Geoffrey Wawro's
The Vietnam War: A Military History—and Much More

BY MARC LEEPSON

As I began reading Geoffrey Wawro’s sprawling, comprehensive The Vietnam War: A Military History (Basic Books, 656 pp. $40), a nagging thought rattled around in my brain: How would Wawro—an accomplished military history professor at North Texas University who until now has focused on European wars—write a comprehensive military history of the Vietnam War without also analyzing the politics that shaped just about every aspect of the conflict?

As the chapters of this exhaustively researched, engagingly written book flew by, though, it became apparent that Wawro handled that difficult task by deftly melding the military history of the war with the politics that shaped it.

The result is a valuable history of the war that concentrates on strategy and tactics on the ground and in the air, but also contains incisive and revealing analyses of the political calculations on all sides that led to what transpired on the fields of battle.

Wawro starts with the political machinations of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, both of whom amped up the U.S. military commitment to South Vietnam to avoid appearing “ ‘weak’ or ‘soft’ on communism,” as he puts it. Wawro finds plenty of fault with JFK and LBJ, along with their Vietnam War policymaking co-conspirators, Secretary of State Dean Rusk and especially DoD Secretary Robert S. McNamara. And he has little good to say about South Vietnam’s president Nguy?n Van Thi?u and his allies.

Nixon’s highly political warmaking, aided and abetted by Henry Kissinger, Wawro notes (as others have), was aimed at creating a “decent interval” to allow South Vietnam “to hold on just long enough for the United States to escape the war, if not its effects.”

Among other things, Wawro spells out in detail how Nixon and Kissinger deceitfully derailed the Paris Peace talks on the eve of the 1968 president election—a fact that came fully to light when the biographer John A. Farell found several smoking guns in the Nixon Presidential Library and told all in his 2018 book, Richard Nixon: The Life. Wawro concludes that Nixon and Kissinger “violated constitutional and diplomatic norms” by having emissaries convince Thieu to back out of the all-but-agreed upon terms for a peace settlement at the last minute “to block the path to peace at a time when hundreds of Americans were dying every month in a war of acknowledged futility.”

The deaths would continue on all sides until the Paris Accords were signed in January 1973. In the end, Wawro says, “Nixon had forced the nation to fight for four more years, lost 28,000 more men, and spent more tens of billions of dollars to get the POWs back” only to get “the same deal that Johnson was about to get when Nixon and Kissinger dropped their monkey wrench into the peace process.”

While placing the disastrous outcome primarily at the feet of America’s politicians, Wawro also excoriates Gen. William Westmoreland, who commanded U.S. forces in Vietnam from 1964-68, for the “waste, aimlessness and folly” of the war he prosecuted, demonstrated most fully by his stubbornly clinging to the misguided strategy of attrition based on generally fruitless search-and-destroy missions.

Calling the MACV commander “diffident, punctilious, and bureaucratic,” Wawro shows that—against all advice to the contrary—Westmoreland kept pushing for more and more combat troops, sticking to the outmoded and ultimately self-defeating strategy that led to thousands of American troops being killed in action, as well as to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese troops and civilians.

The Vietnam War is not a one-sided blasting of America’s policymakers and military leaders. To his credit, Wawro does anything but sugarcoat the ruthlessness and deceit of North Vietnam’s political leaders, especially the “audacious” Lê Duan, a man of “bloodthirsty methods” who pushed aside an ailing Ho Chí Minh to take control of the country—and the war—in 1967. And he recounts more than a few instances of the Viet Cong strategy of viciously brutalizing South Vietnamese civilians who dared support the Saigon government.

This is a readable, thorough examination of the Vietnam War and a primer for anyone with an interest in the military—and political—underpinnings of America’s most controversial overseas war.

And now for something completely different. When I interviewed the great novelist James Lee Burke in 2021 for our “Dispatches” video series, he told me that Private Cathedral, which we reviewed in the pandemic-induced, online-only September/October 2020 issue, would be his last Dave Robicheaux novel. That news stunned me because Dave, the brave, bighearted hero of 23 brilliant police thrillers, is my favorite fictional Vietnam War veteran crime fighter—and just maybe my favorite fictional detective period.

The good news is that Burke had a change of heart and his new book, Clete (Atlantic Monthly Press, 366 pp. $28, hardcover; $18, paper; $9.24, Kindle), is an official “Dave Robicheaux Novel.” This one’s different than the others, though, as Burke spins out his tale through the voice of Clete Purcel, Dave’s long-time fellow knight-errant and partner in fighting crime in southern Louisiana.

I devoured Clete, which is set in 1999, and was happy to see that this compelling, fast-moving novel includes tons of references to both men’s Vietnam War and post-war experiences, significantly more than in the recent Robicheaux books. Burke weaves more than two dozen flashbacks to Clete’s two tours as a U.S. Marine into the tale, along with many instances of Clete and Dave’s not insignificant Post-Traumatic Stress problems.

As always, Burke is right on the button describing in-country weaponry, scenery, and mindsets. In one shining example, Clete describes the “psychoneurotic anxiety” he faced while humping the boonies:

“Imagine yourself on a night trail,” he tells the reader, “one that’s strewn with Chinese toe-poppers and booby-trapped 105 duds, or the real trickster, a Bouncing Betty, one that is engineered to take you off at the waist. Every leaf, every root, every water-dripping frond is your enemy. With each breath you take, you are convinced the next one will come with a klatch that will end your life. You hold your rifle so tightly your knuckles glow like bones with streaks of blood in them.”

The twisting, dialogue-heavy plot contains the usual horror-show bad guys that populate all the Robicheaux novels, along with more than a little mysticism, and cops both good and bad. Plus, as usual, Clete and Dave race through the story acting selflessly and heroically, if sometimes impetuously, to help unfortunate people in distress. The ending is—well, no spoilers here. Suffice it to say that Clete is a great read in every way.

And there’s this: I just learned that James Lee Burke is working on his 25th novel starring Dave Robicheaux. Not too shabby for a guy who turns 88 in December.

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