ARVN: Life and Death in the South Vietnamese Army

Modern War Studies

by Robert K. Brigham

Scorned by allies and enemies alike, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) was one of the most maligned fighting forces in modern history. Cobbled together by U.S. advisers from the remnants of the French-inspired Vietnamese National Army, it was effectively pushed aside by the Americans in 1965. When toward the end of the war the army was compelled to reassert itself, it was too little, too late for all concerned.

In this first in-depth history of the ARVN from 1955 to 1975, Robert Brigham takes readers into the barracks and training centers of the ARVN to plumb the hearts and souls of these forgotten soldiers. Through his masterly command of Vietnamese-language sources--diaries, memoirs, letters, oral interviews, and more--he explores the lives of ordinary men, focusing on troop morale and motivation within the context of traditional Vietnamese society and a regime that made impossible demands upon its soldiers.

Offering keen insights into ARVN veterans' lives as both soldiers and devout kinsmen, Brigham reveals what they thought about their American allies, their Communist enemies, and their own government. He describes the conscription policy that forced these men into the army for indefinite periods with a shameful lack of training and battlefield preparation and examines how soldiers felt about barracks life in provinces far from their homes. He also explores the cultural causes of the ARVN's estrangement from the government and describes key military engagements that defined the achievements, failures, and limitations of the ARVN as a fighting force. Along the way, he explodes some of the myths about ARVN soldiers' cowardice, corruption, and lack of patriotism that have made the ARVN the scapegoat for America's defeat.

Ultimately, as Brigham shows, without any real political commitment to a divided Vietnam or vision for the future, the ARVN retreated into a subnational culture that redefined the war's meaning: saving their families. His fascinating book gives us a fuller understanding not only of the Vietnam War but also of the problems associated with U.S. nation building through military intervention.

Genres: History, Military Fiction, Nonfiction, Military History

192 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Robert K. Brigham, Shirley Ecker Boskey Professor of History and International Relations, joined the Vassar faculty in 1994. He is a specialist on the history of US foreign policy, particularly the Vietnam War. Along with several teaching awards, he has also earned fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for Humanities, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the Ford Foundation. In addition, Brigham has been Albert Shaw Endowed Lecturer at Johns Hopkins University, Mellon Senior Visiting Scholar at Cambridge University (Clare College), visiting professor of international relations at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, summer seminar faculty at the United States Military Academy at West Point, and Mary Ball Washington Professor of American History (Fulbright) at University College Dublin. Brigham was a professor on the spring 2014 Semester at Sea voyage where he was recognized with an award for his teaching by the students. He resides in Poughkeepsie New York with his wife. He has one college aged daughter.

Reviews

[Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

UPDATE: I returned to this book recently. It's considerably stronger than I initially gave it credit for. There's a wealth of detail here about the daily lives of ARVN soldiers that can't be found elsewhere, from training to motivation to food. I especially appreciated the wealth of quotes from the soldiers themselves. As another reviewer pointed out, however, there is an occasional issue with making broad claims based on a rather limited source base (for example, I would have liked to see greater substantiation for the claim on p.46 that ARVN soldiers knew little and cared less about the other soldiers in their unit). I would have liked to see these claims and the subjective statements from soldiers complimented with unit case studies, since it's clear that soldiers' experiences varied tremendously depending on when, where, and under which commanders they served.

I also found ARVN to be an interesting companion piece to Vietnam's Forgotten Army, which takes a much rosier view of the South Vietnamese military.

ORIGINAL REVIEW
The ARVN is one of the most under-studied topics in Vietnam War historiography, so I was excited to read this book. Unfortunately, it's a frustrating read.

Claims and evidence are a problem. The author gathered heaps of interesting evidence about conscription, training, and so on, but the way this evidence is presented is disorganized and sometimes even feels slapped-together. Big claims pile up without much evidence to support them. There are some weak attempts at theory (mainly a few quotes from John Keegan) that add little and should have been left on the cutting room floor. The view of the NLF / PAVN is a little too rosy for my taste, too -- Brigham makes the familiar claim that these groups understood the southern population between than the ARVN, but the evidence for this is largely propaganda statements (although the claim that ARVN soldiers believed that their communist rivals were a proper "people's army" is convincing).

The author interviewed an impressive number of ARVN soldiers, but I wish he had followed their stories through their time in the military instead of breaking their quotes up and sprinkling them through the chapters. I would have also appreciated deeper context about how political changes in South Vietnam affected the military, as well as more detail about the ARVN's campaigns and major battles. Brigham is more concerned with broad trends in the ARVN experience, and I would have liked to see him balance the big picture with narratives of specific units.

For all my issues with this book, I did find many details about life in the South Vietnamese military fascinating. There's a lot here that you just can't find in other histories of the war. I just wish it had been presented in a better-organized package. I'm planning on reading Vietnam's Forgotten Army and will be interested to see how it stacks up to this one.

[Erik Madsen · Rating 2 out of 5]

I cannot recommend this book. Brigham aims too high and too broad for the very brief narrative he provides. In terms of both quality of writing and depth of analysis, the book reads like an undergrad term paper. He fails to clearly differentiate between his (admirably numerous) interview subjects' views and his own; as a result, his arguments are unclear and often appear contradictory.

Minor factual inaccuracies abound. In Brigham's summary of Ap Bac, for instance, he refers to "Giant H-21 'Huey' helicopters," when, in fact, the H-21 "Flying Banana" and the UH-1 "Huey" were two different machines. Contextually, the distinction is an irrelevant nitpick, but such oversights steal further credibility from Brigham's already flimsy argument (especially given the Huey's status as THE icon of the Vietnam War).

The book's core problem is a flawed thesis. Brigham's introduction takes previous authors, Neil Sheehan in particular, to task for trashing ARVN's efficacy and dedication. He then proceeds with a laundry list of reasons for ARVN's lack of efficacy and dedication, all the while defending the integrity and courage of the ARVN enlisted man. This is straw man city, folks. Certainly the ARVN as a whole was accused of cowardice on occasion, out of frustration, but the "institutionalized unwillingness to fight," as Sheehan put it, was universally understood by everyone who mattered to be a result of the factors enumerated in Brigham's book, and not an inherent cowardice in the Vietnamese fighting man. Brigham is attempting a scholarly defense for a charge no scholar has made, and it's not news that the GVN treated & managed the ARVN terribly.

Here, then, is the rub - if you're at all well-read on Vietnam, there's nothing new here. The interviews add an often-absent human touch, and little else. To borrow a common critique from John W. Hall, Brigham has made muffins from crumbs.

[Nguyenhkhoi · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book barely satisfies the mission it sets out to achieve.
The author neglects to explore the most pivotal time periods for the South Vietnamese army, which is the 1954-1955 period and the 1972-1975 periods. As the South Vietnamese army had to fight alone with minimal American support, these periods offer a much more telling insight into the economic conditions, political motivation and morale of the soldiers. These periods are also intimatrly tied with pivotal events in world history, such as the Geneva Conference, the Paris Accords and the oil price shock of 1973. However, they are not covered AT ALL in the book. Instead, he focused on the period where there was heavy American involvement (and the Saigon army was pushed to the sideline). This negligence proves that despite the intention to ‘represent the South Vietnamese soldier’s view of the war’, the book is still written from a thoroughly American perspective.
I will not talk much about the highly arbitrary selection of themes, as well as the method of interviewing a few former soldiers to represent the entire South Vietnamese army. Any informed reader will realize these inconsistencies.
Another confusing aspect is geography. The author uses his own naming convention for Vietamese place names, for example calling the hamlet of Ap Bac simply ‘Bac’, which is strange in both the Vietnamese language and in the vast majority of Vietnam War reporting and histories. Other place names are completely nonexistent, such as the ‘provincial capital of Song Be’.
Editing is also careless as there are numerous Vietnamese spelling mistakes, mostly in the footnote and bibliography sections.

[Walk-Minh · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book has proven to be a valuable resource in my further studies of the former Republic of Vietnam. Weaving in anecdotal evidence from infantrymen and officers with hard data, Brigham makes a compelling case that both the national and military experiments set up by the U.S. to counter the Vietnamese Communist forces were doomed to failure.

Corruption and official indifference committed by many prominent officials of the South Vietnamese government and army chiefs trickled on down until these things infected the culture, morale and day-to-day processes among the troops. It also didn't help that the U.S. took over the major military role in the summer of 1965 and then tried giving it back to the ARVN a couple of years before the war's end.

All in all, the book gives a proper overview of the problems, as well as some well-earned successes, experienced by individuals who were either conscripted into or volunteered for service in the ARVN.

One of the few weaknesses in the book is Brigham's contention that family is what most ARVN personnel were fighting and dying for, especially toward the end of the war when all was lost. The theory is that without a solid and cogent sense of national identity and mission the sheer survival of a soldier's family became the utmost importance to him. It's hard to quantify and prove such a theory based on interviews, diaries and letters, but these are all Brigham can offer and hopes they can satisfy the reader's curiosity.

[AskHistorians]

short and concise, divided into chapters each dealing with a particular topic; Robert Brigham's book is a good introduction to gain an understanding of this very ignored topic within the Vietnam War. Taking up subjects such as draft, the South Vietnamese government's use of the ARVN almost as a personal bodyguard and family life - this is an incomplete yet good introduction.