Vietnam's Forgotten Army uses the biographies of two ARVN officers, Tran Ngoc Hue and Pham Van Dinh, as a lens to discover hidden strengths in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam. Hue and Dinh had oddly parallel lives. Both were born near Hue in the late 1930s, and were part of the first group of officers in free post-colonial South Vietnam. Both had formative experiences in the 1st Division in command of the elite Hac Bao (Black Panther) Company, and rose through the ranks to battalion command and Lieutenant Colonel. But there, their fates diverged. Hue was part of the disastrous Operation Lam Son 719, his unit overrun, and he was wounded and captured. A year later, during the Easter Offensive, Dinh surrendered his unit intact to the NVA, becoming the highest ranking officer to defect.

ARVN has not been treated kindly by either Americans or history. I remember one grunt's memoir which had the writer pre-sighting machineguns on the ARVN unit attached to his company, on the assumption they would break immediately. In Full Metal Jacket, Cowboy offers to trade "some ARVN rifles, never been fired and only dropped once." The ARVN contribution to the film's Battle of Hue is a pimp on a scooter, with a prostitute for the squad. And ultimately, ARVN disintegrated before the hammer blows of the NVA's final offensive in 1975. While some units fought bravely, many deserted en mass, joining the throng of refugees.

Wiest argues against this thesis, using Hue and Dinh to show that ARVN had competent, dedicated officers. And both definitely were good, possibly even great officers: bold in the attack, tenacious in defense, canny in use of terrain. Both fought bravely in the Battle of Hue, leading intense urban combat. Dinh had a period as a province governor, where he managed a successful counter-insurgency campaign that essentially wiped out the Viet Cong in his region. And there was the endless searches, cordons, and patrols of sweep and destroy.

Both Hue and Dinh had great relationships with their American advisors, but personal relationships couldn't bend the arc of the war. ARVN was in it for the duration, victory or death, while the Americans fought a one year war seven times, as advisors and soldiers rotated through on their tours of duty. America never really figured out what to do with ARVN. It was initially trained as a copy of the US military, a high-tech mobile force that was too expensive for South Vietnam and incapable of protecting the people from the Viet Cong. The Regional Forces/Popular Forces, true local defense militias, were hopeless third-rate soldiers. As Johnson and Westmoreland Americanized the war from 1965 onwards, ARVN was pushed out of high intensity operations and into a subsidiary role. Additionally, ARVN became addicted to on-call fire support, a wealth of firepower which would leave when the Americans did. While there was a distinct lull after the Tet Offensive, with the VC and NVA knocked back, as America drew down, ARVN did not rise to meet the challenge. A ramshackle and politicized command structure failed in major operations.

Wiest's take on the personal journeys of his subjects is that both emphasized their own version of loyalty. Hue's course is direct, demonstrating considerable fortitude and courage during his long imprisonment. Dinh's surrender is much more complex, and in Dinh's telling, he was abandoned by higher command with an order to die in place for little military purpose (likely true), and saw saving the lives of the men under his command as more important than his personal honor.

Vietnam's Forgotten Army is mostly fascinating, but hampered by a belief that ARVN could be good, when evidence suggests that it was on the whole anything but. A coherent military requires a basic level of competence across the board, and while Hue and Dinh were effective battalion commanders, a few solid battalions does not make an army. At the bottom, the basic problem was that ARVN soldiers were not paid enough to support a family, and this insufficiency worsened as the war went on. Petty corruption and a self-preservation instinct to avoid close combat were a common feature in all but a handful of elite units. And at the top level, a politicized command structure was full of incompetent generals who failed to exercise command and control. And while elite units could fight, Rangers, Vietnamese Marines, the Airborne, and Armored units all proved more loyal to their own branches than unified division or corps command. Ultimately, Wiest extends evidence that South Vietnam had potential, such as the valor of his protagonists and the durability of affection for South Vietnam in the diaspora, to make a case for the potential strength of South Vietnam and ARVN. And this case for potential strength is overshadowed by evident weakness.

The more general book, which I should revisit, is Brigham's ARVN.