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Book Review: "Vietnam: Three Battles"

By Pete Zastrow

S.L.A. Marshall is justifiably the most noted military historian of the past 30 or 40 years. An ex-brigadier general, Marshall still managed to maintain a remarkable ability to talk to (and, more important, listen to) the troops; the sympathy with which he treats their experiences shows throughout the book.

Vietnam: Three Battles has recently been reprinted in paperback by Da Capo Press. It was originally published in 1971 as Fields of Bamboo: Three Battles Just Beyond the China Sea, a time before works about Vietnam had become salesworthy—so the subject is disguised in the title.

Except for the people who fought them (on both sides), there is nothing significant about the "Three Battles" in the title of this new printing of the book. For Marshall to try to get across his concept of the essence of the war, big battles were never needed. Drawing grand comparisons or picturing great vistas—these were not Marshall's strong point; but no one could improve on his ability to let the small actions or the individuals' reflections mirror what was happening warwide.

Partly this was the result of Marshall's method of telling the story of the war. In this book his subject is three battles, part of the 1st Air Cavalry Division's "Operation Thayer/Irving" which was conducted near the South China Sea to the east of An Khe in the summer of 1966. Marshall was there during part of the campaign, riding around with the division commander, stopping at firebases or other points of interest, making sketches and doing some interviews with the troops on the ground. But the meat of the material is drawn from collecting the survivors at a later time, getting them all together and going through the operation, step by weary step, getting the recollections from each as to what he remembers, what he did, what he thought or what he felt at the moment. The technique was effective.

The result is an after-action report, but with a whole lot of meat on the skeleton report. (After-action reports were filed on every significant and insignificant action by the U.S. military in Vietnam, and gave the sparsest possibly description of the previous day's activities.) Marshall added names, descriptions, words, feelings, thoughts. The KIA of an after-action report becomes, in Marshall's book, a man with a name, a family, with friends who remember him, and an event during which he died.

As a result, the events of the few days each in Dong Tre, Trung Luong, and Hoa Hoi become a kind of microscope through which to examine the war. And this Marshall does, again and again, While he wastes few words and little time on events aside from the actual battles, he does draw some overall ideas, the following from a troops-eye view of their activities: "It was an exercise in frustration, an ultimate test of combat morale when soldiers know they are wearing out their jungle boots and their bodies while risking malaria, the bite of a bamboo viper, attack by a man-eating tiger, and the rancor of the leaders—which is perhaps the sorriest hazard of all—to do nothing that common sense says is truly worthwhile."

Mistakes are not treated lightly, and the higher ranking the officer making the mistake, the harder Marshall comes down on him. Heroics are treated heroically, though it often is clear that the heroic act is as much a mistake as anything else. The ridiculous is certainly there—the company commander who, having lost his glasses, tries to rescue a troop—who in turns out to be a dead dog. Useless tragedy is all around as men die for no reason except they happened to be standing where a round happened to go. Many of the KIA—on both sides—are the result of chance rather than plan.

Each of the three battles begins, more or less, as a mistake; U.S. forces get shot at and combat follows. By the time the U.S. forces are sufficiently revved up to arrive in force, the enemy has split (and this is the 1st Cav, noted for getting to the scene immediately). Some companies are run into the ground; others see almost nothing in the way of combat even though they're in approximately the same place at the same time.

The greatest value of the book is its truth. Since it's written in the words, almost, of the people who fought the war, it reflects what happened. It's in the order of the way things took place, only slightly re-arranged, so sometimes it is confusing, but that's exactly how it was.

Because he is the author and because he was in a helicopter flying over much of the scene, Marshall has a better picture of what was going on overall. But he makes it clear that those immediately involved often had no sense of the "bigger" picture (which may have meant no more than what the next company was doing), and that this was a mixed blessing: "Where ignorance is bliss," he says, "'tis sometimes jollier not to be wise."

Time and time again the battle happen almost without volition: they start, they go on, they end; people fight, are heroic or not, stupid or smart, scared or fearless. They live or die or are wounded and disappear from the story; they don't ever really "win" a battle since there's no way to judge that. The book provides a good glossary of terms for those who were not in Vietnam or the military. But it provides, far more than that, a good sense of the fragments of experience that fighting in Vietnam was like. It brings back a lot—the lost feeling, the futility, the wonder at what people could endure and what we went through, the moments we talked about for weeks. The book is not one man's experience like so many of the more famous Vietnam books on the market today. It is a collective experience, but so was Vietnam. To explain to someone who wasn't there what it was like, there's not much better.

Pete Zastrow