ARVN: Life and Death in the South Vietnamese Army

The second recurring theme is a comparison with the generally more successful North Vietnamese practices, which managed to combine traditional approaches to military service, village-level Confucian concepts of political legitimacy, and Marxist anticolonial goals. Food supplies were often inadequate and inappropriate, and funds allocated for the housing and medical care of soldiers and their families were often siphoned by corrupt officials. Because it is a social history, the book devotes only a single chapter to the ARVN as a fighting force. The most telling piece of information supporting this view is that when Saigon fell in 1975, the ARVN soldiers who fled were able to take along their families in numbers that were proportionally much higher than those of similar refugee groups in other parts of the world.