Since reading Matterhorn I’ve caught myself flipping through every Vietnam book that comes in to the store. Some are classics like Michael Herr’s Dispatches or Malcolm McConnell’s Into the Mouth of the Cat, and there are an awful lot of less-than-classic books rehashing the same material. But James S. Robbins’ new book This Time We Win made me stop and read for a few minutes while I was working.
The full title, This Time We Win: Revisiting the Tet Offensive, reveals the focus of the book. The series of surprise North Vietnamese offensives that began in late January 1968 challenged the American military opinion that the Communist forces were incapable of launching a massive, coordinated attack. U.S. intelligence, interpreting enemy actions by the standards applied to American military forces, had judged the likelihood of a coordinated attack according to the relative strength of the North Vietnamese forces, rather than according to the apparent intentions of the North Vietnamese leadership.
The element of surprise couldn’t prevent massive losses for the North Vietnamese (it is estimated that some 45,000 were lost out of the attacking force of 80,000), and in the aftermath of the initial attacks, it became clearer to U.S. intelligence that the Tet Offensive was a last-ditch effort to maximize the remaining North Vietnamese military strength, and given the crippling losses inflicted on the attacking forces, there was a real possibility of military victory for the American and South Vietnamese forces. Robbins challenges the established interpretation of these events — that the American media and public, jaded by premature predictions of success, saw the Tet Offensive as just the latest and worst example in a long pattern of being lied to by military leadership, and in the critical moment of the war, media pressure was applied to stop a request for more American troops. Instead, Robbins argues that the failure ultimately was not the disillusionment of the American public, but the lack of clear policy and political will to follow the path to victory. The North Vietnamese leadership had pushed in all their chips, and won their gamble, not because of success on the field of battle, but because the demonstration of their utter and final committment to the war destroyed resolve within American political leadership.
Robbins covers this materal adeptly, linking the events overseas with the media and political reactions to form a clear narrative. Most interestingly, though, is not just his identification of this mechanism of military defeat, but how he boils it down to the component parts and applies it to other historical and contemporary events, with a particular focus on the disconnect between how Western military forces have approached the War on Terror and how insurgent forces now tailor their military efforts to induce a reluctant and wavering response from those who oppose them.
After standing for 10 minutes in the back room, flipping through This Time We Win and reading bits and pieces, I realized it was a book headed for the top of my reading pile. Come take a look at it and see if you have the same reaction.
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