Bruce Davies’ Vietnam does not even warrant a more modest adjective such as ‘comprehensive’. The Australian involvement in the Vietnam War of the 1960s and early 1970s had many aspects, including the political, diplomatic, strategic, social, and medical, apart from the military. Here, some of those aspects are almost totally neglected; some appear in slabs, not clearly related to the rest of the story; while others turn up in the form of small references or anecdotes, without explanation for the inclusion of some and the exclusion of others.

The statements in the cover blurb are a better guide to the book’s focus than the subtitle. The claim there is to describe ‘the experience of Australian soldiers as never before’, with new insights on ‘the operational performance of both sides’ and ‘new light on the enemy’s tactical thinking’. These areas engage the author’s interest and expertise, and offer glimpses of a fresh and potentially important perspective on Australia’s war in Vietnam. Bruce Davies served in part of every year from 1965 to 1970, with the first Australian infantry battalion to be dispatched to Vietnam, and then with the Australian Army Training Team Vietnam (AATTV), as an adviser to both the South Vietnamese army and the Americans in different parts of the country. His associate (the ‘with’ in the authorial attribution is not explained) is Gary McKay, a national serviceman who served as a platoon commander in 1971. McKay was injured in the Australians’ last major engagement, was awarded the Military Cross, had a thirty-year career as an army officer, and has written, co-authored, and edited about a dozen books, including what remains one of the best personal accounts by an Australian soldier, In Good Company: One Man’s War in Vietnam (1998). Between them they know a great deal about the Australian soldiers’ war, with their personal experience augmented by the books they have individually or jointly written on the experiences of other individuals and units. The potential value of this book lies in the passages that present the perspective of junior- to middle-ranking army officers. Australian veterans often describe Vietnam as a platoon commanders’ war, a phrase that could easily be extended to the other junior officers and senior non-commissioned officers who served alongside them.

The topics that most engage the author are principally those that have been much discussed, during the war and ever since, especially by those junior- and middle-ranking officers. It has long been known, for example, that there were major differences between the military doctrines and operational styles of the American and Australian forces. The Australians, many of whom in the early years of the commitment had had experience in the Malayan Emergency of the 1950s and the Indonesian Confrontation of the early 1960s, thought that they had mastered many of the tactics appropriate for pacification and jungle warfare. These Australians were often appalled by the American style of warfare, with its emphasis on large numbers, heavy and noisy technology, and massive firepower. They claimed that the Americans placed too much emphasis on the notorious ‘body count’ as an index of success or failure.

In fact, the story was rather more complex. Military techniques that were appropriate at some times and in some parts of the country differed from the needs of other times and places. Part of the eventual success of the People’s Army of Vietnam, generally known as the North Vietnamese Army (NVA), was its ability to conduct the war at several different levels, from low-level guerrilla tactics to massive, conventional warfare. Small patrols may have been effective in Phuoc Tuy province, the main operational area for the Australian task force, but they were utterly irrelevant to the major American engagements, such as the legendary Khe Sanh, where the NVA had infiltrated forces of up to divisional strength. As Davies points out, the Australians were happy to call in artillery and aerial firepower to assist them in some of their larger engagements. Moreover, as noted more than once in this book, the Australians themselves employed body counts in assessing their own successes and failures.

Similarly, Davies devotes considerable attention to other topics that have long been debated by Australian veterans, not least the junior officers and senior non-commissioned officers of the Training Team and the task force. What, for example, did they make of Colonel Ted Serong, the first commander of the Training Team and a close associate of the Catholic activist B.A. Santamaria? Was he a gifted expert on counter-insurgency whose views were highly respected by high-ranking political and military leaders in Saigon and Washington? Or was he widely regarded as a fake and a charlatan, especially by the last years of the war? Davies, like many but not all Australian veterans, inclines to the latter view.

Davies also discusses what is generally accepted as the most disastrous error made by the Australian task force: the construction of a minefield near Dat Do. Here, once again, Davies seems inclined to the view favoured by junior officers at the time. Rather than regarding the minefield as a demonstration of an imperialist mindset, he points to the views of other officers who advised against construction of the minefield at the time. Davies notes that the task force commander who established the minefield was, on his return to Australia, promoted major-general and appointed deputy chief of the army – a decided inhibition upon the officers and men who had to repair the mess.

Much of the information, debate, and source material on many of these topics will be familiar to readers of the three volumes of official history dealing with the Australian Army in Vietnam, To Long Tan (1993), On the Offensive (2003), and Fighting to the Finish (2012), all written by Ian McNeill and Ashley Ekins. Any additional ‘new insights’ are based largely on the extensive American literature on the war and on recent Vietnamese publications. There are some valuable observations about the South Vietnamese forces, largely based on direct observations of Australians in the task force. Given the existence of the official history, as well as Paul Ham’s Vietnam: The Australian War (2007), it is unfortunate that Davies was not persuaded to write a shorter book on Australia’s war in Vietnam, with a sharper focus on the operational experience of junior officers and senior non-commissioned officers.