Books like Street Without Joy: The French Debacle in Indochina

If you have in interest in the Vietnam war, or in strategy, insurgencies and counter-insurgent techniques this book should be on your reading list. Street Without Joy tells the fascinating story of the post WW2 French in Indochina, their failures to understand or counter Vietnamese Communist forces and the eventual continuance of the same errors by the United States.Essentially, Fall posits that French (and later US) forces failed to understand the nature of the Vietnamese Communists' revolutionary war, their support among the local population and their ability to use neighboring countries (and eventually North Vietnam) as refuges. Western forces tried to counter these advantages with technology- fast strike mobile helicopter and armor groups, more and better surveillance, agent orange, etc. but this was a losing battle and they lacked the foresight to see it as such.Beyond the incisive and illuminating discussion of strategies and tactics, this is a story of heartbreaking death and suffering on a grand scale over a protracted time period. Time and again French soldiers were told to hold posts to the last man against advancing Viet Minh forces. Time and again they were slaughtered, with maybe a handful escaping into the jungle to trek for days or weeks back to the French lines, their adversaries in pursuit. When they eventually reached safety their ordeals had broken them to the point that to their rescuers they resembled 'Christ on the cross'. When Dien Bien Phu fell captured French soldiers, wounded or not, were cruelly forced marched five and even six hundred kilometers through the jungle, dying where they fell from exhaustion.Neither brave sacrifices nor horrific suffering were not restricted to the French military. Indochinese Soldiers and civilians suffered terribly, with the former making near-superhuman efforts to defeat their foreign enemies. Viet Minh and VC soldiers carried heavy weapons hundreds of kilometers through the mountains on their bleeding backs, living only on handfuls of rice and dying in droves under French artillery attacks with only primitive medical care available to them. The French also committed war crimes of their own, and Fall details how a Vietnamese village and its residents were napalmed by French aircraft for no reason other than to make a point.Fall writes well, and tells a compelling story of savagery and screw-ups, arrogance and last-stand bravery. I've heard this book is studied at defense academies around the world, and I can see why. Street Without Joy is one of the best books I've read on counterinsurgency and the mistakes a large high-tech army can make when fighting less sophisticated guerrilla forces. I finished this book with a heavy heart. So much wasted life and, judging by the US entry into Vietnam (and later Afghanistan and Iraq), so many lessons unlearned. On a final sad note, no one in this story escapes the horrors of this war, not even Fall himself. Six years after this book's publication Fall was on patrol in Vietnam with a group of U.S soldiers when he stepped on a landmine and was fatally hurt.