Reddit reviews Charlie Rangers

Eh, you're misunderstanding the mentality of the VC. They couldn't be baited into defending civilians because they actually didn't give a fuck about them. Civilians were just camouflage who could be intimidated into providing cover, shelter, and supplies.

For US units, the Vietnam war was a tale of two militaries: one for the elite units who enjoyed a lot of success by training for ambush hunting and using stealth to track and kill VC, and one for the regular line units who received very little effective training and even less effective leadership, and thus weren't really prepared for the war they were being asked to engage in.

Read most of the accounts from Army Rangers, Army Green Berets, Navy SEALS, and Marine Force Recon units from Vietnam, and you get a very different picture of the war. Those guys were playing the VC's game and were much better at it than the VC were. Army/Marine high command was full of officers who were brought up in WWII and Korea and refused to adjust doctrine to match the reality on the ground. This was compounded by a few early battles of the Vietnam war where the VC went force on force with Army line units and the Army line units inflicted staggering losses on the North Vietnamese guerillas. That led to a vindication of the belief among the leadership that the war could be won through conventional means, even though relatively low ranking special forces commanders were already vocally expressing their disagreement. So the special forces and small elite units were allowed to play their "games", while division commanders and above thought they were doing the real work, when in reality they were just feeding unprepared troops into the meat grinder.

This is a pretty hardcore book to read, but I recommend it because it talks about the training and mission preparation Army Rangers in Vietnam did, and how shocked they were at the lack of training and lack of discipline in regular Army troops when they ran across them in the field. https://www.amazon.com/Charlie-Rangers-Don-Ericson/dp/0804102880/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1478359082&sr=8-1&keywords=charlie+rangers



Luckily for the US military, if a captain or Lt. Colonel has a novel idea now, there's a much higher chance of it being listened to compared to back then.

I haven't ready Linderer's work, but I did read Miller's accounts in "Six Silent Men" (book 2), and found it to be plausible and enjoyable. From what I understand, there is a discrepancy in how Linderer's account of a contact went vs the radio transmissions on record? A brief googling didn't provide much clarity.

Rotundo and Ericson's accounts in "Charlie Rangers" were also particularly good, if you're into it, and there are no scandals I am aware of surrounding them...

I recommend "Charlie Rangers" because it tells of the Vietnam experience of a couple of US Army Rangers, who were actually trained to do counter-insurgency jungle fighting, and had great results in Vietnam. They specifically mention multiple times that they were shocked at the poor training of regular infantry troops operating in the jungle. They considered some of the practices they saw to be suicidally stupid. By contrast, the Rangers were beating the VC at their own game of stalk and ambush.

https://www.amazon.com/Charlie-Rangers-Don-Ericson/dp/0804102880/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1506532215&sr=8-1&keywords=charlie+rangers