Kontum: The Battle to Save South Vietnam (review)

In 2001, U.S. Army historian Dale Andradé, in America’s Last Vietnam Battle: Halting Hanoi’s 1972 Easter Offensive (University Press of Kansas), observed that American advisors attached to Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) units during the 1972 North Vietnamese spring invasion had “not really told their own story” (269). This challenge prompted Thomas P. McKenna, Lt. Col., U.S. Army (retired), to write Kontum, a volume that is much more than simply a personal account of the battle. In Kontum, McKenna, a career army officer who advised the ARVN 23rd Division in the spring of 1972, offers a well-researched and heavily detailed examination of the successful South Vietnamese defense of Kontum, the provisional capital in the Central Highlands. Based upon his own experience, as well as extensive research in official records, oral histories collected by other historians, and dozens of interviews McKenna conducted with men who served in the air and on the ground during the battle, the author places his own story within the larger Kontum context, recounting how a single ARVN division held off the equivalent of three divisions of North Vietnamese soldiers in the last two weeks of May, 1972. The result is a well-written history that, through the addition of judiciously selected excerpts and edited extractions from a variety of oral history recordings, reads with the energy and vitality of a personal narrative (which, to a degree, it is).

McKenna begins his tale with the decline of the American military presence in South Vietnam, a product of President Richard Nixon’s policy of Vietnamization. When Operation Lam Son 719 proved that the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) held a significant tactical advantage over ARVN forces lacking U.S. ground support, NVA leadership planned a major offensive for 1972, capitalizing upon the arrival of nearly 1,000 Soviet T-54 and Chinese T-59 tanks. With these resources at their disposal, the North Vietnamese targeted Kontum in their 1972 Easter offensive, hoping to take the city and move eastward toward Pleiku, thereby effectively cutting South Vietnam in half along the northern border of the II Corps Operational area.

Although most American ground troops had already departed the II Corps zone, one American stood poised to assist ARVN in thwarting the North Vietnamese plan: John Paul Vann, a U.S. Department of State Foreign Service official serving with ambassadorial rank as senior U.S. advisor to the ARVN II Corps commander. A retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, Vann, had been in Vietnam since 1962, and, despite being a civilian, held the equivalent rank of major general, allowing him to order U.S. air assets to counter early NVA attacks. Serving two levels below Vann, McKenna observed this “arrogant, egotistical, and cocky commander” and came to recognize him as a “hard-driving, hands-on, competitive commander who got results” (27). Augmenting his own recollections of Vann with conversations with others and interviews conducted by Neil Sheehan for A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (New York: Knopf, 1988), McKenna offers the first in-depth account of the dramatic and often personal fight for Kontum. This battle continues to be archived at www.thebattleofkontum.com, a Web site created and maintained by Lt. Col. (ret.) John G. Heslin, a pilot with the 17th Combat Aviation group who McKenna interviewed for the book. Unfortunately, aside from the Web site maintained by Heslin, the additional material collected by McKenna does not seem to have made its way into any established archive, forcing the interested researcher to rely upon other personal narratives held at the National Archives, Library of Congress, U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center, the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, USMC Historical Center, and the U.S. Air Force Historical Research Agency.

The opening stages of the NVA offensive began with attacks directed toward a series of fire support bases northwest of Kontum, followed by assaults against ARVN compounds...