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The ten thousand day war: Vietnam, 1945-1975
by Michael Maclear
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Methuen (1981)
ISBN: 0458951706
EAN: 9780458951703
Unknown Binding: 368 pages
SKU: 29784
Condition: New
Comments: THE HARDBACK BOOK! ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, 1981. THE UNABRIDGED EDITION. BCE. WITH GREAT MAPS AND PHOTOGRAPHS! HARDCOVER WITH SILVER LETTERING, DUST JACKET AND PAGES ARE BRAND NEW! Rapid shipping w/FREE tracking. GREAT PACKAGING . Air Mail. YW.RD
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Customer Reviews
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GREAT READ ON VIETNAM CONFLICT.
Rating  (5)
Date: 2006-04-01
3 out of 4 customers found this reveiw helpful
Hubert, Kentucky, your loony-left rhetoric rant is at least as political partisan paranoid as the one you are attacking, and a hell of a lot less substantiated.
Where would one start with you, feral radicalism and intellectual laziness for starters..I'm actually in a way cheered that there are so many retro 60s throw-backs appearing suddenly since Invasion Iraq, I LOVED the 60s, especially the flower-power and psychadelic music...the downer is when some idiots make it through to the 21st century with all the drawbacks and none of the great music and love of all kinds.
I like the book, btw, I admit I didnt even pick up on the issues in the negative review below, but I read it in the 80s, I think, I had different views. I probably sounded something like Hubert, especially after some Scotch and Coke.
Which is scary.
I didnt pick up on all these negatives such as the stuff about Ho, but that reviewer sounds like he has some idea of what he speaks.
You could do worse than this book, I especially liked the anecdotes by Green Beret Mr Christian.
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ranting bollocks
Rating  (4)
Date: 2006-01-18
0 out of 6 customers found this reveiw helpful
is bollock one of these neo-cons we hear so much of? right wing imbeciles who see threats to mum and apple pie everywhere? haha he maligns a journalist because he's not going along with seemingly every other journalist in america these days, supporting a war on anyone not a friend or puppet to the states. two words: fox news. i bet bollock loves that. all right-wing opinion and very few actual facts. i bet you read that book with a red pen didn't you? and a handgun under your bed. sheesh, what a loon.
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Inaccurate pro-Communist history
Rating  (1)
Date: 2005-07-11
11 out of 17 customers found this reveiw helpful
As an avid student of the Vietnam War, I have read dozens of non-fiction histories and memoirs about the war. This is unequivocally one of the worst I have come across. Page 1 of the aknowledgements pretty much indicates what the quality of this book is going to be:
"This book was made possible in large measure by the extensive contribution of Peter Arnett . . . this book is based on [Arnett's] interviews."
Since Arnett's journalistic work is the basis of this "history", let's take a moment to review Arnett's career:
Arnett is a rabid America-basher who reported during the 1991 Gulf War that the USAF had bombed a baby milk factory in Baghdad. His evidence for this was a hand-painted sign reading "Baby Milk" in ENGLISH in front of the factory, and a lab coat with stitched lettering reading (again in ENGLISH) "BABY MILK PLANT IRAQ". In 1998 Arnett was fired by CNN for his "Operation Tailwind" story which falsely accused US forces of using sarin to kill US defectors in Laos in 1970. Most recently Arnett was fired by National Geographic and NBC for openly encouraging Iraqi forces on state TV from Baghdad during the Iraq invasion. He was then immediately hired by Britain's radical antiwar Daily Mirror.
Maclear's reliance on him may explain the endless misleading and blatantly false assertions that appear in this book. Indeed, it is so filled with ludicrous assertions that I will only bother to address a few:
Maclear obviously hero-worships Ho Chi Minh. He informs us of Ho's "compassion and lifetime patriotism (pg. 2)". He talks about how Ho "emotionally" told an OSS officer of the terrible suffering of the Vietnamese people during a recent famine (pg. 2). Maclear indicates that Ho's reading of the US Declaration of Independence during ceremonies in 1945 was heartfelt and genuine (pg. 18). He then presents this laughable tidbit from the OSS quoting Ho, as though it were an incredible piece of evidence that was deliberately hidden from the American public lest they realize what a decent, practicle guy he really was:
"...although he formerly favored Communist ideals, he now realized that such ideals were impracticable for his country, and that his policy now was one of republican nationalism." (pg. 21).
Basically, Ho was a flexible, decent Vietnamese George Washington who asked for America's help and was spurned because of their pathological anticommunism (despite the supposed fact that Ho wasn't a communist at all).
Perhaps Mr. Maclear would like to explain the following:
(1) If Ho gave up on communism as being "impracticable" then why did he not say so publicly and abolish the North Vietnamese Communist Party and Politburo? Why did he make himself a dictator and abolish all political parties save the Communist Party? Why did foreign leftists such as Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag and Francis Fitzgerald see unbiquitous pictures of Marx, Lenin and Stalin and hear Communist propaganda being emitted from loud-speakers? Why did he enact land-reform programs in the early 1950s that were an exact replica of Mao's? Why did Ho continue to use Marxist rhetoric on a regular basis? Is it at all pertinent that Ho was trained as an agent of the Comintern in Moscow in the 1920s? If not, why not? If yes, why didn't you mention it? Why, when Ho betrayed genuine Viet nationalists such as Phan Boi Chau to the French occupiers, did he justify his actions by claiming they were non-Communist Nationalists?
(2) If Ho was such a patriot, so full of compassion for his people, why was he responsible for killing 50,000 peasants in the North through a Leninist "quota" system; 86% of Party members in countryside; 95% of cadres in anti-French resistance (so much for Viet nationalism); 3,000 in Hue (1968; many buried alive); and (indirectly) for the death of 600,000 boat people who drowned trying to escape Communist oppression? Why did he send 50,000 to 100,000 Vietnamese to "reeducation camps" upon coming to power? Why were 500,000 to 1 million Southerners sent to gulags by his successors? Why did Ho ostracize hundreds of thousands of family members of the "landlords" to isolated camps where many starved? And why did the North Vietnamese train, equip and infiltrate the radical Communist Khmer Rouge into Cambodia where they proceeded to murder millions in a systematic genocide?
These facts and figures have been widely cited. See Courtois' "Black Book of Communism", Hung and Schecter's "The Palace File", Lewy's "America in Vietnam", Podhoretz's "Why We Were in Vietnam", Nixon's "No More Vietnams" among others.
A few other corrections:
(1) Maclear peddles the fiction that the NVA began infiltrating the South AFTER the US began escalating its involvement. He suggets the Communists didn't move South until late 1964 AFTER a 50% increase in US troop levels.
In No More Vietnams (pg. 49), Nixon cites January 1959 as the date on which NVN decided to go to war to unite Vietnam and issued orders to that effect in May 1959 (pg.49). By 1963 (pg. 48) they had infiltrated 15,000+ of largely Southern cadres trained in the North across the border (at the 17th parallel).
According to Zaffiri in "Westmoreland," COMUSMACV had conclusive evidence that the NVA 101st Regiment had arrived in the central highlands in December 1964 and that two more regiments were on their way. The first NVA regiment to arrive in the South had departed in September or October 1964 based on a leadership decision in July of that year, when COMUSMACV first received reports that NVA cadremen were participating in VC operations.
Guenter Lewy, in "America in Vietnam," estimates there were 5,800 NVA troops fighting in the South in March 1965.
In "Street Without Joy", Bernard Fall states (pg. 244) that columnist Joseph Alsop reported that US intelligence officers had identified the old 803d Vietminh Regiment, which destroyed French G.M. 100, as that which attacked and destroyed South Vietnamese garrisons at Kon-Brai and Dak-To in November 1961, having re-infiltrated from the North.
In John Roche's "The Demise of Liberal Internationalism" (National Review, 3 May 1985, pg. 30): By the late Fifties, Hanoi had concluded that the locomotive of history had to be speeded up, and in 1959 the Party's 15th Plenum decided to mount a full-scale invasion of the South. Southern cadres who had gone to ground in 1954 were reactivated, and the VC guerilla movement began rapid expansion. Moreover, as General Vo Bam told a French television crew doing a history of the Ho Chi Minh Trail in 1983, "On May 19, 1959, I had the privilege of being designated by the Vietnamese Communist Party . . . to unleash a military attack on the South to liberate the South and reunify the fatherland." Moreover, the general added that by the beginning of 1961, when the US had 685 military advisors in the South, he had deployed thirty thousand North Vietnamese regulars in the region to set up the infrastructure for the Ho Chi Minh Trail. From that time to the fall of Saigon a decade ago, Hanoi was engaged in simple, naked aggression."
(2) Maclear (pg. 65) states that elections to unite Vietnam were opposed by President Eisenhower and Secretary Dulles because they knew Ho Chi Minh would beat Ngo Dinh Diem.
This is strictly true, but Maclear, in omitting key information, tries to imply that Ho had more popular support than Diem and that Eisenhower and Dulles were therefore attempting to subvert democracy in Vietnam. In fact, there was NO AGREEMENT to have elections at the Geneva Conference in 1954. The idea was raised but South Vietnam rejected it immediately. The US supported them because they knew that "free elections" would only be free in the South where multiple candidates would be run. In the North, only Ho would be on the ballot. Because the North had 55% of the Vietnamese population, Ho's victory was certain. NOT because he was widely revered. Indeed, this would not likely have been the case after having murdered 50,000 peasants after coming to power.
(3) Maclear (pg.72): "... a US intelligence estimate, that 30,000 landlords and dissidents had been executed in the North. (According to American historian Gareth Porter, who analyzed the war in a book Peace Denied, this estimate was based on the reports of a Vietnamese exile who was receiving a US government grant. Porter himself estimates that executions in the North did not exceed 2,500."
"Historian" Gareth Porter is co-author of "Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution" which has been hailed by Noam Chomsky. In the book Porter claimed that Pol Pot's horrendous cruelties "saved the lives of tens of thousands of people." He vigorously defended the Khmer Rouge after they forced the entire population of Phnom Penh into the jungle, marking the beginning of their holocaust of 2 million. As a member of the Indochina Resource Center, a radical lobby group, he fought to pressure Congress to cut all aid to South Vietnam after the American withdrawal.
(4) Maclear (pg.314): "... Martin Luther King urged that all black and white Americans should declare themselves conscientious objectors. 'Negroes', he said, 'are dying in disproportionate numbers in Vietnam. Twice as many negroes as whites are in combat.' Research for this history shows that Martin Luther King was correct. Black Americans comprised 13% of the troop force in Vietnam - about equal to America's black population. But a disproportionate number of blacks, 28%, had combat assignments. Only 2% of officers were black."
Ok, but if the figure of 28% of blacks in combat is correct, that's not the 65%? that MLK states. Unless MLK didn't mean absolutely, but twice as many in proportion to their population. But if he meant that, his statement does not logically suggest it. It suggests that of all the casualties in Vietnam, blacks accounted for over twice as many. Moreover, Maclear's 'research' doesn't even address casualties. It addresses the number who held combat assignments. Also, Maclear makes no effort to explain why this supposed discrepancy exists. Was it intentional racism? This appears to be the inference.
James Webb, "History Proves Vietnam Victors Wrong", Wall Street Journal (28 April 2000): "African-Americans comprised 13.1% of the age group, 12.6% of the military and 12.2% of the casualties."
Lewy, America in Vietnam (154-55): "The racial situation was not helped by the charge, made by Martin Luther King, Jr., and others, that young blacks in Vietnam 'fight and die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population.' This allegation was false. In 1973 the percentage of blacks of military age was 13.5% of the total population; the proportion of blacks among American servicemen in Vietnam was 9.8% in 1967 and throughout the war was never higher than 12.5%. Through March 1973, blacks accounted for 12.3% of all combat deaths. A disproportionate number of blacks were found in ground combat units, and significantly fewer blacks than whites were officers, but this was the result of social class and educational differences and not racial discrimination on the part of the military."
Nixon, No More Vietnams (pg.128): "It was commonly asserted during the war that blacks constituted a disproportionate number of combat casualties . . . But in fact casualties among blacks were not out of proportion to their share of the population. By March 1973, when blacks comprised 13.5% of all American men of military age, blacks accounted for 12.3% of combat deaths."
(5) Maclear (422): ". . . the American strategic air attack [LINEBACKER II] was of a breadth never before known in the history of war . . . Several captured pilots, after being shown the destruction, went before foreign news cameras. 'I was extremely surprised', at the area we had actually hit: the fact that I could observe no military targets anywhere in the area.' In the 11 days ending 29 December, 100,000 bombs were dropped on two not very large cities 'That', says Ha Van Lau [VC officer and first Vietnamese ambassador to the UN], 'is the equivalent of five atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima.' . . ."
Could the captured pilots have been under duress or simply misled?
In Nalty's The Vietnam War (pg. 272), the figure of 13,395 tons of bombs is given.
Miller in The Cold War: A Military History (pg. 79) explains that 1 kT = 1,000 tons of TNT, and that 'Little Boy' was 15 kT = 15,000 tons of TNT. Five 'Little Boys' would = 75,000 tons of TNT. If TNT = bombs, than five 'Little Boys' are 3.75x+ > Nixon's estimate (20,000 + tons); and 5.6x > Nalty's estimate (13,395).
Martin Herz also cites 20,000 tons of bombs,so that is more likely the real estimate. Herz notes that the -14 kT - 'Little Boy' was 'only' = 14,000 tons of TNT and so it was 'of course' possible to invoke Hiroshima (not five though:).
(6) Maclear (423): "Civilian deaths [resulting from LINEBACKER II] remain unknown."
That is a pure lie. He says they remain unknown in 1981. In Vietnam: A History (1983; pg. 668) Karnow cites about 1,623 civilian dead, using as a source Martin Perez's The Presige Press and the Christmas Bombing, 1972 published in 1980. In Kissinger (pg. 469) Isaacson cites 1,623, using as a source Arnold Isaacson's Without Honor: Defeat in Vietnam and Cambodia (1983). Most importantly, as Nixon says, HANOI made the estimate AT THE TIME (Dec 1972). Karnow explains how American anti-war activists visiting Hanoi urged the mayor of Hanoi to announce a death toll of 10,000. He refused, saying the government's credibility was at stake.
Even if Maclear was unsure, he could have at least mentioned what the existing general estimates were. Moreover, his book was reprinted in 1983, 1984, 1985 and 1986. At any time, he could have corrected himself. In fact, Maclear is a liar. This is a good example of how inconvenient information is omitted and how the Left takes the word of totalitarian officials as gospel, unless they're actually honest as in this case. He talks about the most horrific bombing in history and five Hiroshimas and then claims civilian deaths are unkown, likely hoping the reader will assume that tens of thousands died. As Nixon notes, "Over 35,000 civilians were killed in the triple raid on Dresden, over 42,000 died in six nights of bombing in Hamburg and over 83,000 Japanese were killed in just two days when we fire-bombed Tokyo in 1945." If LINEBACKER II had been a "carpet bombing" operation there would have been far more than 1,600 casualties.
(7) Maclear (426): "There was the death in South Vietnam on 7 April of 9 men in a helicopter. It had been shot down by guerrillas - who used a heat-seeking missile. The 9 men were Canadian, Hungarian and Polish members of the new, hoped-for International Commission of Control and Supervision. The peace-keepers had been the next to die in South Vietnam."
Guerrillas? What kind of guerrillas? Tamil Tigers? Mujihadeen? Contras? He doesn't want to acknowledge that the "guerrillas" were NVA troops. "The peace-keepers had been the next to die in South Vietnam." Ah yes, how tragically ironic. But they were the next to die at the hands of the Communists. Maclear
misleads the reader in regards to Hanoi's sole responsibility for the failure of the Paris agreement
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Very Thorough Read
Rating (5)
Date: 2000-09-20
4 out of 4 customers found this reveiw helpful
The Ten Thousand Day War is the best book on the subject I have ever read. As a student who already knew a good bit about the war, it deepened my knowledge, particulary in the French war in Indochina and America's involvement in it. The book is definitely fascinating and was written after the war ended, giving it a retrospective feel. The book is not extremely long but gives you all the information you will need to fully understand why French and American troops fought and died in a country that most people couldnt find on a map and why it is still a huge controversy to this day. Also, the book doesnt shove opinions down your throat, it is a history of the war and allows you to see the war from different viewpoints with reference to many of the important figures of the war. An excellent read that cuts through the controversy with the facts.
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