Toad, I've actually not read that book but I've been behind on my readings. Ever since starting Aces High, I've slowed my Vietnam readings and have been covering WW2, though I'm currently going through Michel's "The 11 Days Of Christmas." But I'm about ready to make another mass-buy on Amazon and will include the title you mention.
Slo, it sounds like you try to use the term Police Action and make it something negative, though I wouldn't really classify the Vietnam War as a police action. But if it were, I don't necessarily see anything negative in one. Really, to describe the Vietnam War in one-sentence I would state it was a war to repel invasion, which I think was a noble cause. The Ho Chi Minh Trail was a one-way street and ran north to south. Supplies came in from the ports in the northeast and along the northeast and northwest railroad and journeyed south to make war IN the South. There was never any invasion north or attempt to overthrow the North by the South. Troops and tanks never rushed north to invade Vinh or Thanh Hoa or even Hanoi and Haiphong. And it wasn't a war to kill babies and civilians, but quite the opposite. It would have been easy to do, because though you think of Vietnam and lots of water and rice paddies, it's only that way due to dikes and damns. It would have been easy to flood out a good deal of the population and once that's done, starve them because they could no longer grow their rice. The bombing first started in an effort to send signals to Hanoi to stop the aggression and later was used to target those areas that supported aggression south. But again, I re-iterate, there was no invasion north. The South was invaded from the waters to the esat and south, from Laos and Cambodia to the West and for a time from the North across the DMZ...on all sides. Montezuma had a great point about Diem's regime, but democracy I guess can take some time to get right and the effort was there. And sometimes it's a case of a lesser of two evils just like our support for the USSR against Nazi-Germany, the support of troubled SVN govts (loaded with corruption) against invading communists. It was also a different time, and the USSR did make threats upon the world including Nikita stating "we will bury you." Along with the Berlin Airlift, Korean invasion, communist Chinese takeover, Hungarian uprising, Cuba and really a host more. Though I personally believe the idea was noble, how it was run was not. And Pierce Arrow really set the tone for poor management of the war when the strikes were announced in Washington prior to them actually occuring because of a blunder and which provided time for the defenses to get poised and ready. And in the end, two-years after the USA pulled out of the region, SVN, Laos and Cambodia fell to communism and underwent killings and ethnic cleansing of tragic proportions. Not every step taken along the way to the path of war was perfect, but I still think it a noble cause...to defend against invasion a country struggling for democracy.
I gotta run to work.
