Some of the most active debate about the Vietnam War today is prompted by those who believe that the United States could have won the war either through an improved military strategy or through more enlightened social policies. Eric Bergerud takes issue with both of these positions. Carefully analyzing the entire course of the war in a single key p

This book examines the world confronted by the men of an American combat division during the Vietnam War. It covers several subjects, including the physical surroundings, weaponry, battles big and small, the medical effort, relations with the Vietnamese, and morale.

T his BOOK EXAMINES the world confronted by the men of an American combat division during the Vietnam War. Although the unit in question is the 25th Infantry Division, this is not a unit history or standard military chronology. Instead, I try to view all of the major parts of the soldiers' world-including subjects as diverse as climate, living conditions, deadly combat, and morale. The world inhabited by the soldiers of the 25th Division was not theirs alone; the men and women who served with other frontline units in Vietnam will immediately recognize the major landmarks. Using the 25th Division as a focal point, I hope to help the people of today better understand what the Vietnam War was like in fact, not fiction. This work is based on a variety of sources. The documentary foundations come from a great number of 25th Division records generated during the war; the most important of which are the large quarterly Division reports. They, in turn, are complemented by the quarterly reports that came from II Field Force, Vietnam, the Army headquarters for the units operating in the provinces near Saigon. The Center of Military History, Department of the Army, provided these documents to me while I was doing research on the village war in a Vietnamese province. I used this research to write The Dynamics of Defeat: The Vietnam War in Hau Nghia Province (Westview Press, 1991), which deals with the political and military struggle waged by both sides in an important part of the 25th Division's area of operations.

Some of the most active debate about the Vietnam War today is prompted by those who believe that the United States could have won the war either through an improved military strategy or through more enlightened social policies. Eric Bergerud takes issue with both of these positions. Carefully analyzing the entire course of the war in a single key province, "The Dynamics of Defeat" shows that the Vietnam War was a tragedy in the true sense of the word: American policy could not have been much different than it was and could only have led to failure.Examining the war at the operational level, where political policy is translated into military action, "The Dynamics of Defeat "provides a case study of the efficacy on the ground of policies emanating from Washington. Many of the policy alternatives now proposed in hindsight were actually attempted in Hau Nghia to one degree or another. Bergerud is able on that basis to critique these policies and to offer his own conclusions in a thought-provoking but utterly unpolemical fashion.Based on extensive research in U.S. Army archives and many personal interviews with those who experienced the war in Hau Nghia, "The Dynamics of Defeat" is a story full of violence, frustration, and numbing despair, but also one rich with lessons for American foreign policy.

In the first two years of the Pacific War of World War II, air forces from Japan, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand engaged in a ruthless struggle for superiority in the skies over the Solomon Islands and New Guinea. Despite operating under primitive conditions in a largely unknown and malignant physical environment, both sides employed the most sophisticated technology available at the time in a strategically crucial war of aerial attrition. In one of the largest aerial campaigns in history, the skies of the South Pacific were dominated first by the dreaded Japanese Zeros, then by Allied bombers, which launched massed raids at altitudes under fifty feet, and finally by a ferocious Allied fighter onslaught led by a cadre of the greatest aces in American military history.Utilizing primary sources and scores of interviews with surviving veterans of all ranks and duties, Eric Bergerud recreates the fabric of the air war as it was fought in the South Pacific. He explores the technology and tactics, the three-dimensional battlefield, and the leadership, living conditions, medical challenges, and morale of the combatants. The reader will be rewarded with a thorough understanding of how air power functioned in World War II from the level of command to the point of fire in air-to-air combat.