Defend and Befriend

This book adds a great deal to the significant debate about how the United States waged the war in Vietnam. Southard skillfully questions the wisdom of the war of attrition, while at the same time highlighting the challenges of trying to win the war on the local level.

~Kyle Longley, author of Grunts: The American Combat Soldier in Vietnam and The Morenci Marines: A Tale of Small Town America and the Vietnam War

The work of the Combined Action Platoons during the Vietnam War was significant, yet the participants have had little opportunity to tell their stories. Defend and Befriend provides them with a voice. Charting new waters, this book is an important contribution to the study of the war.

~Mary Kathyrn Barbier, coeditor of America and the Vietnam War: Re-examining the Culture and History of a Generation

"A valuable and insightful study of the relationship and perceptions of Americans tasked with counterinsurgency and their Vietnamese counterparts. Defend and Befriend is terrific military history as well as serving as a guidebook for future counterinsurgency efforts. I learned something new from each chapter."—Larry Berman, author of Zumwalt: The Life and Times of Admiral Elmo Russell "Bud" Zumwalt, Jr.

"Southard has provided a much needed account of the Combined Action Program in Vietnam, a topic of increasing importance in a world increasingly obsessed with counterinsurgency. From strategic debates, through training, to combat, to the complex interaction between the Marines and their Popular Force counterparts, Defend and Befriend admirably covers CAP inside and out and is an important step forward in the historiography of the Vietnam War."—Andrew Wiest, author of The Boys of '67: Charlie Company's War in Vietnam

John Southard brings a scholarly perspective to a Vietnam War Marine counterinsurgency program that hitherto hasbeen discussed primarily by Marine Corps historians.

~VVA Books

[...] I cannot point to another source – primary or secondary – that describes the CAP program and all that it encompasses in such a concise manner [...] Southard is able to excellently capture much more than the gist of the CAP's experience; he captures the outlook of the individual CAP Marine to Lieutenant General Krulak's experience defending the CAP program to his four-star headquarters. This book will be appreciated by both historian and practitioner alike. Easily read with a well-organized and researched argument, it should be in the hands of the historian looking to examine other methods of war than conventional search and attack battle.

~US Military History Review