Dak To: America's Sky Soldiers in South Vietnam's Central Highlands

Brigade size actions are difficult to write about. Too big to gain a really intimate portrait of the men, they’re also too small to reveal much strategy. Murphy does his best, focusing on the 173rd Airborne Brigade in the desperate fighting around Dak To in November of 1967. Heavy North Vietnamese forces were entrenched on a group of hills in the Central Highlands, and the Sky Soldiers of the 173rd were brought in to destroy them. The ensuing close combat was vicious: NVA bunkers nearly negated American firepower, and it came down to riflemen in dense jungle and steep hills, with mortars falling all about. The men fought and died for each other over a set of hills designated solely by number. The result was a microcosm of Westmoreland’s attrition strategy. Several of the NVA regiments involved were wrecked, able to do little more than reorganize in Laos for a year, but the 173rd also had its guts ripped out. The terrain meant nothing.

Murphy does his best to depict the men, although we get only a paragraph or two for most of them. It’s difficult to track the overall course of the campaign. The closest comparison I can think of to this book is We Were Soldiers Once… and Young, and while it’s unfair, We Were Soldiers Once is far superior.