Lewis Sorley, a military historian and retired United States Army officer who argued that the U.S. won the war in Vietnam, only to later betray the Vietnamese and lose it, died on Sept. 25 at his home in Carlisle, Pa. He was 90.
His death was confirmed by his stepdaughter, Susan Merritt.
Mr. Sorley’s revisionist book “A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam,” published in 1999, enjoyed a vogue at the Pentagon in the early years of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, when officers were assigned to read it in the hope that it might offer a positive prognosis for those conflicts.
As it turned out, it didn’t. And outside the Pentagon, the book’s main thesis was largely rejected.
Mr. Sorley, who had been an officer in the Vietnam War, declared flatly in his central chapter that “there came a time when the war was won” — a period he dated to the end of 1970, when the “South Vietnamese countryside had been widely pacified.” It was only after 1972, when the U.S. “defaulted” on “repeated commitments to the South Vietnamese,” as Mr. Sorley put it in a later interview, that North Vietnam was able to overcome its adversaries.
Mr. Sorley, a third-generation graduate of West Point, gave particular credit to Gen. Creighton Abrams, commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, under whom he served, whose taped meetings with staff were an essential research tool for the book. General Abrams jettisoned his predecessor William Westmoreland’s “war by attrition” strategy in favor of a policy of winning hearts and minds in the Vietnamese countryside, a strategy Mr. Sorley believed was successful. (In 2011, he would write a critical biography of Gen. Westmoreland.)
It was “the termination of political support, reduction of matériel support, and eventually even denial of fiscal support to the South Vietnamese by their sometime American ally,” Mr. Sorley wrote in the conclusion of “A Better War,” that proved decisive in the South’s defeat.
Historians, journalists who covered the war and many veterans rejected Mr. Sorley’s perspective, both before and after his book appeared. In their view, it discounted the circumstances that made the Vietnam War “effectively unwinnable,” as the historian Kevin Boylan put it in a New York Times opinion essay in 2017.
Mr. Sorley’s book, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, minimized several crucial factors: that the conflict with the Americans was one of national liberation for the Vietnamese Communists, just as it had been when the Vietnamese forced the French out in 1954 and 1955; that the corrupt and torture-prone American-supported government in Saigon enjoyed little support among the population, a pattern that would be repeated in Afghanistan a half-century later; that the grotesque scale of the killing of civilians helped turn the population against the Americans (the 1968 massacre at My Lai got only a passing mention); and that the South Vietnam forces’ “Achilles’ heel was their weak will to fight — and this shortcoming was never overcome,” as Mr. Boylan put it. That was another way this war anticipated the one in Afghanistan, where government forces melted away in the final week.
The journalist and historian Jonathan Mirsky dismissed Mr. Sorley’s argument in The New York Review of Books, writing that “it fails as a piece of serious analysis” because “it never addresses the most telling question of all: Why were the South Vietnamese armies, backed by the most powerful country in the world, so weak?”
Mr. Mirsky characterized the book as “an embittered defense of Creighton Abrams,” and indeed Mr. Sorley devoted much space to the general’s Accelerated Pacification Campaign, which he believed was the key to his strategy, and his success.
“The central goal of the APC, as it was called for short, was to raise 1,000 contested hamlets to relatively secure status in a ninety-day period,” Mr. Sorley wrote. “When the campaign showed greater than expected success early in the process, the number of targeted hamlets was raised to 1,300, and by early January 1969 some force had been moved into 1,320 of them.”
But other historians pointed out, as Mr. Mirsky wrote in a review of Mr. Sorley’s Westmoreland biography, that General Abrams “championed ‘clear and hold’ operations like ‘Speedy Express,’ in which the Ninth Division ‘had taken off the kid gloves’ during its six-month operation in the delta. This led to an enormous number of civilian casualties.”
Mr. Sorley was sharply critical of Ken Burns’s widely acclaimed 2017 PBS documentary series about the Vietnam War, which documented the war’s horrific missteps; he called it “deeply flawed.”
Lewis Stone Sorley III was born on Aug. 3, 1934, in West Point, N.Y., the son of Col. Merrow Sorley, who taught military art and engineering at the U.S. Military Academy, and Louise (Hunt) Sorley. Bob, as his family called him, graduated from the Texas Military Institute in San Antonio in 1951, and from West Point in 1956 with a degree in military engineering.
There followed a long career in the military: From 1957 to 1960, in Germany, he was a tank platoon leader; from 1963 to 1966, after earning an M.A. in English literature from the University of Pennsylvania, he was an instructor and assistant professor in the English department at West Point. He was an executive officer in a tank battalion in Vietnam in 1966 and 1967, before serving as assistant secretary of the general staff there from 1968 to 1970; and in 1973, he joined the faculty of the U.S. Army War College in the department of military planning and strategy.
After retiring from the Army in 1976, he was a senior civilian official in the C.I.A. In 1979, he received a Ph.D. in national security policy from Johns Hopkins University.
Mr. Sorley was also the author of “Honor Bright: History and Origins of the West Point Honor Code and System” (2008), “Vietnam Chronicles: The Abrams Tapes, 1968-1972” (2004), “Honorable Warrior: General Harold K. Johnson and the Ethics of Command” (1998), “Thunderbolt: General Creighton Abrams and the Army of His Times” (1992) and “Arms Transfers Under Nixon: A Policy Analysis” (1983).
In addition to his stepdaughter, Mr. Sorley is survived by two stepsons, Douglas and Timothy Becker; a sister, Judith Simpson; and four step-grandchildren. Mr. Sorley’s wife, Virginia, died this year, and a daughter from a previous marriage, Kathy Sorley, died in 2018.
“He loved the Army, and being in the military, and driving tanks,” Ms. Merritt, his stepdaughter, said in an interview. “And he so greatly admired the generals he wrote about.”
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