SOURCE: "No Trumpets, No Drums," in The New York Review of Books, Vol. XLII, No. 14, September 21, 1995, pp. 58-61.

[In the review below, Mirsky remarks on three novels by Vietnamese writers about the Vietnam war.]

Reading these novels makes one raise a long-neglected question: How did the North Vietnamese win the war? If Robert McNamara has read them he must be even more baffled; he says in his recent memoir that he realized almost from the beginning that few Americans, including himself, knew much about the Vietnamese. His critics have condemned him for this, noting how just when the war started the White House and State Department scorned journalists like Bernard Fall and Jean Lacouture, who had come to know the country during the French War, or academic specialists like George Kahin and David Marr, who had studied Vietnamese nationalism. Nor did the military listen to its own experts...