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A review by buermann
Yemen: The Unknown War by Dana Adams Schmidt
3.0
If only because almost all his sources are sympathetic with the monarchy and he spends the vast majority of his time on the royalist side of the conflict, and seems to have his own strange sympathies for the Saudis -- a long standing tradition among New York Times correspondents -- the narrative is a fairly one-sided account of the war.
A penultimate chapter devoted to the International Red Cross field hospital south of Najran is particularly fascinating, if only because it's such a refreshing change of perspective after hundreds of pages narrating repetitive reversals and fruitless parlays amongst belligerents stuck in gridlock.
The history ends in much the spirit: Schmidt sets up the climactic siege of Sana'a, with royal forces outnumbering the republicans two to one, and then, as I re-read these last pages over again, fails to tell the reader what happened, or who won this particular unknown war. With the Egyptian occupation ended, replaced by Soviet air support on the republican side, and the royal faction mostly starved of outside support without the Saudis, the Yemeni proxies themselves simply dissipate in a disjointed narrative shift to the Aden Emergency. One can gather from the implications of the afterword that the republicans drew out a stalemate to victory, but it's a strange way to end a war story.
Most curious, perhaps, is that in 1968 the author compares the Egyptian invasion of Yemen to America's invasion of Vietnam, by way of denouncing it for its cratered moonscapes and exceptional atrocities. Egyptians had already, in a seemingly anachronistic neologism considering America's fruitless mass production of south east asian moonscapes for the next five years, taken to calling Yemen their Vietnam.
A penultimate chapter devoted to the International Red Cross field hospital south of Najran is particularly fascinating, if only because it's such a refreshing change of perspective after hundreds of pages narrating repetitive reversals and fruitless parlays amongst belligerents stuck in gridlock.
The history ends in much the spirit: Schmidt sets up the climactic siege of Sana'a, with royal forces outnumbering the republicans two to one, and then, as I re-read these last pages over again, fails to tell the reader what happened, or who won this particular unknown war. With the Egyptian occupation ended, replaced by Soviet air support on the republican side, and the royal faction mostly starved of outside support without the Saudis, the Yemeni proxies themselves simply dissipate in a disjointed narrative shift to the Aden Emergency. One can gather from the implications of the afterword that the republicans drew out a stalemate to victory, but it's a strange way to end a war story.
Most curious, perhaps, is that in 1968 the author compares the Egyptian invasion of Yemen to America's invasion of Vietnam, by way of denouncing it for its cratered moonscapes and exceptional atrocities. Egyptians had already, in a seemingly anachronistic neologism considering America's fruitless mass production of south east asian moonscapes for the next five years, taken to calling Yemen their Vietnam.