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Triumph Forsaken The Vietnam War, 1954-1965 by Mark Moyar Cambridge, 542 pp., $32 In the late summer of 1963, President John Kennedy dispatched two observers to South Vietnam. Their mission was to provide the president an assessment of the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem, the president of the Republic of Vietnam. The first, Major General Victor Krulak, USMC, the special assistant for counterinsurgency for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, visited some ten locations in all four Corps areas of Vietnam. Based on extensive interviews with U.S. advisers to the South Vietnamese army, Krulak concluded that the war was going well....

A FEW weeks ago, an archivist at The New York Times discovered a small trove of photographs I’d taken 50 years ago while covering the first major clash of the Vietnam War between the American and North Vietnamese Armies. Though I had written about the battle for The Times, and later in my book “A Bright Shining Lie,” I’d completely forgotten about the photographs. Seeing them brought back a cascade of memories of one of my most extraordinary days as a young war correspondent. From Our Advertisers It was Nov. 15, 1965, in the valley of the Ia Drang in...

In the days following the death of David Halberstam on April 23, praise of his journalism appeared in just about every major newspaper and magazine in America. Adhering to the principle of de mortuis, I did not interrupt the paeans with remarks about Halberstam’s gross misdeeds in Vietnam, which I had exposed in a book last year. But now that the funeral period has ended, the media has made clear that Halberstam’s elevation to the status of national hero is intended to be permanent, so in the interest of national history it has become necessary to point out how much...