House to House: Playing the Enemy's Game in Saigon, May 1968 (review)

This is a war story. More accurately, it is a collection of war stories centered around the house-to-house fight for District 8, Saigon's southern suburb, during the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese May 1968 Offensive, also known as Tet II or Mini-Tet. The book's narrative thrust derives from the collective experiences of five U.S. infantry battalions, two of them mechanized, from the 9th Infantry Division, along with recollections from members of the Saigon headquarters, war correspondents, and the 377th Security Police Squadron at Tan Son Nhut Airbase, drawn from interviews conducted from 2000 to 2003. Keith Nolan's story shifts from viewpoint to viewpoint, but stays organized by focusing on one fight at a time; beginning with the initial reaction to the VC and NVA attack on Saigon on 5 May 1968, the reorientation of units towards the city, the fight within Saigon itself, the battle outside to prevent reinforcements, and then an almost block by block treatment of the thrusts from all sides to retake the district, ending by 20 May.

Several points stand out in Nolan's work: the semidiscipline of the draftee U.S. Army, the critical importance of leadership from the platoon to battalion level in an urban fight, and the large divide between the South Vietnamese people and security forces and the U.S. military. Nolan's thesis, such as it is in a work intentionally light on analysis, is captured in his subtitle, "Playing the Enemy's Game in Saigon." The VC and NVA intentionally occupied one of most pro-U.S. areas of Saigon, fully expecting a brutal counter-strike that would further alienate the population. This is what the U.S. delivered, due to inexperience in city fighting and an inability to work with the local police and officials to identify enemy positions.

Nolan has produced a timely work, given the ongoing importance of urban terrain in current operations. And while U.S. and coalition forces that choose to enter into urban warfare may well be "playing the enemy's game," House to House points out the need to learn to play the game very well.