Who won?(Vietnam: The Australian War)(Book review)

Vietnam." The Australian War, by Paul Ham; HarperCollins, 2007, $55.

THIS IS AN EXTREMELY good book. We probably had to wait thirty years for someone to do it, in order for them to be able to read some more of the often damning archives. Also, it had to be written by someone young enough not to have been compromised by the events it relates, but old enough to understand what they mean.

Ham fits the bill. I doubt a single academic in Australia does. Certainly not me.

I taught with and to soldiers going to Vietnam at Duntroon in the 1960s and worked with soldiers who had been there at the Joint Services Staff College in the 1980s. In between, I was secretary to the Vietnam Moratorium and "peace visited" Hanoi the week after Jane Fonda in 1972. There are a lot of people I know in these pages. Many of them are dead.

Ham has read a lot, travelled a lot and interviewed plenty to come up with a very thorough and wide-ranging account of Australia's involvement in the Vietnam War. Apart from brave soldiers and suffering Vietnamese civilians, almost nobody comes out with any credit.

Around 1946 the leadership of the Vietnamese Communist Party decided to take over the country by whatever means necessary, and finally did so by military conquest of the south in 1975. The rather foul French failed to stop them. The Americans, for no very good reason, also tried to do so in the late 1960s and also failed.

The eager Australian Coalition government decided to help and in 1965 sent an uninvited task force which it steadily expanded while the war was popular until 1968, when it began to reduce its size as support for the war waned. By 1972 it had been transformed into a training mission--and Whitlam then withdrew even that.