Uphill Battle.

• Author: Quinlivan, James T.
• Position: Book review

Uphill Battle: Reflections on Viet Nam Counterinsurgency by Frank Scotton, Texas Tech University Press, ISBN-13: 9780896728677, 2014, 512 pp., $85.00 Hardcover, $28.81 Paperback, $38.49 Nook e-book.

It is more than fifty years since Frank Scotton arrived in Viet Nam in 1962 as a newly minted officer of the United States Information Agency (USIA). He would spend years in Viet Nam on a first tour and would repeatedly return to Viet Nam right up until its fall. Only now after retiring from USIA in 1998 as Assistant Director for East Asia has he produced his memoir and reflections.

Scotton came to Viet Nam at a time when the Americans were still trying to figure out what to do and "there was (relative to what came later) absence of doctrine, organizational rigidity, and placement within boxes from which there could be no escape." (p. x) The United States Information Service (the overseas arm of USIA) in Viet Nam was itself charged not only with telling America's story with reading rooms and news releases but also assisting the Vietnamese government's own Vietnam Information Service (VIS) as well as propaganda, and psychological operations.

Scotton was drawn to Ev Bumgardner, the head of USIS field operations. Bumgardner offered a critical point of view "In this country mistakes are never corrected, they just accumulate and fester" (p. 13) and travel tips "your weapon should always have a folding stock for concealment and easy use from a vehicle." (p. 370) Most importantly, Bumgardner sent Scotton into the field to "Perceive, engage, report."(p. 27) With Bumgardner's guidance, Scotton was soon consorting with John Paul Vann and other field operators, both Americans and Vietnamese like Nguyen Be and Tran Ngoc Chau.

In a country where 90% of the population was described as "non-city" in the Area Handbook, there was very little American--or for that matter South Vietnamese--government understanding or interest in what went on in the hamlets where this population lived. Scotton initiated the Long An Hamlet Survey (whose interview guidance is included as an appendix) to try to find out. Scotton came to recognize the crucial question of whether the government and its American backers were inside the hamlet pushing out or outside the hamlet pushing in. In all too many cases, the answer was outside pushing in, either ineffectually or indiscriminately and destructively. Scotton's efforts such as the Quang Nghia People's Commandos and the Armed Political...