I'm a little disappointed in The Co-Vans. This book was sold to me as the real story of the advisory war, and the more factual companion to Bing West's The Village, but it's basically an average memoir with only a little bit of insight in the bigger picture.

In 1970, Miller returned to Vietnam as a USMC Major, adviser to a VNMC Battalion. His previous combat tour as company commander and 3-month Vietnamese immersion course only partially prepared him for his new job. Unlike Army advisers, who deployed with a small team for backup, Marine advisers served alone, living on Vietnamese rations, with only the radio net and occasional trips back home as connection with the world. It's these experiences that Miller focuses on, and they're a lot like any rifleman's except a little more adult. Meals are sketchy chicken cooked by an enlisted VNMC "cowboy" servant rather than C-rations. Officers get drunk and get in trouble in Saigon, if a little less frequently than privates. There's the same political games with idiotic superiors, except that they have flag rank here.

Miller's tour overlapped a key period in Nixon's 'Vietnamization' draw-down, when the Vietnamese would have to take over fighting the war themselves. By and large, by this point the Vietnamese were experienced veterans, and Miller's duties apparently consisted mostly of coordinating logistics and air strikes, which were still American run. Most tellingly, Miller took a week off for R&R in the middle of Operation Lam Son 719; the critical test invasion of Laos by RVN forces in 1971. Only one adviser was allowed over Laos at a time, so there was little that Miller and his comrades could do aside from shelter from NVA artillery at Khe Sanh and listen to the radio, but even a professional and committed adviser like Miller seemed fairly checked out at this stage in the war.

I was really hoping for some sort of insight into the advising relationship across cultural barriers, but aside from some awkward moments of "He speaks our language?" from both Vietnamese and Americans, the details of the advisory relationship remain opaque. I was also hoping that Miller would rebut, confirm, or at least expand upon the common charges that RVN forces were cowardly, corrupt, and incompetent, but his assessment of the Vietnamese military is confined to about 10 pages at the end of the book, where he notes that Vietnamese officers tended to run their units out of their hip-pockets as personal fiefdoms, so for example a battalion was more of an over-sized company. This worked on light-duty counter-insurgency missions, but the absence of a command structure made it impossible to coordinate combined arms missions across multiple units in battle, making the VNMC less than the sum of it's parts. Commanders' personal charisma mattered a lot, the phrase 'mandate of heaven' is invoked, but units tended to fall apart if their commanders broke or became incapacitated. The worst criticism is reserved for ARVN General "Old Bloody Hands" Lam, who ordered the VNMC to act as a rear-guard for Lam Son 719 without a plan for their extraction except 'die to a man', apparently as the end-stage of some decade-long political feud in the RVN armed forces.

Anybody with a passing interest in the Vietnam War knows that the advisory system never really worked, and that in the end ARVN was defeated by the NVA. But this is not the book to provide much context for why that happened, except that by 1970 it was probably too late for everybody concerned.