| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.3 | The History Cooperative

Robert K. Brigham. ARVN: Life and Death in the South Vietnamese Army. (Modern War Studies.) Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. 2006. Pp. xiv, 178. $29.95.
Since the fall of Saigon in the spring of 1975, a multitude of reasons have been advanced to explain the U.S. defeat in the Vietnam War. Among the explanations most frequently cited is the role allegedly played by the South Vietnamese armed forces, known as the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, or ARVN. According to the familiar litany, the South Vietnamese army, poorly trained, poorly led, and poorly motivated, was no match for its highly disciplined adversaries, the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and its ally in the South, the People's Liberation Armed Forces, popularly known as the Viet Cong.	1
Robert K. Brigham exposes this piece of accepted wisdom to the harsh glow of scholarly analysis. In a wide-ranging study enriched by hundreds of interviews with South Vietnamese soldiers and their families, the author examines the training, the leadership, and the morale of the South Vietnamese armed forces, as well as the social environment in which they operated during two decades of intense internal conflict. In the process, he concludes that while there was undoubtedly more than a grain of truth in ARVN's public image, there were a number of extenuating circumstances that must be taken into account before rending a final judgment about its performance during the Vietnam War.	. . .

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