The preface of Stuart Herrington's first memoir, "Stalking the Vietcong", relates the mood of the country in 1961: exhilarated, optimistic, omnipotent. He quotes Kennedy's inaugural, which included the pledge to "bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty". In "Peace With Honor?", his elegiac second memoir, we see the awful damage such grandiose promises can wreak.

Of course, any of the Cubans stranded without air support at the Bay of Pigs could have told the Vietnamese that some burdens were too heavy for the US to bear. Arthur Schlesinger explains in "A Thousand Days" how JFK didn't want to turn world opinion against his administration by supporting the invasion. That was a quick decision. In Richard Shultz' new book he details JFK's efforts to wage a covert war against Hanoi and still remain within the boundaries of all the international treaties. In other words, he decided to stop the North secretly, so as to maintain his honor--a less quick decision, but a decision all the same.

By the time of the fall of Saigon, the very notion of honor in Vietnam had become a little more than a source of bitter jokes. "Peace With Honor?" refers to President Nixon's version of honor in Vietnam, the Paris Peace Agreement. The question mark is added, I presume, because of the way Hanoi "honored" the agreement, and the way America enforced it. A ceasefire was declared, the Americans withdrew, the North regrouped, and attacked, and overran the South. "Peace With Honor?" is the final chapter of the tale that began with the pledge to "bear any burden". After fifteen long years the burden of Vietnam had become too heavy. A friend had to be betrayed and abandoned.

Herrington is unique in my experience with writers on Vietnam in that he knows the language. The Halberstams and the Karnows and the McNamaras have poured an ocean of words into explanations and perspectives of the war, but it all seems a little abstract next to Herrington's personal accounts. I doubt whether you can understand a culture or its problems, much less solve them, unless you speak to its people, and you can't speak to its people unless you know their language. Imagine trying to liberate France from the Nazis with no French speakers on your team. It could have been done, but would been much harder. Probably half the people in the Roosevelt administration knew some French. I wonder whether there was even one person in the Kennedy or Johnson or Nixon administrations that spoke Vietnamese.

"Peace With Honor?" then, is a portrait of the Vietnamese people, not just the southerners but those from the north as well, people from Hanoi and Saigon as well as peasants from the countryside. There is the heart-rending story of an 18-year-old boy drafted and killed in a few days, because his family elects not to pay off the conscription sergeant. There is the outrage and incomprehension of the South Vietnamese who watch the North violate the ceasefire with impunity and grind ever closer to their home. There is Col. Herrington's personal account of the evacuation airplane full of babies that crashed soon after take-off. He arrived to find the plane's fuselage "twisted and burning in the mud", and in the field around it "mud-covered infants strewn everywhere --some of them ashen-faced and quiet, others screaming in pain or fright". It would take the heart of a communist to view such a scene as a propaganda opportunity, and indeed that's what it became, with Hanoi's representatives claiming that the Americans were taking Vietnamese children to concentration camps.

One gets the impression from his conversations with North Vietnamese that they believed their own propaganda: an NVA Major insists Hanoi was bombed into rubble and that the socialist masses rebuilt the city, employing, according to Herrington, sophisticated aging techniques to make the buildings appear seventy years old. Another NVA Major tries to explain away the mass graves of civilians slaughtered in the city of Hue after it was taken during the Tet Offensive by saying they were caught in a crossfire. Herrington asks him whether he finds it unusual that the civilians had their hands tied behind their backs during the "crossfire".

The final third of the book finds Herrington struggling to evacuate as many people as he can from the collapsing Saigon. As for anyone who has come to know and love a culture, it was extremely painful for him to see it sacked. He spent a lot of time reassuring panic-stricken people that they would not be left behind to be reeducated or murdered. We Americans tend to view conflicts as presenting two options: stay and fight; or turn and run. But for the Saigonese in 1975 there was nowhere to run. In Cambodia, the only nearby country, the communists were arranging an even more efficient solution to the class enemy problem. Running in all other directions brought you to the sea.

So there was extreme terror and desperation. Near the end of the evacuation Herrington receives and obeys orders to leave on the final helicopter, though 420 people who have been assured of safe passage are still waiting on the embassy stairway. For the people of Vietnam this helicopter that never comes is the final betrayal.

I was reminded of the words of a novel that had been written a half a century before the war: "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy--they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made..."

I had the pleasure to work with then Colonel Herrington before he left the Army. This book is an outstanding work as a personal memoir, an insight into the Vietnam War, and an example of successful counter-insurgency operations.

Stalking the Vietcong takes the reader into a relatively ignored, and perhaps the most important side, of the Phoenix program-the district level operations. Most other books on Phoenix tend to concentrate on sensationalized special forces operations or the alleged abuses of the Vietnamese populace. Read this book to get a more complete and accurate picture.

It's great to see good books on special operations. Not many are written. Another couple of books that bring the reader into more contemporary special operations are "Black Hawk Down" by Mark Bowden, and "Danger Close" but Mike Yon. Keep writing!

What's so different here is the intelligence of the author, his sensitivity to and curiosity about the Vietnamese. It's too bad he wasn't a policy-maker. Intensely interesting, entertaining history. I was truly sorry when it was over. I wanted more.

An excellent book that shows how hard US Army agents work to "get the bad guys." Colonel Herrington shows how much time, effort, and sacrifice each of those soldiers is making daily in their effort to keep our country safe. They deserve the recognition and he shows their point of view in this gripping history. I recommend it both as a interesting/exciting read and to get great sense of an overlooked part of our history.

I am not an aficionado of the spy genre, but this book held my interest throughout. I would guess that that's because of it's realism. The world of spies and spycatchers appears to be much drabber than what is portrayed in the novels of Le Carre. I don't quite understand why I like that better, but it's probably because I read such books to find out about the real world rather than for escape into a fantasy world.

I found the amount of politics and bureaucratic hurdles Herrington and his team had to go through appalling, particularly the Justice Department insistence on a 100% airtight case against a traitor of the magnitude of Clyde Conrad. On p.212 an attorney of the Justice Dept. says they will not authorize the arrest of Conrad in spite of an overwhelming pile of evidence, and Herrington asks if that is the attorney's personal view or the position of the attorney general. The attorney answers ambiguously that it is the view of the Justice Department. I find it very, very hard to believe that either Ed Meese or William French Smith would hesitate to go after an enemy agent like Conrad out of fear of failing to obtain a conviction. That sort of timidity in defense of the departmental resume just wasn't characteristic of the Reagan appointees. No, this sounds more like eunuchs guarding their little piece of turf. Failing to arrest and prosecute Clyde Conrad on the grounds that you might not get a conviction is tantamount to letting Timothy McVeigh run free because he wasn't seen at the site of the Oklahoma City bombing. I would only fault Colonel Herrington for not putting the names of those cowardly Justice Department lawyers into this very fine book for all to read.

This well-written eyewitness account of our military's counterintelligence operations during the Cold War will stand as a classic. Stuart Herrington was there and, as a former Intelligence officer myself, I can attest that no one had greater respect or credibility in the counterintelligence world. The only fault I find with this terrific book is that Herrington understates his own indispensible--and often heroic--role in these actions. While his humility is becoming, it limits the reader's knowledge of his incalculable contributions. But that is by the way--this book tells a dramatic story that long needed to be told, and it tells it splendidly. While I have written fiction about this shadowy world, no fictional tale can equal the remarkable reality of what a handful of men did for our country behind the curtains of the world stage. As a fellow officer, I admire Herrington; as a fellow author, I envy his skills and achievement. I strongly--STRONGLY--recommend this fine book to all Americans interested in how the Cold War was really waged. Excellent!

Author Stuart Herrington got unique insights on the underlying causes of the Vietnam War by debriefing several Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army soldiers who were captured or surrendered. He also learned effective ways of fighting the enemy, and how the South Vietnamese government (and the U.S.) inevitably lost the war by failing to change.

This book should be of great interest Vietnam veterans and others who wonder why we "lost" the Vietnam War despite the vast amounts of money, time and lives we devoted to the fight.