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The enemy held almost half of the town, and their troops and tanks were assaulting day and night to take the remainder of it.” Yet Kontum was successfully defended. McKenna writes: “During the last two weeks of May in 1972, Kontum was the scene of a violent struggle between the equivalent of three divisions of Communist North Vietnamese soldiers, who were attacking to seize the city, and the one South Vietnamese division defending it. . . He writes, ‘The Communists showed relative restraint in the Central Highlands, where they besieged the town of Kontum, even though a South Vietnamese division fled rather than fight.’ ”

(Aug.In the preface to “Kontum,” McKenna, who lives in Stowe, Vt., is critical of Karnow’s “Vietnam: A History,” published in 1983, in which the only mention of the Battle of Kontum “consists of 26 completely misleading words.

McKenna, severely wounded near the end of the offensive, switches from the first person to the third and includes excessive military minutiae, but does an effective job of melding his own story with the bigger picture. McKenna served under Vann, the subject of Neil Sheehan's A Bright Shining Lie, and offers an illuminating picture of the colorful, contradictory ex-military man in action. The successful defense of Kontum (and South Vietnam) was led by the legendary John Paul Vann, working for the U.S. That onslaught overcame a less-than-stellar performance by the South Vietnamese Army, although one ARVN division stood up well. But tens of thousands of American troops, including advisers to the South Vietnamese Army such as McKenna, remained, and Nixon unleashed American airpower, including massive, sustained B-52 bombing operations.

The massive, three-pronged attack, aided by Soviet and Chinese weaponry, came as the United States was rapidly withdrawing its combat troops under Nixon's "Vietnamization" plan.

McKenna, in his first book, presents a well-researched, heavily detailed look at the 1972 North Vietnamese Army invasion of South Vietnam%E2%80%94the so-called Easter Offensive designed to topple the South Vietnamese government and end the war.