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Vietnam Chronicles: The Abrams Tapes 1968-1972
Reviewed by Nathan Alexander
24 June 2005

From the outset, Abrams understands that his main opponent is neither the VC nor the NVA, but the U.S. media. His struggles will be less in securing hamlets, than conveying the significance of this to the American public. There is less information on pacification in Sorley’s 900 pages, than on countering the misrepresentations of the media.

The Abrams Tapes are extraordinary not for any particular revelation they make about the war. Rather, they present a sort of “counter history” of the war’s later years, wholly distinct from that known to the American public by authors such as David Halberstam and Francis Fitzgerald. Reading through The Abrams Tapes, a different, forgotten vision of the war appears, parallel to that of Halberstam, and incommensurable with it.

In the Halberstam/Fitzgerald argument about the war (which is prevalent in the academic world), a technocratic, Robert MacNamara-lead United States confronts the “Confucian-Communist-Nationalist” movement of Ho Chi Minh. The U.S., fixated on its “western” ideal of democracy, fails to realize that these “Confucian-Communist-Nationalists” comprise most of the Vietnamese population and their tradition of “resisting the outsider” is far deeper than our relatively superficial political and crusading gestures. Defeat is inevitable as our misunderstanding the “essence of Vietnamese culture” is endemic. There are many variations on this basic idea, but its strength is such that to simply argue against it is to invite contempt. Jonathan Mirsky, in his review of A Better War in the New York Review of Books, dismisses Sorley’s claims by declaring him “embittered,” and that he is unable to explain why “the Vietnamese armies refuse to fight.” William Duiker in the Journal of American History agrees with Mirsky, pointing out that the North was simply “too determined” and the ARVN, without effective leadership, “lacked confidence.” The North Vietnamese, whose inscrutability prevented Lyndon Johnson and Nixon from any having any sort of serious negotiation, have become psychologically transparent.

The Abrams Tapes may be read as a sort of running commentary on the main events of the war, and there is much to be learned about how the U.S. brass understood the significance of the Cambodia invasion in 1970 or the Laotian invasion, Lam Son 719, in 1971. Abrams believed his mission was to secure South Vietnam for its citizens, and inflicting a death blow upon the North Vietnamese or achieving significant “body counts” was a different objective. Both Cambodian and Laotian operations, from Abrams’ perspective, succeeded in destroying supply caches which prevented the North Vietnamese from launching offensive operations in South Vietnam. He saw them as great successes.

From the outset, Abrams understands that his main opponent is neither the VC nor the NVA, but the U.S. media. His struggles will be less in securing hamlets, than conveying the significance of this to the American public. There is less information on pacification in Sorley’s 900 pages, than on countering the misrepresentations of the media. The main reason for not invading Cambodia, for instance, is not because the ARVN is incompetent or because the destruction of enemy logistics will fail to thwart NVA offensive operations in the coming years: a Cambodia invasion will bring U.S. anti-war forces together, provoking an overreaction from congress, and crippling military operations in the future. Abrams and his staff maintain a dark sense of humor towards the U.S. media that expeditiously substitutes its own objectives for those of Abrams and the military as a way of “snatching defeat from the threat of victory.” In the case of Cambodia, the media emphasized the small enemy body count as an alternative to the military’s objectives of eliminating enemy supplies, logistics, and sanctuaries. In the case of Laos, clear and decisive victory over all the North’s best troops and permanent severing of the Ho Chi Minh trail made the elimination of the North’s offensive capacity for the coming year a success of modest proportion.

The Abrams Tapes are divided into four sections, each corresponding to the years 1968 through 1972. There are under 100 pages of entries for the year 1968, but in what Ron Spector has called “the bloodiest year in Vietnam,” 1969, there are over 200. The Abrams Tapes appears to confirm that 1969 might well have been the decisive year in the war.

The context for U.S. military operation in 1969 was, in General Phillip Davidson’s words, “one of the worst decisions in military history,” the attacks in 1968 grouped under the name “Tet offensive.” The elimination of much of the VC during Tet 1968 enabled Abrams (this is a theme in Sorely’s other book) to implement the “one war concept.” By this Abrams meant equally prioritizing pacification, improvement of RVNAF and actual combat operations. The U.S. military clearly saw the Tet offensive of 1968 as an act of desperation on the part of the communists and by coming out into the open, enabled U.S. forces to locate and eliminate them. One of the reason Abrams goes along with the Cambodia and Laotian operations is that they will force the North Vietnamese into another act of desperation, the Easter Offensive of 1972. Abrams’ predicts the invasion two years in advance and is practically gleeful about the results.

Abrams professes irritation with the lack of coordination between the U.S. government’s withdrawals and what it calls “Vietnamization,” but this is not cause for major concern. The ARVN 1st Division, he remarked in November of 1969, is as good as an average U.S. division and in any event, he remarks in August of that year, it’s quite possible that the U.S. has “helped too much.” The “different war,” a war fought mainly by the South Vietnamese, is effective enough so that Abrams is able to order top U.S. units to disengage from Vietnam “so as not to appear avoiding taking withdrawal seriously.”

The entries for 1970 are striking for their lack of reference to combat operations in the RVN. At first Abrams thinks there will be an offensive in early 1970, just as there was in 1969. However when none takes place, Abrams begins realizing that the massive causalities inflected on the enemy in 1969 has greatly restricted the NVA’a offensive capacity. More importantly, he concludes, were the elimination of enemy supply caches and the interdiction of infiltrating units moving south. The key to success, Abrams says repeatedly, is not body count (as the press is obsessed with), but the elimination of infrastructure and logistics, such as rice tonnage. By September of 1970, Abrams has largely stopped discussing the conflict in strictly military terms:

I don’t want to roll out the champagne here, but you know, if we could be fairly successful on this dry season thing, and if we could really get this VCI and the guerrillas mobile forces tamped down to a relative—they’re always going to be here, some number, but get them down to where they really aren’t’ effective. .. then we’d say. . .we can all go home and give lectures on how you fight the people’s war, write books, theorize about it.

William Colby agrees, declaring that the war is no longer about the North Vietnamese armies, but against terrorists, economics, politics. In his review in the Washington Post, Arnold Isaacs takes issue with Sorley’s claim that this indicates that the war has been won. However Isaacs offers no evidence to contradict Abrams’ (and Sorley’s) momentary optimism other than by pointing out that the “end” of the war makes these temporary victories insignificant.

The entries for 1971 deal mainly with the South Vietnamese operation into Laos, Lam Son 719. It was only possible, Abrams declares, because of the successes in the war in the previous two years. This enabled the units involved to be “freed” from their usual operations and devoted to offensive operations. Abrams, at times, speaks of the Laotian operation dramatically: Lam Son was possibly the “decisive battle of the war,” (p. 558) he says and in August declared it may have been a “death blow” for the North. However the objective of the operation was never to achieve a “death blow,” but the elimination of enemy supplies and its logistical infrastructure. This, Abrams predicted accurately, would put the North Vietnamese out of action until around mid-1972. Of course he was quite accurate in predicting that the US media would portray Lam Son 719 as a defeat.

What is noteworthy about Abrams’ understanding of the Cambodia operation in 1970 and Laotian incursion in 1971 is how relatively unimportant they were to his broader strategic objectives, which were about territorial security. This is why reading The Abrams Tapes piecemeal is misleading. The section on 1971 spends seemingly disproportionate time on ARVN border operations and forays into Cambodia, as well as the little known Lam Son 720. There is a large percentage of time spent discussing infiltration rates and North Vietnamese logistics. However most of the section on 1971 deals with non-military problems which take precedence in the absence of North Vietnamese activity in the south. A discussion with Mel Laird is about how to get current U.S. football games to US troops. The war in South Vietnam in 1970 and 1971 is a different war.

The Abrams Tapes invite a number of questions for further research. First, the quality of ARVN divisions remains a mystery. Abrams' confidence in Truong, the commander of the ARVN 1st Division is unshakable. He has similar confidence in the South Vietnamese Airborne division and the Ranger units. The victories of 1969 are in great part South Vietnamese victories, and yet the American press, he says repeatedly, gives the Vietnamese little credit for much else than “raping and looting.” This question deserves more examination—certainly more than generalizations about the “psychology of the Vietnamese” convey. Second, the war has generally been criticized from the perspective of the inevitability of defeat. The Abrams Tapes help in assessing what the specific criterion for US (and RVN) success was at a given moment. The Abrams Tapes clearly make the case that the war was lost in late '73 and '74. And despite the rapid nature of US withdrawals, Abrams makes the case that Vietnamization was not as dependent on U.S. presence as James Willbanks, in his recent Abandoning Vietnam, has argued. While US air power was essential, even here there were advances in creating a Vietnamese air force. Abrams’ criteria for success was clearly the ability of ARVN to thwart enemy offensives, which is much different from those invariably bestowed upon them by the media. Third, it is necessary to assess the role of the press in its role reporting the war. Not in the polemical sense that it deliberately distorted United States and South Vietnamese objectives, but in the sense that it—like most Americans— never being privy to them, was forced to invent its own.