Anatomy of a War: Vietnam, the United States, and the Modern Historical Experience.

• Author: Uhl, Michael

Anatomy of a War, published by Pantheon in 1985, has been reissued without apparent revision to the original text, presumably for the sole purpose of showcasing a provocative forty-four-page "Postcript." In it, the post-reunification Vietnamese leadership comes in for a rather depressing tonguelashing at the hands of their former confidant and sometime champion, the author and historian Gabriel Kolko.

The charge? That classic provender of the Far Left - a sellout. In his "reassessment" of their "entire experience," Kolko argues that the Vietnamese have been stampeded down the capitalist road when they should have - indeed, could have - continued along the path of revolutionary socialism.

Even under these somewhat cranky circumstances, a new edition of Anatomy of a War is a welcome event. This is, after all, a monumental work, synthesized from a vast quantity of raw data and ordered within a methodological framework that the historian Marvin Gettleman once described as "plain Marxist" - which might suggest to some a blend of zeal and orthodoxy worthy of John Calvin.

Kolko has molded a historical epic from the actions, and the motive forces behind them, of the four principal actors of the "American war" - the northern and southern communists, the Americans, and their Vietnamese allies. Anatomy of a War remains the definitive scholarly response to the question posed to the American public by Lyndon Johnson in 1965 - but never satisfactorily answered by any of the war's apologists, even at this late date: "Why Vietnam?"

Despite a tendency toward repetitiveness, extending to certain key points and a few stock metaphors (more "vacuums" are created and filled in Kolko's prose than in a high-school physics class), there is a relentless, penetrating intelligence guiding this work from start to finish. And naturally for those of us who, with Kolko, recognize the justice of Vietnam's victory, the reading is bound to produce a certain grim satisfaction as we relive the glory days of that grand check to imperial power and world capitalist expansion, whose every step Kolko documents and analyzes with precision.

But now, nearly twenty years after that dramatic setback to U.S. designs for hegemony over Vietnam, the capitalist fox - if I may turn Hubert Humphrey's anticommunist barnyard homily on its head - has found economics to be a more effective means for wheedling its way back into the Little Red Hen House. This, at least, is the tenor of Kolko's...