Reddit reviews War Without Fronts: The USA in Vietnam

Thanks for the reply!

I'd like some more elaboration on the differences between Turse's and Greiner's books; looking at the Amazon summary, it seems like Greiner also argues that it is not so much the fault of the "grunts" on the ground, but the faults of the general US strategy in the area, and the approach that the top brass took toward Vietnam:

>Rather than pointing the finger at the “grunts” fighting a dirty war on the ground, Greiner argues that the responsibility for these atrocities extends all the way up to the White House and the Pentagon. The escalation of violence on the ground can be attributed to several factors: a U.S. political leadership afraid for the United States to lose its credibility and unable, against better advice, to stop the war; a military that devised a strategy of attrition based on “body counts” as the only way to defeat an enemy skilled in unconventional warfare; officers who were badly trained, lacking in motivation and interested only in furthering their careers; soldiers who realized they were utterly disposable and sought to empower themselves through random killing. The result was the torture, rape, maiming, and murder of countless Vietnamese civilians.

This doesn't seem all that different from Turse's identification of official policy as the root cause of the violence. Does the book focus more on "brainwashing" methodologies than Greiner's book?

In that post /u/Bernardito recommends "War Without Fronts: The USA in Vietnam", who was described as:

> Rather than pointing the finger at the "grunts" fighting a dirty war on the ground, Greiner argues that the responsibility for these atrocities extends all the way up to the White House and the Pentagon. The escalation of violence on the ground can be attributed to several factors: a U.S. political leadership afraid for the United States to lose its credibility and unable, against better advice, to stop the war; a military that devised a strategy of attrition based on "body counts" as the only way to defeat an enemy skilled in unconventional warfare; officers who were badly trained, lacking in motivation and interested only in furthering their careers; soldiers who realized they were utterly disposable and sought to empower themselves through random killing. The result was the torture, rape, maiming, and murder of countless Vietnamese civilians.

... so saying that he's "whitewashing the US military" is a bit of a stretch. He's just saying that book isn't that great, and recommended a better one.