By Michael Uhl

A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Finald Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam, By Lewis Sorley, Harcourt Brace, 507 pp., Illustrated, $28

As an alternative title for A Better War," why not "The Creighton Abrams Story”? General Abrams, who died in 1974, commanded US forces in Vietnam from 1969 into 1972. Certainly this work by historian, career soldier, and retired CIA analyst Lewis Sorley reads as much like ghosted war memoir as history. It is based substantially on 455 taped recordings of two to six hours' duration housed among the still sequestered "Abrams's Special Collection," and rare is the page in this lengthy text where a comment in Abrams's own words does not accompany the author's polemical defense of our Vietnam debacle. Yet Abrams – appealingly earthy and at times humane – is revealed by Sorley's editing as a man seldom capable of completing either thought or sentence. It is not Abrams's military brilliance but his spirit of true belief that Sorley wishes to invoke as motivational guidance for the dubious conclusions of “A Better War.”

Many unreconstructed enthusiasts for US policy in Vietnam, especially former combatants, have alleged that victory was denied them because Washington "tied their hands" militarily. In fact, short of nuclear weapons (whose use was a strategic impossibility), American forces held back little in their arsenal. Despite the use of firepower throughout Indochina that was unprecedented in modern warfare, it is almost universally believed that, after a decade in Vietnam, the United States was beaten and forced to withdraw.

Nay, writes Sorley: "There came a time when the war was won ... in late 1970." A buoyant Abrams, recorded during a staff briefing, announces "Christ, we can all go home and give lectures on how you fight the people’s war. Such euphoria rises from two debatable assertions: that the countryside throughout South Vietnam was finally "pacified and that US air power (notably B-52 bombing raids) had "interdicted” the enemy's resupply line along the Ho Chi Min Trail, forcing him back to a protracted war strategy.” Even if correct, this was what the outgunned but patient North Vietnamese did best: choosing the terrain of battle – whether in combat, diplomacy, or politics – that allowed them to come back and fight another day. South Vietnamese leaders would later wonder whether their US advisers "trained them for the wrong war.”

Nonetheless, in the best tradition of the Dolchstoss or "stab in the back” school of history, Sorley argues that our victory on the battlefield, engineered during Abrams's “better war," was lost by Washingon at the bargaining table in Paris. One-sided concessions were made, Sorley contends, first by President Johnson's chief negotiator, Averell Harriman, and later by President Nixon's man, Henry Kissinger. While Harriman is reviled by Sorely and his many sources as an arrogant and senile fool, it was Kissinger who delivered the most telling blow to US officials' “nation building” dreams for South Vietnam. The 1973 cease-fire that Kissinger signed in Paris left "thirteen NVA [North Vietnamese Army) divisions . . . an estimated 160,000 troops in all – still in place in South Vietnam.” This, according to the author. was a determining factor in the fall of Saigon two years later. But Sorley casts important doubt on his own cry of “sellout” by quoting Britain's guru of counterinsurgency, Sir Robert Thompson, who frankly saw that the terms of the Paris accords were "an inevitable acceptance of the battlefield realities.”

Old antiwar hands may take some comfort from Sorley’s portrait of factional backbiting that persists within the ranks of the war’s architects and managers, expressed throughout the narrative in the bitter reflections of military and political contemporaries and co-thinkers who survived Abrams. Coming in for especially heavy weather are Johnson, Harriman, Clark Clifford (who succeeded Robert McNamara as Johnson’s secretary of defense), and, with unexpected harshness, General William Westmoreland, who, in the eyes of Sorley and his interlocutors, botched the “early” war in Vietnam between 1965 and 1968. In one truly bizarre observation, and speaking for himself, Sorley suggests that South Vietnam’s President Nguyen Van Thieu “was arguably a more honest and decent man than Lyndon Johnson.”  A contrasting view holds that Johnson, a tortured cold warrior, left a domestic legacy no president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt can touch; while Thieu, a puppet of the Cold War, left a legacy of torture.

Sorley raises many challenges to the postwar cannon, imbedded for the most part within technicalities of military craft. Experts in the field, and historians of the period generally, may or may not be moved to reexamine these arcana, including the impact of the refusal (by both Johnson and Nixon) to call up the reserves, thus denying the green and youthful US forces “access to the experienced small-unit leadership,” not to mention Sorley’s unqualified praise for the Phoenix Program, designed and implemented by Central Intelligence Agency director William Colby to “neutralize” Viet Cong leadership indigenous to the South. Butressed by frequent quotes from Abrams, Sorley heaps repeated kudos on the village militias that US “mentors” beefed up in the post Westmoreland era, arming them to the teeth with modern light weaponry. This can only strike many veterans who witnessed the war from below as revisionism approaching the surreal. GIs disparaged these “regional” and “popular” forces as “ruff-puffs,” harmless “papasans” at best, too old for conscription by either side, South Vietnamese or Viet Cong.

Sorley makes abundantly clear that. he and Abrams alike never doubted the preference of the average Vietnamese residing in the south for the prolonged presence of a foreign invader linked to a fascistic client state in Saigon over the national aim of unification, even under the thumb of a dictatorship in Hanoi. Such a belief flies in the face of everything we know of Vietnam's long effort to free itself from foreign domination. Former Green Beret Don Duncan once cleverly noted that what we brought to Vietnam was only “anticommunism ... a lousy substitute for democracy.”

Michael Uhl, a writer living in Maine; he served in Vietnam with the 11th Infantry as a first lieutenant of military intelligence.