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The Battle of Ap Bac, Vietnam: They Did Everything but Learn from It. By David Toczek. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001. ISBN 0-313-- 31675-9. Maps. Photographs. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xxvii, 185. $62.00.
On the eve of the Communist conquest of Saigon in 1975 the South Vietnamese army was still a military organization riddled with weaknesses: lack of strategic mobility and tactical aggressiveness, an inefficient and politically motivated officer corps, and an over-reliance on air power and artillery. Generally speaking, these problems had first become apparent more than a decade earlier, a fact that John Toczek's book on the battle of Ap Bac makes very clear.
In January 1963, at a little village in southern South Vietnam known as Ap Bac, a battle was fought that would prove to be a warning of things to come. As battles go, it was a small one, but within a few weeks the story of what happened there thrust the burgeoning guerrilla...