Rewriting the Vietnam War

by Mark Moyar

Mark Moyar is the author of the widely acclaimed new book, Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965. Already regarded by many leading historians as one of the definitive works on the Vietnam War, Triumph Forsaken is necessary reading for those who wish to gain a better understanding of America’s role in Vietnam. Dr. Moyar is currently an associate professor at the U.S. Marine Corps University.

My interest in the history of the Vietnam War began in the early 1990s when, as an undergraduate at Harvard, I took a core curriculum course on the war. I was struck by the extent to which Harvard faculty and students considered the Vietnam War closed to debate. In the course, historical works that did not conform to the mainstream interpretation of the Vietnam War received little attention and still less respect. The course term paper, however, afforded me the opportunity to find other books in the dimly lit corridors of Widener Library, and it was there that I first began to sense that something was seriously amiss.

That term paper led to a senior thesis and then to the publication of Phoenix and the Birds of Prey: The CIA’s Secret Campaign to Destroy the Vietcong (Naval Institute Press, 1997). Focused on counterinsurgency programs in South Vietnam during the late 1960s and early 1970s, the book challenged a great deal of conventional wisdom on the village war. Phoenix and the Birds of Prey touched at various points on the history of Vietnam before 1965. And after the book came out, I decided to look further into the early years of the war. I found unanswered questions and inconsistencies. Extremely skeptical of the existing scholarship, I resolved to check other historians’ primary sources for accuracy whenever possible and to seek out new primary sources to help fill the gaps in the existing literature. The result of that work is Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965 (Cambridge University Press, 2006).

While I wrote Triumph Forsaken several important revisionist books appeared. In a thousand-page tome on the two Indochina wars, Arthur Dommen offered much new information and analysis.1 C. Dale Walton reexamined America’s strategic options, while Michael Lind used secondary sources to produce a broad critique of the orthodox school.2 Several other historians reinterpreted the government of Ngo Dinh Diem and its demise.3 In addition, a number of excellent works on the latter part of the war emerged.4 Unfortunately, this collection of books did not receive the recognition it deserved from other scholars. David L. Anderson, the president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations and a historian of the Vietnam War, exemplified the thinking of many scholars when he pronounced in his recent presidential address that Vietnam War revisionists merely argued on the basis of emotion, whereas orthodox scholars relied on rational analysis of the evidence.5 It is my hope that Triumph Forsaken will make clearer the preposterousness of such accusations.

I went back long before 1954 in order to understand traditions that might have left cultural imprints on the 20th-century Vietnamese. Numerous scholars and pundits have contended that Vietnam has a long history of fighting wars against foreign invaders, especially the Chinese, which allegedly shows that American intervention in Vietnam was utter folly for two reasons. First, ancient tensions inevitably precluded China and North Vietnam from maintaining a durable partnership in spreading communism across Asia. Second, the devotion of the Vietnamese people to fighting foreigners ensured that the Vietnamese communists would keep fighting the United States until the Americans quit.