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• W2272767048 abstract "In the preface to ARVN: Life and Death in the South Vietnamese Army, Robert K. Brigham notes that the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) was “one of the most maligned armies in modern history” (p. x) criticized by the American press and the military from the earliest days of America's conflict in Vietnam and blamed for the fall of the South Vietnamese regime in 1975. Few scholars have paid attention to the soldiers who constituted the ARVN or to the effects of their service on the families and local societies from which they were recruited. Brigham's study takes a valuable step toward correcting this gap in our knowledge. He specifies in the introduction that the focus of the book is not the battlefield history of the ARVN, which has appeared in many other works, but rather its social and cultural history. He also emphasizes that the book primarily addresses the lives of enlisted soldiers, not those of the officer corps.The book is solidly based on research in the archives of the South Vietnamese government, located in Ho Chi Minh City, and American military and government records in the U.S. Army archives and in the Kennedy and Johnson presidential libraries. It also draws on Brigham's interviews with hundreds of former ARVN soldiers in the 1990s in both Vietnam and the United States. Despite the problems of accuracy in personal recollections, of which Brigham is well aware, these individual reminiscences are an invaluable record of the attitudes of the people who lived this piece of history.Brigham organizes the book into five sections: conscription, training, morale, battles, and families. Although he takes a very sympathetic approach to the ARVN soldiers, the book is inevitably guided by the ultimate question of why the South Vietnamese forces failed to defeat the North Vietnamese Army (PAVN, People's Army of Vietnam). In his search for answers, Brigham returns in each chapter to two themes: The first is the dominance of the ARVN by the American army and, therefore, by concepts, policies, and strategies that were inappropriate for Vietnamese society. The second recurring theme is a comparison with the generally more successful North Vietnamese practices, which managed to combine traditional approaches to military service, village-level Confucian concepts of political legitimacy, and Marxist anticolonial goals.Many of the book's findings will come as no surprise to readers who are familiar with the war. On the all-important question of morale, for example, it was well known at the time that the Communist leadership was far more successful than the Saigon government at instilling in its soldiers a sense of purpose and conviction. The section on political training in chapter 2 clearly explains the failure of Ngo Dinh Diem to convert ARVN troops to his “third way” political philosophy of “personalism,” a substitute for the traditional Vietnamese concept of state power that was organically rooted in village society. Brigham, however, goes well beyond the military and political studies to examine the historical and social forces that undermined the morale of ARVN soldiers. ARVN leave policies did not allow sons to help with the harvest or to carry out essential family rituals. Food supplies were often inadequate and inappropriate, and funds allocated for the housing and medical care of soldiers and their families were often siphoned by corrupt officials.Because it is a social history, the book devotes only a single chapter to the ARVN as a fighting force. Chapter 4 chronicles the inconsistencies and changes in the expectations placed on the ARVN, which was initially conceived as a popularly based force that could counter the influence of Communist guerillas at the village level but was inexorably molded by its American advisors into a clone of the U.S. Army, relying on mobility and firepower rather than local legitimacy. From the bellwether battle of Ap Bac in 1963, through the early PAVN offensives of the mid-1960s, on to the Tet Offensive of 1968 and efforts at “Vietnamization” in the early 1970s, Brigham reminds us that the ARVN was constantly pulled between the demands of its American trainers and suppliers, the insecurities of its own political leadership, and the needs of the soldiers' villages and families. This chapter contains a few errors in military terminology. The CH-21 helicopters at Ap Bac are incorrectly called “Hueys” (the UH-1), and the M-1 Garand rifle, a semiautomatic, is referred to as a machine gun. These mistakes may grate on veterans or equipment enthusiasts, but they do not affect the validity of Brigham's conclusions.The final chapter of the book focuses on the central institution and dominant concern for Vietnamese soldiers: the family. One result of the failure of the government and military to adequately support the soldiers was that many brought their families to live with them, on or near their bases. Indeed, Brigham contends that faced with poorly defined goals, unreliable leadership, and interminable conscription terms, the ARVN soldiers developed their own justification for serving, seeing it not as protection of the nation but as a strategy for survival of the family. The most telling piece of information supporting this view is that when Saigon fell in 1975, the ARVN soldiers who fled were able to take along their families in numbers that were proportionally much higher than those of similar refugee groups in other parts of the world.The book will be an important addition to any collection on America's war in Vietnam, and it would be useful in courses about that war or about the political and social issues involved in wars in developing countries in general." @default.
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• W2272767048 date "2007-04-26" @default.
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• W2272767048 title "ARVN: Life and Death in the South Vietnamese Army. By Robert K. Brigham. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006. xiv, 178 pp. $29.95 (cloth)." @default.
• W2272767048 doi "https://doi.org/10.1017/s0021911807000873" @default.
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