The Twenty-Five Year Century: A South Vietnamese General Remembers the Indochina War to the Fall of Saigon
This valuable memoir of the Indochina War, 1950-75, by a former South Vietnamese general takes its title from the fact that, for him and his generation, the most important events of the twentieth century were packed into that period. An upper-class Vietnamese, Thi was one of the first Vietnamese to receive a French commission. During the late '50s, he received training in the U.S., on which his insights are particularly interesting. He rose rapidly through staff and command positions during 1963-75. Polite but explicit about the deficiencies he encountered among his fellow Vietnamese and among their Western supporters, he never goes overboard into the "How we might have won" syndrome. He is also too polite to be explicit about how the South Vietnamese army's former friends and former foes alike completely ignored it in the postwar period, and that makes his memoir valuably unusual.Roland GreenCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved