No vietnam. No problem.
Firstly, no historian would take history book available from bookstore seriously.
From what I can see from your comments, the book you have read seems to have very straight forward narrative in which everyting are explained to the readers as if it is a story book. Unfortunately the fact that someone can explain/narrate something is no proof that its claims are valid.
Another thing which is apparent from your narration of the books is that the book(s) don’t seem to bother to examine the primaly source which contradict his claim, not to mention the fact that he seems to have very few source to base his claim. I don’t have to go to book store tomorrow to find that there are numerous books which has opposite view/conclusion from the book(s) you read, and I won’t be suprised if these book(s) also souce their argument from “recently declassified material”, which often are not so secret, not to mention the numerous ommision involved in the quote which become apparent if I examined the source by myself.
There are whole arts involved in critical apraisal of the primary sources in history. To even write a 30 page paper, an academic historian often quote numerous different sources of material. To make sence out of complex and often contradictory sources is agonising process. To write a book would often take nearly 100s of different source material and years or even a decade of work. If someone would base his claim on very few or sometimes only one source, you should consider the book as edutaiment book.
I’m sorry that my initial proposition was half-baked. Though it is a historical constancy that guerrila warfare involving civilians has always been near impossible to fight against unless one employ scorched earth tactics, I certainly didn’t want to bother to write loooooong comment on history of ground combat capability of U.S.. I could certainly up the standard of debate here but that would be exceedingly boring and pointless. After all, this is a martial arts forum.
My argument here is not to convince you that you should switch to lefty view on history. In practice all the vietnam books you can buy from book store are “Vietname War for Dummy” type book. Serious historical work is very boring to read and would never sell in bookstore. Therefore, you should seriously avoid drawing any conclusion(s) from book you read.
Lastly, we are going to find out the result of the war one way or another. That goes the same with the credibility of that Russian site, though, so far, I’m impressed with information this site provide.
I just thought this is an interesting issue to point out, not to mention the interesting analogy with UFC. Btw, I still believe that U.S. has good chance of eventually capturing Bagdhad. Whether they can keep occupying Iraq is another matter.
no your not