Book Review: Number One Realist: Bernard Fall and Vietnamese Revolutionary Warfare

Fifty years after the withdrawal of American troops, questions about why America fought there, whether the war could have been avoided, and what the lessons of Vietnam can teach America’s military continue to be hotly debated, not least in the pages of Number One Realist: Bernard Fall and Vietnamese Revolutionary Warfare. [...] Written by former soldier and Afghanistan War veteran Nathaniel Moir, the intellectual biography of Bernard Fall examines the thinking of one of the most insightful writers of the Vietnam War and is clearly influenced by the biographer’s service as a soldier in a rural counterinsurgency war some decades later. [...] Fall became one of the early analysts of the French campaign and maintained his focus on Vietnam during the early years of American Military History Number One Realist: Nathaniel L. [...] There was, however, a general agreement that the members of the class who vigorously protested the American involvement in the war would never have expected that the T-shirts and baseball caps at their reunion would be made in Vietnam. [...] The views and opinions expressed in Parameters book reviews are those of the reviewers and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government.