An absorbing and definitive modern history of the Vietnam War from the acclaimed New York Times
bestselling author of The Secret War. Vietnam became the Western world's most divisive modern
conflict precipitating a battlefield humiliation for France in 1954 then a vastly greater one
for the United States in 1975. Max Hastings has spent the past three years interviewing scores
of participants on both sides as well as researching a multitude of American and Vietnamese
documents and memoirs to create an epic narrative of an epic struggle. He portrays the set
pieces of Dienbienphu the 1968 Tet offensive the air blitz of North Vietnam and also much
less familiar miniatures such as the bloodbath at Daido where a US Marine battalion was almost
wiped out together with extraordinary recollections of Ho Chi Minh's warriors. Here are the
vivid realities of strife amid jungle and paddies that killed two million people. Many writers
treat the war as a US tragedy yet Hastings sees it as overwhelmingly that of the Vietnamese
people of whom forty died for every American. US blunders and atrocities were matched by those
committed by their enemies. While all the world has seen the image of a screaming naked girl
seared by napalm it forgets countless eviscerations beheadings and murders carried out by
the communists. The people of both former Vietnams paid a bitter price for the Northerners'
victory in privation and oppression. Here is testimony from Vietcong guerrillas Southern
paratroopers Saigon bargirls and Hanoi students alongside that of infantrymen from South
Dakota Marines from North Carolina and Huey pilots from Arkansas. No past volume has blended
a political and military narrative of the entire conflict with heart-stopping personal
experiences in the fashion that Max Hastings' readers know so well. The author suggests that
neither side deserved to win this struggle with so many lessons for the twenty-first century
about the misuse of military might to confront intractable political and cultural challenges.
He marshals testimony from warlords and peasants statesmen and soldiers to create an
extraordinary record.
