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In the preface to ARVN: Life and Death in the South Vietnamese Army , Robert K. Brigham notes that the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) was "one of the most maligned armies in modern history" (p. x) criticized by the American press and the military from the earliest days of America's conflict in Vietnam and blamed for the fall of the South Vietnamese regime in 1975. Few scholars have paid attention to the soldiers who constituted the ARVN or to the effects of their service on the families and local societies from which they were recruited. Brigham's study takes a valuable step toward correcting this gap in our knowledge. He specifies in the introduction that the focus of the book is not the battlefield history of the ARVN, which has appeared in many other works, but rather its social and cultural history. He also emphasizes that the book primarily addresses the lives of enlisted soldiers, not those of the officer corps.
The book is solidly based on research in the archives of the South Vietnamese government, located in Ho Chi Minh City, and American military and government records in the U.S. Army archives and in the Kennedy and Johnson presidential libraries. It also draws on Brigham's interviews with hundreds of former ARVN soldiers in the 1990s in both Vietnam and the United States. Despite the problems...