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A New and Personal Narrative of Who Lost Vietnam

Over the decades that have passed since the Vietnam War, there has been a growing movement to turn that history into a more comforting narrative. The revisionist histories come in different versions, but broadly speaking they present the American war in Vietnam as honorable and well fought, rather than a great national mistake. In this view, blame for the South Vietnams ultimate defeat falls on faint-hearted politicians, or the antiwar movement, or Congress, or journalists, or all of the above just about anywhere, in fact, except on U.S. policy, the military leadership that carried it out, or the ally we sought to support.

The proponents of that narrative and those who believe it should read this book. Frank Scotton, the author of Uphill Battle, is unusually qualified to explain the Vietnam failure. Fluent in Vietnamese, for many years he was closer than nearly all other Americans to Vietnamese life in the countryside where the war was fought. At the same time, over those years he came to know a remarkable range of South Vietnamese military commanders and other significant figures. Uphill Battle is a personal account, not a history, but the breadth of the authors first-hand observations and experience makes a completely convincing case for his central thesis: that the war was lost because of the incompetence and political weakness of the South Vietnamese leadership. Scotton shows that the military-dominated Saigon government was never able to mobilize enough popular support or use its superior manpower and weapons effectively enough to meet the challenge of a far less well-armed but more disciplined, tenacious and politically skilled enemy. Just as convincingly, he shows that the United States, for all its military power, never grasped the true nature of the war, consistently deluded itself about what it was accomplishing, and never found a way to remedy its allys fatal flaws.

Scotton arrived in Saigon as a junior U.S. Information Service officer in 1962, and served there, not quite continuously but most of the time, for more than a decade a period spanning the whole course of the American war, from the military buildup through the gradual drawdown and the final withdrawal after the failed Paris peace agreement in early 1973. During that time, Scotton made it his mission to inspire a more effective South Vietnamese war in the hamlets, the center of gravity in the contest between the U.S.-backed government and its Communist enemy. His concept at the outset was to form and support local defense units on the model of the Communists armed propaganda teams, which would not just fight the enemy but put into visible practice a political alternative to the Communists revolutionary vision avoiding corruption and mistreatment of civilians, and winning support for the government by demonstrating that it could govern fairly and justly. The idea evolved through various organizational incarnations over the years, but the basic goal of a stronger, more capable government presence in the hamlets remained at the core of his work.

The United States, for all its military power, never gra