Stalking the Vietcong: Inside Operation Phoenix - A Personal Account - Softcover

Herrington, Stuart A.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0891416412 ISBN 13: 9780891416418

Publisher: Presidio Press, 1997

Synopsis

As a district-level Phoenix officer in Vietnam from February 1971 to August 1972, Stuart Herrington's job was to root out insurgency in the villages and hamlets of Duc Hue. Operation Phoenix (the program organized to destroy the Vietcong's shadow government) had already discovered how difficult this was: local officials were reluctant to cooperate; villagers were silent. Herrington's story reads like a spy story but is doubly poignant because of its truth.

About this title

From the Author:

Why did I write this book?
I wrote this book to assist non-military readers who desire to understand why the country that could put a man on the moon could not prevail in what appeared at the outset to be an achievable task--the might of America against a small, rural Asian adversary. The war that some thought would yield an easy victory instead turned out to be a study in the limits of power--and those limits began in the villages of Vietnam, where I lived and worked with my South Vietnamese counterparts. This struggle, the war fought by advisors with their Vietnamese counterparts, occurred in an entirely different Vietnam that the "'Nam" of the GIs who served in American line units. If you wish to really understand Vietnam, you must understand this. Hence the book. Good reading!

About the Author:

Stuart A. Herrington is serving his last year of a thirty-year army career as a member on the faculty of the Army War College at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania.

About this edition

• Publisher: Presidio Press
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0891416412
• ISBN 13: 9780891416418
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240