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Vietnam's Forgotten Army: Heroism and Betrayal in the ARVN. By Andrew Wiest. New York: New York University Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-8147-9410-4. Maps. Photographs. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xviii, 350. $35.00.
Andrew Wiest's exceUent book helps to fill a yawning void in the history of the Vietnam War. While thousands of books have been written about the war from the American and Vietnamese communist perspectives, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) has been treated by western historians largely as what communist propaganda claimed it to be - a force of incompetent "lackeys" whose efforts had Uttle impact on the outcome of the war itself. Little attention has been devoted to the experiences, the contributions, and the courage of the ARVN soldiers who fought for decades under appaUing conditions and for reasons that few Americans truly knew or understood.
Professor Wiest tells the fascinating story of two young ARVN officers, Pham Van Dinh and Tran Ngoc Hue, whose lives paralleled one another to an amazing degree but who made starkly different choices when confronted, as both were, with the grimmest choice a soldier can face. Pham Van Dinh and Tran Ngoc Hue were both the...