There is a lot of information in this book. This is book two as book volume one starts in 1945 and the French occupation. Really though what a lot of people miss is that when the leaders Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin were meeting with these so-called who do we split everything up Stalin was already planning on taking over Asia just as he was planning on doing and doing with parts of Europe. We the U.S. and Britain were tired of war and wanted to move on, we started looking at home for our own with the Macarthy hearings when we should have been looking elsewhere, by the time most people thought we had just started to arrive in Vietnam we had been there since the fifties. With a father working for the government and then two relatives fighting over there we the people were fighting ourselves instead of supporting our troops. Most people blamed the ones fighting over there and not the politicians who continued to send troops. People forget Johnson increased troop levels and size and also was the one that began mass bombing, he also gave the approval to go into Laos and Cambodia where troops and supplies were coming from, yet the press made it out as wrong for troops to be there and that is when we should have left yet we stayed. When we did leave the mountain people that had fought with the Green Berets from the early sixties were to fend for themselves and we know what happened to most of them. Yes, this is a good book with a lot of information I feel fortunate that my Uncle was able to make it back after two tours as a Marine Infantry officer and that my cousin did the same as an Army helicopter pilot with his last tour flying a gunship, so my views are different coming from a military family as my father fought in WWII and Korea.

Sorry I didn't get to read it before the time ran out. I didnt know you couldnt renew once archived. I was looking forward to reading it aswell. I slso didn't know books archieved then.

I have wanted the opportunity to read more about the history of the Vietnam War. Thank you to Sergio Miller, Osprey Publishing, and NetGalley who provided me with an advance copy (eGalley) of this book in exchange for an honest review.

The complicated, messy, and confusing Vietnam War is recounted in a two-volume set; this is about Volume 2, 1965 to 1975. This narrative recounts not just military operations and troop movements, but political intrigues, policies, and memories of involvement recounted by soldiers, with occasional dollops of popular culture.

The author, Sergio Miller, lays out in detail which units were sent to specific areas and with what effect. He also details who did or did not make decisions for troop deployment as well as who was not even consulted: notably and frequently, the South Vietnamese.

The first part of the book does have an overwhelming amount of information regarding which regiment, battalion, etc did what and what were the killed/wounded body counts. There IS analysis of what military and political figures were doing, but there is much more analysis of the War overall from almost halfway through the book on. The amount of logistics and statistics might be off-putting but it is important to watch the genesis of the War emerge in the early 1960’s (of course Volume 1 lays the groundwork in earlier years).

The author put a lot of effort into researching the facts of this book, and it shows. I can sincerely appreciate that. What bothered me were the unnecessary personal opinions that were thrown like bombs into an otherwise fact-driven narrative. I recognize that every historian has bias; it is the great historians who can tell a story, though, while neutralizing that bias.

On several occasions the author criticizes Democratic members of Congress as well as the Congress on the whole without fully supporting his criticism. His criticism indicated that they were impeding or undercutting the war effort for bad or no reason at all. These contentions were inadequately supported.

Further, the author states on page 351 of the eGalley that “[T]he point about My Lai was that a soldier sent to Vietnam could be a trigger-pull away from acting like a thug. Americans could not face or discuss this (and mostly remain unwilling to do so today.) .” He also goes on to cite various sources that state that Americans either dismissed, denied, or embraced atrocities such as My Lai. I don’t know where those Americans lived, but they certainly did not live around where I did, the northern rural Midwest. Very conservative, but people were horrified and sickened by My Lai. I remember people talking about it in shocked tones, some using profanities to describe the soldiers who committed the acts. These weren’t hippies or protesters. I also discussed the aftermath of the revelations of atrocities with my husband who is older than me and who grew up in a more urban setting. He agreed; it was extremely divisive. There were the “America, love it or leave it” crowd that would excuse anything, and then there were the rest of us. If the author only knows Americans who excuse or deny these acts, he needs to hang with a better crowd.

There were a couple of other points I need to discuss. One is the use of the French colonial term “Montagnard.” I am not certain that there exists another better term to describe the various groups of hill people, except by their proper names or by the term “hill people.” I live part of the year near where groups of Hmong settled, and they call themselves “Hmong.”

I read through all of the endnotes/footnotes at the end of the text. I was very surprised to see standalone citations to YouTube. YouTube, although excellent for learning how to repair things, is not what I would consider to be appropriate source material. It’s not curated or permanent and it can suddenly disappear.

Finally, this is very much an American-centric and U.S. Army-centric view of the Vietnam War. A friend who retired as a U.S. Navy Captain and who used to take R&R at China Beach would be disappointed at the lack of Navy inclusion. Another friend who was a higher-level officer in the ARVN would also probably be unhappy with the depiction of the ARVN. I know he is proud of his service. Mine is a qualified recommendation of this book for reading as a part of a comprehensive reading plan focused on the Vietnam War.

Having read and appreciated Mr Miller’s earlier volume in this mastery history of the Vietnam War, ‘In Good Faith’, I was eagerly looking forward to its companion volume. ‘No Wider War’ certainly lived up to expectations, with all the positive features of the first volume present here, too. The level and detail of research into this most futile and cruel of the twentieth century’s regional wars is again highly impressive. For those readers who remember the regular nightly news reports, featuring grainy black and white images and film clips, the names of the many towns and villages visited by the horrors of mechanised warfare will provoke long forgotten memories. For those more intimately involved, American or Vietnamese, the memories are likely to be sharper and more painful. Equally, however, this two volume series will be of interest to any reader who seeks a better understanding of this conflict, the echoes of which still reverberate in Washington, in particular. Half a century may have dulled recollections, but the failure of governments, and - more especially their military elites - to recall and apply the lessons learned so painfully and at such cost in blood and treasure in Vietnam stands out on turning the pages of this book and seeing the inevitable conclusion play out.

The many controversies, myths and incidents of both shame and heroism that are inevitably associated with our recollections of this war are covered in comprehensive detail. Miller is perhaps kinder to Nixon and Kissinger than many other commentators, over the President’s conduct of the war - particularly the convoluted negotiations, threats and compromises that led to the ‘Peace Agreement’ and the eventual American withdrawal. He also leaves the reader wondering from time to time over a series of ‘what if’ questions, particularly in respect of strategy and tactics that showed some promise in the closing stages of the American military engagement. However, the overwhelming sense, on reaching the end of this two volume history, has to be a sense of horror, awe and wonder at the suffering of the Vietnamese people and their fortitude in surviving the colonial era French occupation; the distinctly mixed blessings of being the beneficiaries of American military assistance in the ‘fight against communism’; and the ‘benevolence’ of the communist re-education of many in the defeated south. If there are any minor reservations about the book I would mention just the unresisted temptation facing an author who has undertaken detailed research to include perhaps too much detail on occasion; a need for more maps to assist the reader to understand the significance of towns and geographical features; and Mr Miller’s occasional tendency to play fast and loose with the chronological timeline. However, these comments deserve to be regarded as nit picking in the context of such a well written work.