Vietnam Chronicles: The Abrams Tapes, 1968-1972 (review)

Documents underpin history, and historians wallow in them whenever possible. The Vietnam War—arguably even more than previous wars—produced troves of documents, and they are still being exploited today. Researchers are especially fortunate to have voluminous message traffic from the men commanding the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV), General William C. Westmoreland, and his successor, General Creighton W. Abrams. These messages provide rich detail on the major events of the war, as well as on some of the thinking behind the strategy and tactics. Until recently there was also an untapped source of high-level material—audio tapes of Abrams's weekly high-level gatherings called the "Weekly Intelligence Estimate Updates," or WIEUs. Historian Lewis Sorley gained access to these classified tapes, and he transcribed some two thousand hours of briefings and conversations between the commander and many of his subordinates. Sorley's selections of these transcripts are reproduced in this book, which runs almost a thousand pages in length.

This is an impressive undertaking that gives readers a glimpse of the personal side of Abrams's relations with some of his staff and a window onto his thinking on certain aspects of the war, particularly on the progress of "Vietnamization," the plan to train the South Vietnamese to take over the war as American forces withdrew. Sorley's editing of the WIEU tapes focuses on four broad issues: Abrams's intention to replace the "search and destroy" strategy of large-scale troop sweeps with small unit operations and pacification, the need to attack the Communists' ever-growing logistical system, the increasing effectiveness of the South Vietnamese military, and the growing importance of the Vietnamese militia—known as the Regional and Popular Forces. Abrams holds forth on these subjects, and others, giving assessments and telling the gathered men how he wants the war to be waged.

Despite the secrecy of these meetings, there is a certain banality about them. High-level decisions were not made at the WIEUs, and readers expecting startling revelations about the war will be disappointed. Instead, the participants concentrated on the nuts-and-bolts issues of manpower, logistics, and tactics. Researchers may find that some of the best material comes not from the generals and other ranking officials, but from briefers who presented their data at the beginning of each session. In particular, there is a wealth of material on Communist infiltration and on supplies coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail and from Cambodia.

Only Sorley has listened to the tapes, so it is impossible to know what else is contained in them. However, his argument that Abrams radically altered the American strategy in Vietnam is seemingly bolstered here by numerous passages in the book. For example, the attack on the enemy's logistics is described as a tactic pioneered by Abrams himself, when in fact the enemy's resupply system had been a target of American operations since the start of the war. Sorley makes much more of this than Abrams does, as illustrated by several passages. For example, on 6 July 1968 the MACV commander noted that, in the wake of the Tet Offensive, the enemy was "getting replacements, getting himself organized." The preparations included "carrying the ammunition up and putting it in caches" so that when combat troops moved up "they pick it up at the cache." In the text Sorley notes that this is "an early Abrams articulation of his analysis of the enemy's logistics 'nose,' logistical support prepositioned in advance of attacking forces instead of being brought up from the rear as would normally be done from an army's logistics 'tail'" (p. 15). On 21 September 1968 Abrams is quoted as saying that "We should work against the [enemy logistical] system" and gave as an example recent operations west of Saigon that uncovered North Vietnamese supply caches (p. 53). But this was nothing new. The Viet Cong...