Military Review English Edition May-June 2014 | Page 91

BOOK REVIEWS

regime, most recently its March 2013 renunciation of
the cease-fire agreement itself. The author presents
these events within the context of the North Korean
regime’s continuing struggle for legitimacy, internally
and in the international community.
Meanwhile, the war’s legacy has influenced political and economic development significantly on both
sides of the demilitarized zone. Additionally, it has
shaped events far beyond the Korean Peninsula. These
include the collapse of Sino-Soviet relations, the
rapprochement between Japan and South Korea, and
the U.S. intervention in Vietnam—which included a
significant contingent of South Korean combat troops.
There are, unavoidably, some gaps in Jager’s
account, most notably the decline and fall of the Rhee
regime in the years after the cease-fire. Still, the author
successfully presents seven decades of history within
a single volume, and she paints a particularly sharp
portrait of the personal and political conflicts within
the communist bloc.
Jager narrates these developme nts in clear and
elegant prose, supported by an impressive array of
primary and secondary sources from Western and
Eastern archives. Several dozen photographs and
maps illustrate the narrative, while 91 pages of informative end notes provide additional details worthy of
attention from scholars and popular audiences alike.
Sixty years after a cease-fire nominally ended
the Korean War, military and political analysts still
consider the Korean demilitarized zone to be the
most dangerous place on earth. In Brothers at War,
Sheila Myoshi Jager provides readers with a work of
remarkable scholarship that vividly illustrates why.
Lt. Col. William C. Latham Jr., U.S. Army, Retired,
Colonial Heights, Virginia

HANOI’S WAR:

An International History of the
War for Peace in Vietnam

Llien-Hang T. Nguyen,
The University of North Carolina Press,
Chapel Hill, 2012, 464 pages, $34.95

T

HIS IS ONE of the most important books on
the Vietnam War to come along in some time.
Llien-Hang T. Nguyen is a Vietnamese American
MILITARY REVIEW May-June 2014

who was born in Saigon in 1974. She and her family
fled to the United States in 1975 as their country fell
to the communists. Now an associate professor at the
University of Kentucky, Nguyen, who has “kin who
served on both sides,” seeks to come to grips with
a war that to her was “both distant and proximate.”
She focused her research efforts on determining
“how certain leaders made specific decisions … that
led to the deaths of approximately 58,000 Americans
and an estimated 2-6 million Vietnamese.”
Using unprecedented access to the Foreign Ministry Archives in Hanoi and extensive interviews
with many of the principals in Vietnam, Nguyen
has produced a remarkable piece of scholarship that
serves to correct many of the commonly held ideas
about how the war was conducted on the other side.
In most historiography on the war, the key players
in North Vietnam are Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen
Giap. Nguyen demonstrates convincingly that the
real power in Hanoi was held by the “comrades
Le”—Party Secretary Le Duan and his closest ally,
Le Duc Tho, who together controlled Vietnam for
over half a century. Nguyen charts the rise of Le
Duan from his early days in the struggle against the
French in the First Indochina War to his ascendancy
as First Party Secretary in 1959. Once in office, Le
Duan used the police and intelligence services to
eliminate rivals and consolidate his control of both the
party and the state. Fully in charge, Le Duan prosecuted
a total war against South Vietnam and the United States,
always focused on the desired end state, which was a
reunified Vietnam under communist control. In order to
sustain the war effort, Le Duan skillfully walked a tight
rope between the Soviet Union and China, determined
to maintain “equilibrium in the Sino-Soviet split”
so that he could ensure his partners provided Hanoi
with the materiel and support needed to fight the war.
Le Duan was single-minded; his intense focus on
the end state sometimes blinded him, particularly
when he held fast to the idea of a general offensive
followed by a general uprising. This approach, particularly with regard to the 1968 Tet Offensive and the
1972 Spring-Summer Offensive, often led to “staggering losses” for the North Vietnamese side. Yet, Le
Duan never wavered. Failing to win the war outright
on the battlefield, the “comrades Le” prosecuted the
strategy of dam va danh (“talking while fighting”), an
approach that eventually resulted in the signing of the
Paris Peace Accords and the subsequent withdrawal
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