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In June 1964, Prime Minister Robert Menzies promised President Lyndon B. Johnson that no matter what happened in Vietnam, "whichever way it goes, my little country and your great country will be together through thick and thin". He was as good as his word. Less than a year later, Menzies formally announced the commitment of a battalion for service in South Vietnam. That decision was presented to the Australian public as an extension of on-going assistance to that nation and it was implied that it was the result of a formal request for military assistance to Saigon. A couple of weeks earlier, Menzies told Cabinet that Australia should commit forces because, among other things, he believed the psychological effect on Washington would be "phenomenally valuable, including in Australia's interests". Menzies got his way and set the course with the words, we "were looking for a way in and not a way out". By the end of the conflict, 50,000 Australians had served in Vietnam, resulting in 520 dead, 2,400 wounded, and a total cost of $162 million. The impact on Australian society was inestimable.

For years, we did not know much more at the end of the story than we did at the beginning, with the Australian War Memorial history concluding, weakly, in 1997 that "Vietnam was the most difficult and complex challenge to face those responsible for Australia's defence and foreign policies since the critical stage of the Pacific War in 1941-42". Now we know a little bit more. In an unpublished interview, conducted by the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library, in Austin, Texas, in late 1969, Menzies tells us that this most difficult and complex decision was neither difficult nor complex: "It took us not five minutes to decide that when this thing came to a point of action, we would be in it. We couldn't be in it to a very large extent because we're, in population terms, a small nation. But we had no hesitation, no doubts, and I have never had any regrets."

Former diplomat and scholar Garry Woodard begs to differ. Woodard's Asian Alternatives offers a new perspective and is revisionist history at its best. In the space of 355 pages and sixteen chapters-with the rest of the book turned over to an appendix and an adequate index-Woodard argues that Australia's involvement in this unhappy war was not as natural or predetermined as is generally assumed. In doing so, he picks two fights. In the first he disagrees with traditional scholarship which contends that the then Department of External Affairs was mainly responsible for getting Australia into the Vietnam War, arguing instead that the fateful decision "was made by politicians, limiting themselves to military advice" (p. 270). In the second, offering a JFK-style counter-factual explanation in its place, he argues that had Minister for External Affairs Garfield Barwick stayed on instead of Paul Hasluck, Australia would have chosen not to get involved in Vietnam. This is done by "comparing 'the Barwick years', 1959-64, with the following twelve months May 1964-April 1965, in which his successor Paul Hasluck fulfilled his aim for Australia to go to war alongside America in Vietnam" (p. x.) Woodard makes a powerful case.

If one only had time to read one new book on Australia's decision to go to war in Vietnam, Woodard's Asian Alternatives would be the first port of call. His appendix of enduring features in Vietnam decision making, pointing to the folly of Iraq nearly forty years later, is worth the price of admission alone.

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