Whether the United States ever really ‘understood’ the Vietnam War is a question that resonates from the highest echelons of political decision-making down to the lowliest ‘grunt’. Received wisdoms tell us not.2 In popular literature at least, the US campaign in Vietnam is presented as a sort of grisly caricature; an indiscriminate military effort trammelled by an obsession with technology, wedded to the strategy of attrition and fundamentally ignorant of Vietnam as a social and political entity. These failings thus set the ground for a vastly inflated yet curiously half-hearted conventional military and air campaign on the part of the United States that sought to use its traditional strengths of mass, manoeuvre and firepower in order to defeat the North’s politico-military struggle for national liberation.3 Defeat was inevitable.