A Better War by Lewis Sorley

Every now and then you get a revisionist account of Vietnam that argues that the U.S. military knew what it was doing and could have won the war if not for the hippies, the journalists, and the politicians. Sorley makes a decent case that the war under the command of General Creighton Abrams was not a complete disaster, and even goes so far as to argue that the war was practically won by 1970, after the Viet Cong were virtually annihilated by their disastrous Tet Offensive. The argument goes that the process of Vietnamization was too rapid and the United States withdrew its support of South Vietnam too precipitously for the South to hang on to its gains. The American people and their government simply lost their will to win the war. So…did Walter Cronkite lose the war? There are a lot of ifs and might-have-beens in this book that incline one to think that Sorley protests too much, but he makes as good a case as anyone for the revisionist theory. Kudos for a determined effort.