Conventional wisdom holds that the US Army in Vietnam, thrust into an unconventional war where occupying terrain was a meaningless measure of success, depended on body counts as its sole measure of military progress. In No Sure Victory, Army officer and historian Gregory Daddis looks far deeper into the Army's techniques for measuring military success and presents a much more complicated-and disturbing-account of the American misadventure in Indochina.
Daddis shows how the US Army, which confronted an unfamiliar enemy and an even more unfamiliar form of warfare, adopted a massive, and eventually unmanageable, system of measurements and formulas to track the progress of military operations that ranged from pacification efforts to search-and-destroy missions. The Army's monthly "Measurement of Progress" reports covered innumerable aspects of the fighting in Vietnam-force ratios, Vietcong/North Vietnamese Army incidents, tactical air sorties, weapons losses, security of base areas and roads, population control, area control, and hamlet defenses. Concentrating more on data collection and less on data analysis, these indiscriminate attempts to gauge success may actually have hindered the army's ability to evaluate the true outcome of the fight at hand--a roadblock that Daddis believes significantly contributed to the many failures that American forces suffered in Vietnam.
Filled with incisive analysis and rich historical detail, No Sure Victory is not only a valuable case study in unconventional warfare, but a cautionary tale that offers important perspectives on how to measure performance in current and future armed conflict. Given America's ongoing counterinsurgency efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, No Sure Victory provides valuable historical perspective on how to measure--and mismeasure--military success.

Making sense of the wars for Vietnam has had a long history. The question why Vietnam? dominated American and Vietnamese political life for much of length of the Vietnam wars and has continued to be asked in the three decades since they ended. The essays in this inaugural volume of the National History Centres book series Reinterpreting History examine the conceptual and methodological shifts that mark the contested terrain of Vietnam war scholarship. They range from top-down reconsiderations of critical decision-making moments in Washington, Hanoi, and Saigon to microhistories of the war that explore its meanings from the bottom up. Some draw on recently available Vietnamese-language archival materials. Others mine new primary sources in the United States or from France, Great Britain, the former Soviet Union, China, and Eastern Europe. Collectively, these essays map the interpretative histories of the Vietnam wars: past, present, and future. They also raise questions about larger meanings and the ongoing relevance of the wars for Vietnam in American, Vietnamese, and international histories of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Oktibbeha County is a community closely connected to its past, with landmarks coloring its landscape and illustrating its history to a revolving population of students and teachers at Mississippi State University. Beyond the classrooms and corridors is a small, Southern community with a rich and varied history, shaped by the great legacy of the Choctaw Indians, the plantation owners of the nineteenth
century, the farmers who struggled through the Great Depression, and the educators who sought to develop an institution of higher learning for the youth of Mississippi. Captured within these pages are the memories of Oktibbeha County as it once was, before America dove headfirst into an era of change and progress. Seen are simpler times, when policemen could place telephone calls from a light pole in the middle of town, and stores closed at noon on Wednesdays so that the local businessmen might spend the afternoon fishing together. The treasured
photographs of days gone by provide residents of Oktibbeha County, as well as visitors to the area, with a refreshing glimpse of life in the old days. Included are the countyas earliest schools, homes, and churches, as well as the residents who studied, lived, and prayed in them.

In 1968, at the age of 22, Karl Marlantes abandoned his Oxford University scholarship to sign up for active service with the US Marine Corps in Vietnam. Pitched into a war that had no defined military objective other than kill ratios and body counts, what he experienced over the next thirteen months in the jungles of South East Asia shook him to the core. But what happened when he came home covered with medals was almost worse. It took Karl four decades to come to terms with what had really happened, during the course of which he painstakingly constructed a fictionalized version of his war, MATTERHORN, which has subsequently been hailed as the definitive Vietnam novel.

WHAT IT IS LIKE TO GO TO WAR takes us back to Vietnam, but this time there is no fictional veil. Here are the hard-won truths that underpin MATTERHORN: the author's real-life experiences behind the book's indelible scenes. But it is much more than this. It is part exorcism of Karl's own experiences of combat, part confession, part philosophical primer for the young man about to enter combat. It It is also a devastatingly frank answer to the questions '"What is it like to be a soldier?"' "What is it like to face death?"' and "'What is it like to kill someone?"'

By the end of the American war in Vietnam, the coastal province of Phu Yen was one of the least-secure provinces in the Republic of Vietnam. It was also a prominent target of the American strategy of pacification - an effort, purportedly separate and distinct from conventional warfare, to win the 'hearts and minds' of the Vietnamese. In Robert J. Thompson III's analysis, the consistent, and consistently unsuccessful, struggle to place Phu Yen under Saigon's banner makes the province particularly fertile ground for studying how the Americans advanced pacification and why this effort ultimately failed. In March 1970, a disastrous military engagement began in Phu Yen, revealing the enemy's continued presence after more than three years of pacification. Clear, Hold, and Destroy provides a fresh perspective on the war across multiple levels, from those making and implementing policy to those affected by it. Most pointedly, Thompson contends that pacification, far from existing apart from conventional warfare, actually depended on conventional military forces for its application. His study reaches back into Phu Yen's storied history with pacification before and during the French colonial period, then focuses on the province from the onset of the American War in 1965 to its conclusion in 1975. A sharply focused, fine-grained analysis of one critical province during the Vietnam War, Thompson's work demonstrates how pacification is better understood as the foundation of U.S. fighting in Vietnam.