Reflections on the Vietnam War

by Dr. Lewis Sorley

Dr. Lewis Sorley graduated from the U.S. Military Academy in 1956. His Army service included leadership of tank and armored cavalry units in Germany, Vietnam, and the U.S. In Vietnam, he was the Executive Officer, 1st Battalion, 69th Armor, 25th Infantry Division. He retired from the Army a lieutenant colonel, and received his PhD from Johns Hopkins University.

Dr. Sorley is the author of several books, including Arms Transfers Under Nixon, Thunderbolt: General Creighton Abrams and the Army of his Times, and the acclaimed, A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam—a work which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. One of the most esteemed historians of the Vietnam War, Dr. Sorley addressed the Ninth Annual Conference on November 10, 2006. The following is a transcript of that presentation.

I am very pleased to be here and to, in a very short time, say a few words about the war in Vietnam. The Vietnam War was one of the longest and most complex wars our country has ever taken part in, so you will understand that what I am going to say is highly selective, but I hope will open up some aspects of the war that you may want to talk about. I would like to say something about the nature of the war, about the conduct of the war, about the outcome of the war, and about the people who fought the war.

First of all, one of the controversies you have heard over the years has to do with the nature of the war, with some commentators arguing that it was essentially a guerrilla war, and others disagreeing, saying that it was a conventional war. I think that, in many ways, this is a false dilemma. Because the fact is that, in some times and in some places, it was one, and in other places and other times, it was the other. Sometimes, in the same place, and in the same time, it was both. You talk to people who served in Vietnam, you get a wide range of views as to the nature of the fighting they were engaged in, and the enemy they were engaged in fighting, and that will be because some were engaged in fighting in one province, some up in the north near the demilitarized zone, where the nature of the war was, let us say, more conventional, and others who might have found themselves in the Mekong Delta, where for most of the time the war was more of a guerrilla-type war. Then, some who served in the early period will have one experience, while some who came later will have had a different experience—maybe in the very same province or provinces. And so, what you have really is a patchwork of experiences, all of which are a part of the whole. But if you try to reason from an individual experience at one time and in one place, you will only get one piece of that whole.

The conduct of the war is probably the most interesting aspect of it. It’s interesting to think of the war in terms of segments. I have used for analytical purposes four segments (involving the U.S. experience in the war) starting with 1960. You can pick different starting points, but for those of us who served in Vietnam, we each received a medal from the government of the Republic of Vietnam—the South Vietnamese—and on the ribbon of that medal, there is a little metal scroll. It has the opening date—1960—then a little dash, and then it is blank after that. I presume the intention was, at some point, to fill in the last date, but unfortunately by the time that date came, there was no longer a South Vietnam, for reasons which you know and on which I will comment in a bit. I took the date 1960, the date that they chose, as a reasonable starting point for the American involvement, even though we had people there in various roles before that. I think it’s useful to look at the period of 1960-1965 as the period of primarily advisory effort of Americans in Vietnam, although we did do other things during that period, to include helping the South Vietnamese improve communications, and with intelligence and logistics.