Tanks in the Wire: The First Use of Enemy Armor in Vietnam

Book by Stockwell, David B

The burgeoning list of publications on the Vietnam War remains concentrated around the opposing poles of personal narrative and general accounts. Studies of specific operations tend to either take a journalistic approach or to be of interest primarily to military professionals. Daring Books has taken a welcome lead in filling this gap with a number of sound operational histories. Tanks in the Wire is the story of North Vietnam's first use of armor to overrun the Special Forces camp at Lang Vei on February 7, 1968. Stockwell, a serving armor officer in the United States Army, establishes the operational environment of the camp; in particular, he notes the problems of waging a low intensity war with irregular forces against the North Vietnamese regular army. Lang Vei's problems and requirements were also increasingly overshadowed by the developing siege of Khe Sanh, the marine base a few miles away. Certainly the most controversial aspect of this book is Stockwell's assertion that marine commanders were so intimidated by the developing North Vietnamese threat that they refused to take the risk of relieving Lang Vei. This behavior is not presented as the result of incompetence or pusillanimity. Tanks in the Wire pitilessly highlights growing confusion in the United States conduct of the war at the tactical as well as the strategic level. Inter-service rivalries between soldiers and marines were exacerbated by objective tensions between the demands of the light infantryman's war and those of conventional formations supported by heavy firepower. In the final analysis the balance rested with the North Vietnamese. At Lang Vei/Khe Sanh, the NVA skillfully matched its strengths to its enemies' weaknesses, using tanks to overrun an outpost while paralyzing superior mass with a matador's cape of hit-and-run warfare. Tanks in the Wire is a tribute to courage in adversity. It is also a warning against underestimating one's enemy. In this large format journal, 10-1/2" x 15", and often utilizing double page spreads, there's ample room to provide die silences, air, and white space so beneficial to the appreciative publication of poems. Bomb tends to cram a multiplicity of verse on a page. This presentation trivializes the work, and for a periodical concerned with design excellence, such layout is typographically clumsy. Prose was of inconsistent quality, with Jonas Mekas' "Diary" and Bradford Morrow's "Bestiary" loaded with energy, kinesis and crafty inventiveness. Several other pieces were inexplicably introspective or fragmentary and aimless. Bomb's editors display an affinity for selections from forthcoming books, and both Marguerite Feitlowitz's "Anna, Who Didn't Believe in the Sea" and Leslie Dick's "Repetition" reveal the publishing dangers inherent in this strategy. Both writers' works, in brief excerpts, woefully lack context, development and engagement. There's not enough to insightfully grasp and, because the selections are from the early portions of lengthier texts, resolution is missing. I was not teased to anticipate either of their yet unpublished novels. There are numerous pages of photography, usually black and-white renderings of large-scale visual art. While I've no doubt many of the canvases and constructions are strong, moving, and beautiful as originals, too much is lost though the grainy texture of newsprint publication. Abstract paintings appear as a wash of grays, though representational pieces fare better. Bomb has its moments and should be in the periodical collections of libraries concerned with developments in the arts. It is neither as explosively noisy nor the theatrical dud that its name suggests. -- From Independent Publisher