H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-War@h-net.msu.edu (May 2007)
William Thomas Allison. _American Lawyers in War: Vietnam 1963-1975_.
Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007. xv + 230 pp. Notes, tables,
bibliography, index. $34.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7006-1460-8.
Reviewed for H-War by Michael Noone, The Columbus School of Law, The
Catholic University of America
An Introduction to Military Lawyers in Vietnam
The April 1968 issue of the Federal Bar Association's _News_ reported
that sixty members attended the Vietnam Chapter's luncheon meeting at
the Rex Hotel in Saigon. How those lawyers spent their professional time
is William Thomas Allison's theme. He says in his preface, "My primary
purpose is to explain the variety of military legal activities in
Vietnam, evaluate them, and share the human side of those activities,
all in the context of the war itself. The broader purpose is to expose
readers to the complicated nature of military law and military justice
in a democratic society as well as to show how difficult it is to
include military justice and legal affairs in the vanguard of
nation-building operations that include spreading U.S. values as a
political objective." He achieves his goals in 186 pages of extremely
readable text by keeping a tight focus on Vietnam. Nothing is said about
contemporaneous legal activities of the Air Force in Thailand and
Okinawa, nor of the Navy's activities in the Gulf. Very little is said
about the role of each service's supervising legal authorities outside
Vietnam, or of the role played by lawyers and policy makers at the
Commander-In-Chief, Pacific; the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and the Office
of the Secretary of Defense. Law enforcement personnel fare slightly
better. Lawyers in Vietnam relied on them to make the cases which could
be prosecuted, so there is some discussion of the problems faced by
military police and investigators. The author's definition of American
military justice in Vietnam does not extend to its products, the
prisoners at the notorious Long Binh Jail, the site of a murderous race
riot in 1968. This is legal history experienced in country by captains,
majors, and lieutenant colonels, nearly all of them judge advocates.
That vantage point makes the book particularly useful as supplementary
reading for a course on the war in Vietnam. Its chapters on the drug
problem, the black market, currency manipulation and corruption,
violations of the laws of war, and criminal justice issues illuminate
each topic by giving examples. The case of Captain Archie Kuntze, USN
("The American Mayor of Saigon"), who, according to one witness at his
court-martial, had over $23 million stashed in an icebox, illustrates
the difficulties prosecutors faced in proving corruption cases. Each
chapter is replete with similar examples, some of them, like the My Lai
cases, well known. Other cases, like the prosecution of PFC Michael
McInnis for attempted murder of a superior officer and related offenses,
were forgotten until the author resurrected them from the files of the
National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). The author's use of
source material is exemplary. He relies primarily on secondary sources
and, in doing so, offers an exceptional bibliography of law-related
materials which would aid students in their own research. Primary
materials, from NARA and the military history centers of the Army and
Air Force, are used to enrich the text. The National Archives holds the
research files created by Marine Lt. Col. Gary Solis as he wrote the
definitive legal history of the Marines in Vietnam, _Marines and
Military Law in Vietnam: Trial by Fire_ (1989), which Allison mined
particularly effectively. His work can serve as a model for researchers
revisiting the sources of earlier official histories.
What of the general reader? A former CIA historian once categorized
military history as either strategic, tactical, or anecdotal. This book
works wonderfully as an anecdotal history of U.S. military lawyers in a
particular time and place, enlivened by the reminiscences of veterans
whose letters to the author recapture emotions and experiences now forty
years past. This is the way the war must have been for the lawyers who
participated in it. Their stories, and those of their clients, are a
first-class read. At the tactical level, the book faces fierce
competition from two books covering the same period and many of the same
themes: Solis on the Marines and Maj. Gen. George Prugh on Army lawyers,
_Law at War, Vietnam 1964-1973_ (1975). I have not read Col. Frederic L.
Borch's _Judge Advocates in Vietnam: Army Lawyers in Southeast Asia
1959-1975_ (2004). Both traditional institutional histories cover events
and individuals in more detail and perforce with less verve than
Allison, who, with the exception of the chapter on corrupt practices,
does not attempt the same level of analysis and chronology. This book is
preferred as a readable brief introduction to the daily legal problems
faced by military lawyers in Vietnam.
At the strategic level, the author's ambitions--if any--are unclear.
Chapter 1, "A New Code for a Different Kind of War," attempts to
describe, in twenty pages, developments in U.S. military criminal
justice between 1765 and 1968 without a strong narrative line. There are
strategic themes available: evolving notions of "due process," (a
slippery term)and the extent to which the criminal justice revolution
created by the Warren Supreme Court in the early 1960s should be
extended to what the Supreme Court has described as "the separate
community" of the armed forces; changing demographics in the armed
forces; and the consequences of changes in the Uniform Code of Military
Justice in 1968. The chapter ends on that note, but the author makes no
effort in the following chapters to distinguish pre- and post-1968
developments. Instead, he extends his coverage to the role of military
lawyers in country building in Vietnam, without making any judgments
about their success or failure.
The conclusion, chapter 8, "Still in the Vanguard," does not succeed as
a coda. It starts by describing the last of the Vietnam courts-martial
of the turncoat Marine Robert Garwood, then briefly summarizes the 1970s
debate over efficacy of the post-1968 military justice system in
wartime. Chapter 8 could offer a rich opportunity to comment on recent
experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, where investigations of war crimes
allegedly committed on patrol require a separate lawyer for each patrol
member, and where testimony and physical evidence must be collected,
according to strict U.S. due process requirements, under circumstances
never imagined by the Supreme Court. The author instead gives a brief,
typically one paragraph, description of judge advocates'activities in
selected U.S. military operations, such as Urgent Fury (Grenada 1983),
Just Cause (Panama 1989), Desert Shield and Desert Storm (Kuwait,
1990-91) and several others, including recent operations in Bosnia,
Afghanistan and Iraq. Inexplicably, Allison does not mention Operations
Provide Relief and Restore Hope (Somalia 1992-95). His concluding
paragraph, referring to judge advocates' role in nation building, is
disappointingly bland and non-judgmental. Perhaps the author had no
strategic goal to use U.S. legal experiences in Vietnam as an
opportunity to reflect on our experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq. If
that is the case, then we can hope that his undoubted research and
writing skills will lead to a sequel.
Copyright (c) 2006 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits
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contact the Reviews editorial staff: hbooks@mail.h-net.msu.edu.
Regards,
Janet G. Valentine, PhD
H-War Book Review Editor
http://www.h-net.org/~war/
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Mike Yared
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