Year of the Hawk

September 20, 2021
Historian Warren (God, War, and Providence) delivers a solid study of the Vietnam War focused on the rapid escalation of the conflict beginning in 1965. Drawing largely on memoirs and secondary sources, Warren details the history of Vietnamese resistance to French colonial rule, the U.S. government’s decision to support France’s war against communist insurgents in the 1950s, President Lyndon Johnson’s fears that the fall of Saigon would severely damage “American prestige” and his own reputation, and the rise of an American antiwar movement that saw the conflict as “an inherently immoral, inhumane enterprise.” He suggests that the war may have been unwinnable, but blames Gen. William Westmoreland’s resistance to counterinsurgency tactics in favor of “big-unit search-and-destroy operations,” and the South Vietnamese government’s “fractiousness and dysfunction,” for dooming any chance of victory. Warren also stresses that American and South Vietnamese political and military leaders never gave the Vietnamese people a palatable alternative to Ho Chi Minh’s brand of nationalism, which offered “both unity and freedom from foreign domination.” Though Warren treads familiar ground, he lucidly explains the origins and “strategic blunders” of the Vietnam War. This is a worthy introduction to a conflict that continues to haunt American politics and culture. Agent: John F. Thornton, the Spieler Agency.

October 1, 2021
A close look at the origins and escalation of America's involvement in Vietnam. Military historian and foreign policy analyst Warren begins with a brief overview of U.S. society in 1965, followed by a synopsis of Vietnamese history up to the point when the French were expelled by Indigenous rebels. While the U.S. had some presence in the country under the Eisenhower administration, officials in the Kennedy administration believed that America needed to support South Vietnam's government against what appeared to be a communist threat. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson ran a campaign centered on a pledge not to send American troops to Vietnam, but only a year later, he reversed course and began the escalation. Warren explores the politics and military decisions on both sides of the conflict, providing insight into the North Vietnamese view of the struggle along with numerous American misreadings of the situation--especially the failure to recognize that the primary enemy was not North Vietnam but the ordinary people of South Vietnam who were engaged in a civil war against their corrupt and uncaring government. The author also provides detailed descriptions of several key battles during the period he covers, notably the Battle of Ia Drang Valley, a "ferocious encounter between the US Army's elite 1st Cavalry Division and the regular army of North Vietnam in the remote jungles of the Central Highlands." That battle brought home to many Americans just how serious the war was going to be. Along the way, Warren offers illuminating profiles of participants on both sides, including future Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf and Vietnamese Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap. For those old enough to remember the war, much of the book will offer painful, pointed reminders of what went wrong at a key point in American history. As a focused study of a pivotal year, this book is a welcome addition to the literature on a misguided war. A well-researched overview of how America got into Vietnam--and why it shouldn't have.

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Starred review from November 1, 2021

A former acquisitions editor at Columbia University Press and former visiting scholar in the American Studies Department at Brown University, Warren (God, War, and Providence) looks closely at the year America definitively entered the fighting in Vietnam. In 1965, the first U.S. combat troops arrived in Vietnam, an air campaign against North Vietnam was launched, and a major ground offensive targeted the Communist insurgency in the south. And then nothing worked as planned. With a 50,000-copy first printing.

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