A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam

Lewis Sorley

Harcourt Brace & Company, 1999 - History - 507 pages

Neglected by scholars and journalists alike, the years of conflict in Vietnam from 1968 to 1975 offer surprises not only about how the war was fought, but about what was achieved. Drawing from thousands of hours of previously unavailable (and still classified) tape-recorded meetings between the highest levels of the American military command in Vietnam, A Better War is an insightful, factual, and superbly documented history of these final years. Through his exclusive access to authoritative materials, award-winning historian Lewis Sorley highlights the dramatic differences in conception, conduct, and-at least for a time-results between the early and later years of the war. Among his most important findings is that while the war was being lost at the peace table and in the U.S. Congress, the soldiers were winning on the ground. Meticulously researched and movingly told, A Better War sheds new light on the Vietnam War.

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User Review  - nbmars - LibraryThing

Lewis Sorley is graduate of West Point with a doctorate in history from Johns Hopkins University and an American intelligence strategist and military historian. In A Better War, he argues that the ...

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - poreilly - LibraryThing

A profound, masterful, and unique history of the Ameican military's efforts in the Vietnam War during the period after the Tet Offensive in 1968, when General Abrams replaced General Westmoreland as ...

About the author

A third-generation graduate of West Point, Lewis Sorley also holds a doctorate from Johns Hopkins University. He has served in the U.S. Army, on staff at the Pentagon, and later as a senior civilian official in the Central Intelligence Agency. He is the author of Thunderbolt: General Creighton Abrams and the Army of His Times, an excerpt of which won the 1991 Harold Peterson Prize as the year's best scholarly article on American military history, and of Honorable Warrior: General Harold K. Johnson and the Ethics of Command. He lives in the Washington, D.C., area.

Bibliographic information

• Title: A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam; Harvest Book
• Author: Lewis Sorley
• Edition: illustrated, reprint
• Publisher: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1999
• ISBN: 0156013096, 9780156013093
• Length: 507 pages
• Subjects: History / Asia / Southeast Asia; History / Military / General; History / Military / United States; History / Military / Vietnam War