Goodnight Saigon: American Provincial Advisors’ Final Impressions of the Vietnam War

This article tests the veracity of the Revisionist thesis that the United States effectively won the Vietnam War in the years after Tet 1968. Since quantitative indicators could not accurately measure who was winning the “War in the Villages,” it relies instead upon qualitative assessments made by U.S. Province Senior Advisors—the Americans best qualified to make such judgments. It is organized into three sections dealing with the key Revisionist claims that the Vietcong insurgency was defeated, the Saigon regime gained control of practically the entire rural population, and the South Vietnamese armed forces became capable of standing on their own.