Military Review English Edition January-February 2015 | Page 127

REVIEW ESSAY

infiltration routes into the south is concise, but it clearly
conveys the criticality both sides attributed to those routes
in the way the war ultimately played out. By doing so,
Sander’s narrative becomes an operational history of U.S.led efforts to interdict the Ho Chi Minh Trail, of which
the ARVN invasion was simply the largest single event.
Willbanks, by contrast, uses Lam Son 719 as a vehicle to
expound on the successes and failures of President Richard
Nixon’s policy of Vietnamization as a whole.
Coming on the heels of the “Sanctuary Offensive” into
Cambodia in 1970, Lam Son 719 (the name honors the
birthplace of fifteenth-century Vietnamese national hero
Le Loi) was conceived as a spoiling attack to prevent the
North Vietnamese from launching a major offensive against the
Republic of Vietnam in 1971.
U.S. military leaders in Vietnam,
including Gen. Creighton W.
Abrams, commander of the U.S.
Military Assistance Command
Vietnam, endorsed the operation
despite their knowledge of both
internal and external obstacles to
success.
The internal obstacles included
a South Vietnamese military culture that valued compliance with
authority over initiative. More
importantly, South Vietnamese
senior leaders lacked proficiency
at comparatively simple tasks like
air-ground integration, as well as
the complexities of synchronizing the efforts of a multi-brigade
joint force. Externally, the greatest
handicap facing the ARVN was a prohibition against U.S.
forces conducting military operations outside the borders
of South Vietnam. Legislated by Congress in the wake
of the Cambodian incursion, the law barred U.S. ground
forces from accompanying ARVN units into Laos in any
capacity, even as advisors. As Willbanks writes, “for the first
time ARVN would go into battle without their American
advisors,” upon whom they were overly reliant for access
to and integration of “enablers” such as close air support,
medical evacuation, and logistical support.
Willbanks and Sander pull no punches in their sketches
of the positions taken in Vietnam, in Washington, and in
MILITARY REVIEW  January-February 2015

Paris where Henry Kissinger hoped to secure a cease-fire
deal with the North Vietnamese that would allow the U.S.
to declare victory and disengage from a politically damaging war. Nixon needed Lam Son to succeed in order to
justify the Vietnamization policy he had adopted in 1969.
Kissinger needed Lam Son to succeed as a way to pressure
the North to reach an agreement. Nguyen Van Theiu,
South Vietnam’s embattled president, needed the operation to succeed in order to safeguard the continued flow
of supplies and military hardware to his country and thus
prevent a Communist victory.
Finally, Abrams needed Lam Son to succeed because of
his considerable investment in building up the reputation
of senior ARVN commanders,
including Lt. Gen. Hoang Xiang
Lam, the commander of the
ARVN I Corps. The number of
competing agendas during both
planning and execution is illuminating, and helps explain why the
ARVN I Corps, after enjoying a
brief period of success, ultimately
sustained an operational defeat of
significant proportions.
Sander’s treatment of the
debacle at Landing Zone Lolo on
3 March 1971 demonstrates his
encyclopedic knowledge of the
U.S. units, officers, and men who
flew alongside him in support of
the ARVN during Lam Son. His
dispassionate description of the
planning, equipment, and leadership challenges that adversely
affected successful execution of
this mission makes his analysis of Army shortcomings all
the more damning.
Without resorting to invective, Sander uses contemporary sources to show that, even as late as 1971, American
planners and commanders exhibited a shockingly low appreciation for the skill of North Vietnam’s army. Worse, the
decision to entrust the mission to a newly created battalion
without prior experience with planning or coordinating
rotary-wing aircraft in combat can only be described as
criminally negligent. Sander’s work, already much more
deeply involved in detailing this event than Willbanks’
,
follows up with an excellent discussion of the second- and
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