). When questioned about the issue, Komer declared, "Hell, with half a million men in Vietnam, we are spending twenty-one billion dollars a year, and we’re fighting the whole war with the Vietnamese watching us; how can you talk about national sovereignty?" (cited in Krepinevich, Army and Vietnam, 196).

On Civilian Operations Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS), see Colby, Lost Victory, 215.

For more on the Abrams-Colby collaboration, see Lewis Sorley , A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam (New York: Harcourt, 1999).

Most U.S. advisers at the district level were serving one-year terms in Vietnam and could not speak Vietnamese. Advising was a low-prestige assignment for military personnel, who did not stand to gain by stating that the war was going badly. Still, Guenter Lewy, Richard Hunt, and others who mined adviser reports demonstrate that they contain much useful commentary on the situation in the countryside. See Lewy, America in Vietnam, 168; Richard Hunt, Pacification: The American Struggle for Vietnam’s Hearts and Minds (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1995), 269-74; Bergerud, Dynamics of Defeat, 156-58; and Colby, Lost Victory, 190-92. On scientific warfare, see James William Gibson, The Perfect War: The War We Couldn’t Lose and How We Did (New York: Vintage, 1986, 1988), 124 (emphasis original). President Johnson’s instructions are cited in R. Hunt, Pacification, 134; Komer is cited in Elliott, Vietnamese War, 857. Fear of a possible peace agreement also figured here. Colby and Thieu wanted evidence that would maximize the RVN claim to territory in case an accord reached at the bargaining table called for a division of the terrain between the government and the National Liberation Front (NLF; R. Hunt, Pacification, 158 and 193).

Elliott, Vietnamese War, 1169-70, 1267; Colby, Lost Victory, 289. The RVN referred to My Tho as "Dinh Tuong" Province. For further evidence on the "quasi-Orwellian" manipulation of the system, see R. Hunt, Pacification, 195.

Tran Dinh Tho , Pacification, Indochina Monographs (Washington, DC: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1980), 189.

On the "toolbox," see John Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002/2005), 203; on the consolidation of programs under CORDS, see R. Hunt, Pacification, 93. Cao Van Vien and Dong Van Khuyen declare that ralliers "came over to our side, not out of ideological conviction, but primarily for personal reasons such as fear of hardship, war weariness and family problems": Reflections on the Vietnam War, Indochina Monographs (Washington, DC: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1980), 64. Tran Dinh Tho writes, "Almost all returnees were low level military and cadre or even stray people who chose to rally to stay away from war hazards, for family reasons or for a chance to earn a living and seldom because they were ideologically convinced by the GVN overtures. . . . The GVN was only half-hearted in employing ralliers for any useful purpose, out of suspicion and fear of its inability to control. . . . The program was costly and caused frustration among the troops who felt their lot was much worse than a rallier’s" (Vien and Khuyen, Reflections, 157). For more on the motives and situations of defectors, see the appendix in D. Hunt, Vietnam’s Southern Revolution; on the Third Party Inducement Program, see Lewy, America in Vietnam, 92. A number of sources indicate that defectors were mistreated; see, e.g., R. Hunt, Pacification, 102.

For details on the Regional and Popular Forces, see Blaufarb , Counterinsurgency Era, 244-45.

Ibid., 37, 258-60; Elliott, Vietnamese War, 1245; Bergerud, Dynamics of Defeat, 237. On "four million" People’s Self Defense Force militia, see Sorley, who adds that they were equipped with "600,000 weapons" (A Better War, 217). According to Bergerud, because of the vigorous leadership of province chief Nguyen Van Thanh, Hau Nghia was reputed to have the most effective Regional Forces in South Vietnam. In the last days of the war, Thanh was assassinated by "PSDF traitors" (Dynamics of Defeat, 310, 316).

Civil affairs (building roads and the like) is a traditional U.S. military sidelight and not an innovative program; see R. Hunt, Pacification, 45-46; Lewy, America in Vietnam, 93; Blaufarb, Counterinsurgency Era, 92, 219, 272. Bergerud declares that it was never U.S. policy "to redistribute wealth and power in South Vietnam" (Dynamics of Defeat, 114). As for Land to the Tiller, Gabriel Kolko shows that peasant revolution in the Delta destroyed landlordism in the early days of the NLF and that landlords of the region were pleased to receive compensation (provided by the Americans) for property they had already written off. By contrast, in the Center, where land reform had not yet been imposed, President Thieu made no move to challenge landlord power. As a result, according to Millard Barr, who served as an adviser to the program, Land to the Tiller was "a miserable failure in Central Vietnam": cited in Gabriel Kolko, Anatomy of a War: Vietnam, the United States, and the Modern Historical Experience (New York: Free Press, 1985/1994), 390-91.

Vien and Khuyen, Reflections, 63-64; Tho, Pacification, 156; also see R. Hunt, Pacification, 265. Kolko argues that elections served as a vehicle for extending upper echelon control and attendant corruption into villages and hamlets (Anatomy of a War, 387); and Bergerud reports that "even elected officials required bribes for routine assistance on such matters as war damage compensation" (Dynamics of Defeat, 271).

Colby , Lost Victory, 266.

Douglas Pike helped to establish this view of the Viet Cong Infrastructure (VCI), which he called the Viet Cong’s "organizational weapon," with flow charts included to underscore the point: Pike, Viet Cong: The Organization and Techniques of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1966), 133, 146, 211. 215, 274-75; also see R. Hunt, Pacification, 84, 92, 111.

The many ways that villagers participated in the Front and the indistinct lines separating cadres from other villagers are explored throughout D. Hunt, Vietnam’s Southern Revolution; for a general analysis of the need for a distinction between the party apparatus and the popular movement, see ibid., chap. 3. For one attempt to define "VCI," see Mark Moyar, Phoenix and the Birds of Prey: Counterinsurgency and Counterterrorism in Vietnam (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997/2007), 171-72.

The Phoenix adviser is cited in Lewy, America in Vietnam, 283. On extortion in detention centers, see R. Hunt , Pacification, 238. Blaufarb scorned the RVN’s crude interrogation methods and argued instead for the CIA concept, which "was the accepted routine function of any professional counterintelligence service worthy of the name." It involved "painstaking, patient questioning, checking and requestioning in circumstances calculated to emphasize the prisoner’s helplessness and dependence on his captors" (Counterinsurgency Era, 213). The CIA’s "professional" approach, which sounds like what later came to be known as "no touch" torture, deserves to be received with skepticism, given the agency’s close control over assassins in the Provincial Reconnaissance Units (PRUs), who showed little interest in taking prisoners, as Moyar makes clear (Phoenix, 228). For more on the CIA and torture, see Alfred McCoy , "Torture in the Crucible of Counterinsurgency," in Iraq and the Lessons of Vietnam: Or, How Not to Learn from the Past, ed. Lloyd Gardner and Marilyn Young ( New York: New Press, 2007), 230-62.

Lewy , America in Vietnam , 95; Blaufarb , Counterinsurgency Era, 216-17.

Moyar, Phoenix , 164-73. For another estimate of PRU assassinations, see R. Hunt , Pacification, 245.

Colby , Lost Victory, 331-33.

Ibid., 332. For details on rape and other acts of violence against civilians and their property in My Tho Province, see D. Hunt , Vietnam’s Southern Revolution, esp. chap. 9.

Colby, Lost Victory, 333. In another context, Colby conceded that "in a people’s war a guerrilla and ‘the people’ cannot be distinguished when they are dead" (189). Precise descriptions of how corpses were identified as Viet Cong are not plentiful in the literature, but Moyar does provide two illustrations. One U.S. adviser confessed that he had to rely on Vietnamese participants in after-action teams and to accept their word that dead people had been Viet Cong. "They’d point to Nguyen Van Dam on the list, who was supposed to be a village propaganda cadre, and say, ‘That’s him.’ How the hell would I know? He wasn’t carrying any paperwork. It looked to me like he was just a regular foot soldier because he’d been mowed down here on the battlefield in a stupid night attack. I couldn’t have known the difference unless I’d been there for years and years." Another American struck a more confident note with the assertion that "when we searched a dead VC, we’d often find a picture of three or four or five people standing in front of a Viet Cong flag with AK-47s. In many cases, the guy carrying it or some of the other enemy dead were in the picture. If you had a picture of a guy with an AK and a Viet Cong flag, it was a pretty clear indication as to which side he was on" (Phoenix, 185, 211). One might salute the good fortune of this Phoenix operative, whose kills were so foolish as to move around with documents in their person that made it easy for the enemy to identify them as Viet Cong. A different view comes from John Paul Vann, who thought that "a large number of cadres that were claimed to have been killed in action were, in fact, not cadres at all; many were not even followers of the Front" (cited in Bergerud, Dynamics of Defeat, 260).

R. Hunt , Pacification, 47.

Colby , Lost Victory, 214-15.

The derisive commentary on Colby’s guided tours comes from Douglas Kinnard, The War Managers ( Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1977), 108. A retired Brigadier General, Kinnard based his work on postwar commentaries from U.S. Army General Officers who served in Vietnam.

Among the outstanding local studies not treated in this section are Robert Sansom, The Economics of Insurgency in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970); and Jeffrey Race, War Comes to Long An: Revolutionary Conflict in a Vietnamese Province (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972). These early works, which mainly deal with the pre-1968 situation, do not refer to the CORDS endeavor. Also notable is Bergerud, Dynamics of Defeat, on Hau Nghia province. "Although American and South Vietnamese efforts harmed the Front in 1969, most of the damage was due to military attrition and the number of defections caused by military pressure," Bergerud argues. "The allies again failed miserably to attack the Front’s political apparatus in an organized manner" (255). He adds that "Front losses would have been more or less the same even if there had been no Phoenix Program at all" (314). A CORDS report on one village in the province revealed that the 13 to 14 people in the local VCI were "part of a network of relatives involving, in one case, as many as 80-100 people" (303). Pacification in Hau Nghia did not succeed in depriving the Communist Party of "the support of the most politically aware and most determined segment of the peasantry" (326).

James Walker Trullinger , Village at War: An Account of Revolution in Vietnam (New York: Longman, 1980), 108-9, 209, 97, 144-45, 178, 194. Communist Party strategy during the Vietnam War was based on the hope of assembling a united front of Vietnamese against the United States and its clients in Saigon. In line with this approach, land reform was promised to the peasants but withheld until after "national liberation" had been achieved. In the central region (including Thua Thien), peasants were willing to wait, but in the Mekong Delta, they seized land in the early days of the NLF. For a discussion, with references, see D. Hunt , Vietnam’s Southern Revolution, 9.

Trullinger , Village at War, 150-54.

Ibid., 111, 143, 193, 190.

Frank Frost , Australia’s War in Vietnam (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1987), 57-58, 79, 98, 166, and chap. 8 on the windmills.

Ibid., 95, 115, 125, 132, 180, 123, 154, 160.

Ibid., 162.

Elliott, Vietnamese War, 859-60, 1139, 1033 (and for more on draining the pond, 1126, 1137, 1139), 1126-27 (and for a further comparison to My Lai, 1134).

Ibid., 1329, 1034, 1372, 1356, 1292-93.

Stephen Hosmer , Konrad Kellen , and Brian Jenkins , The Fall of South Vietnam: Statements by Vietnamese Military and Civilian Leaders (New York: Crane Russak , 1980), 232. The "bitter failure" judgment is in Elliott, Vietnamese War, 860. No major battles were fought in the Mekong Delta in 1975, but it remained critically important even as more dramatic events unfolded elsewhere. The decision to leave three of the eleven Saigon army divisions in the southern part of the country at a time when the future of the regime was hanging in the balance makes sense only if one notes that the delta was the richest and most heavily populated region of South Vietnam and that defeat of governmental forces there would have been a fatal blow to the RVN no matter what happened further to the north.

Bergerud, Dynamics of Defeat, 326; Lewy, America in Vietnam, 95; R. Hunt, Pacification, 123, 277; the National Security Council and the U.S. Agency for International Development are cited in Kolko, Anatomy of a War, 219, 228; Hosmer, Kellen, and Jenkins, Fall of South Vietnam, 76.

R. Hunt , Pacification, 122, 125, 126; Westmoreland , A Soldier Reports, 244; Gibson , Perfect War, 82.

Kolko , Anatomy of a War, 91, 211, 213, 215. It took several years, but Thieu was finally able to outmaneuver his chief rival, Nguyen Cao Ky, whose network was badly damaged during the Tet Offensive. He later had to contend with Tran Thien Khiem, a competition that took the form of each accusing the other’s lieutenants of corruption and demanding their removal from office, a gambit at which Thieu was particularly adept, given his ability to plant sensational exposes in the press. For more, see Alfred McCoy , The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 178-79, 209. McCoy asserts that, "compared to the fortunes that could be made from the theft of military equipment, commodities, and manufactured goods, opium was probably not that important" (173), and Kolko agrees (Anatomy of a War, 217). The value of McCoy’s study of the heroin traffic is its painstaking reconstruction of the factions that controlled one sector in the larger system.

Kolko , Anatomy of a War, 219, 546; McCoy , Politics of Heroin, 158-59; Hosmer, Kellen , and Jenkins , Fall of South Vietnam, 241. Kolko argues that congressional support for the RVN dissolved because the Pentagon and its conservative political allies got tired of reading reports that ARVN commanders were firing artillery to retrieve and sell the brass casings, that helicopter parts were stripped away to be peddled as scrap metal, and that "much of its gasoline was going into the black market." "It was this reasoning, not the antiwar minority of both houses or the President’s resignation, that shifted the attitude of Congress decisively" against further aid to Thieu (Anatomy of a War, 504-5).

R. Hunt , Pacification, 116-18. McCoy provides documentation on the Ky-Loan involvement in the heroin traffic. "Often they seemed to forget who their ‘enemy’ was supposed to be and utilized much of their police-intelligence network to attack rival political and military factions" (Politics of Heroin, 173).

Sorley, A Better War, 425. Kolko states, "It was not until about 1970 that the U.S. Army was finally master of its inordinately complex logistical system. The loss of fuel to pilferage fell substantially below the earlier 25 percent peak but remained huge" (Anatomy of a War, 357).

McCoy’s study of the heroin traffic illustrates how an operation run out of Saigon could link up with international markets for its product. These were not the only commodities to pass through the RVN system. According to Gibson, Equipment Incorporated, a U.S. firm, ran 400 trucks making runs twenty-four hours a day carrying deliveries from docks and airstrips to customers in Vietnam. Theft of cargos and even of the trucks themselves was rampant, and U.S. officials seemed powerless to prevent the losses. The best they could do was to report theft to the National Police. By 1970, 500,000 tons of rice had been stolen, and quantities of cement and roofing to rebuild houses and other structures (mostly destroyed by U.S. bombing and shelling) also disappeared, as did medicines and medical equipment (Gibson, Perfect War, 251-58).

Kolko , Anatomy of a War , 235, 218, 382.

Ibid., 253; Hosmer, Kellen , and Jenkins , Fall of South Vietnam, 74-75.

Hosmer, Kellen , and Jenkins , Fall of South Vietnam, 75; Blaufarb , Counterinsurgency Era, 304-5.

Blaufarb , Counterinsurgency Era, 216 and 308-9. On Blaufarb’s association with strategic hamlets, see ibid., 125; with Phoenix, see ibid., 275, and Hunt, who identifies him as an "observer-participant" in the program (Pacification, 251).

Krepinevich , Army and Vietnam, 5, 6, 172. In passages that must have offended many in the Pentagon, Krepinevich minced no words in denouncing the suffering that U.S. war making inflicted on the Vietnamese. See, for example, the section where he drew on the testimony of Anthony Russo to underscore the disastrous consequences of defoliation (210-13).

Ibid., 5, 213, 172, 131, 215, 194. On combined command, see note 13 and also Lewy, America in Vietnam, 439-40, and Bergerud, Dynamics of Defeat, 334; on the idea that Americans should have taken full control over pacification, see R. Hunt, Pacification, 277-79.

Krepinevich, Army and Vietnam, 13, 67, 218, 9 (emphasis in original), 171. The reference in the indented passage anticipates the infatuation with T. E. Lawrence among today’s COIN theorists; see Marilyn Young, "Lost in the Desert" (manuscript in the hands of the author).

Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, 46-47. Krepinevich is often cited in this text, e.g., 116 and 206. One should give Nagl a measure of credit for following the tough-minded Krepinevich rather than the ultra-revisionist Lewis Sorley, whose hagiographic treatment makes it seem as if Creighton Abrams replaced attrition with pacification and in the process "won the war" by 1970 (or perhaps it was by 1972). Working against his own view, Sorley makes clear that after 1968 Abrams remained obsessed with infiltration from the North and came up with no creative ideas about how to fight in the villages. The 1969 campaigns, which were launched during his watch, were among the most destructive of the war; see R. Hunt, Pacification, 222-33; Lewy, America in Vietnam, 138-53; and Krepinevich, Army and Vietnam, 253-57. Lewy asserts that the Abrams reform program "remained a paper exercise" (America in Vietnam, 139), and Blaufarb concludes that Abrams tried to change the army approach but that "his impact does not seem to have been great" (Counterinsurgency Era, 268).

Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, 88-89, 93, 100-101. In these and other passages, the author comes across as a cheerleader for colonialism. See, for example, his claim that the British "mission was informed by the recognition that the army’s role was the pacification of people who would someday become imperial subjects and was therefore marked by the use of limited force" or when he gives credence to the notion that the aim of Marine foreign interventions was to gain "the lasting friendship of the inhabitants" (36 and 47). Also see the assertion that campaigns against Native Americans were "wars for national survival" and "national existence" (43). With disturbing frequency, U.S. military personnel refer to enemy-held areas in Iraq and Afghanistan as "Indian Country," a usage that reinscribes and updates "a narrative of U.S. Colonialism, triumphalism, and Othering"; see Stephen Silliman, "The ‘Old West’ in the Middle East: U.S. Military Metaphors in Real and Imagined Indian Country," American Anthropologist 110, no. 2 (2008): 237-47.

Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, 136, 137, and 151 on VC terrorism, 128-29 on the Civilian Irregular Defense Group, 165 on the Police Field Forces.

Petraeus et al., Field Manual, xxxi, 2, 52, 41, xxv. The chart on page 36 makes it seem as if "in any situation, whatever the cause, there will be an active minority for the cause, a neutral or passive majority," represented as about 90 percent of the total, and "an active minority against the cause."

On the Russian revolution spawning wars of national liberation, see ibid., 6-7. Roger Hilsman worked behind the lines against the Japanese in Burma, and William Colby was parachuted into France and then into Denmark to work with the anti-Nazi resistance. References in the text to possibly legitimate insurgencies are brief and infrequent, as in the statement that "insurgency has taken many forms over time. Past insurgencies include struggles for independence against colonial powers, the rising up of ethnic or religious groups against their rivals, and resistance to foreign invaders" (6). On pages 256-58, there is a commentary on the patriots of 1776 and Mao’s Chinese Revolution, both of which preyed on the supply lines of "the enemy." The Manual has little to say about Vietnam. A sidebar characterizes CORDS as "a useful model to consider for other COIN operations." The authors congratulate General Abrams and William Colby, who "were clear in their focus on pacification as the priority" and succeeded in "serving the needs of the local populace" (ibid., 73-75). Compare to Andrew Krepinevich, who declares that "despite Abram’s ‘new’ strategy, the rewards continued to flow to those who practiced the art of war as prescribed by the Concept," most notably General Julian Ewell, whose conduct while commanding the Ninth Division in the Mekong Delta earned him the nickname the "delta butcher." Ewell was rewarded with a promotion to lieutenant general and command of "II Field Force" in mid-1969, a "plum" assignment. The promotion was on Abrams’s watch, and Sorley portrays Ewell as one of Abrams’s trusted colleagues. According to Krepinevich, the Army Concept survived intact until the 1970 Cambodia invasion, "the last great search-and-destroy operation" of the war (Army and Vietnam, 203, 255, 257).

Abrams is quoted in Sorley , A Better War, 219-20.

General McChrystal is characterized as a "manhunter" in dispatches written by Ann Scott Tyson: "New Afghan Gen. Has Manhunter Reputation," Washington Post, May 13, 2009; and "US Chief For Afghanistan Known for Enemy Hunting," Boston Globe, May 14, 2009s.

The stories cited in this paragraph came from 2009 editions of the Boston Globe: Jason Straziuso, "Afghan Leader, US Envoy Meet Amid Strained Ties," February 15; H. D. S. Greenway, "General Petraeus’s ‘Anaconda Plan,’" April 28; Jason Straziuso and Rahim Faiez, "Chemical Suspected in Afghan Wounds," May 11; Chris Brummitt, "Taliban Firefight May Fortell Bloody Summer for US Troops," June 22; Fisnik Abrashi, "US Ends Taliban Body Count, Cites Focus on Aiding Afghans," July 28; Zarar Khan and Ishtiag Mahsud, "US Strike May Have Killed Pakistani Taliban Chief," August 7; Dir Zubair Shah and Sabrina Tavernise, "US Certain Pakistani Taliban Chief Dead," August 8; Tom Hayden, "How Many Civilian Deaths Are Acceptable," August 2.

On getting the war right next time, see Marilyn Young , "Counterinsurgency, Now and Forever," in Iraq and the Lessons of Vietnam, 229.