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 … 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.
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I have read several good books about Vietnam. What I like most about this book is that it begins with how the French became involved with Indochina . It digs deeply into the actions of individual characters and how their actions influenced the spiral into war with this small peninsula culture. It then continues with the same deep analysis of the individuals during the Indochina then Vietnam war as it evolved and then devolved through the years of American involvement. It also addresses the attitudes of the Vietnamese themselves toward the war as there were divergent opinions between the Upper class and the Agrarian class of the Vietnamese people.
This is a comprehensive, spellbinding, surprisingly intimate, and altogether magnificent historical narrative.
If you are a Nam vet or family of a Nam vet you need to read this book
This balanced and insightful book is a pleasure to read. It destroys the fantasy that one side or the other held the moral high ground or a monopoly on devastating folly.
Maybe the best book ever written about the Vietnam Conflict…….it includes details from the French era and even after the US exited……..a don’t miss book for military history readers
I loved the book “Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975” by Max Hastings which offers a unique perspective on the war. There’s also a heart breaking book “War Torn” which compiles the stories of women reporters who covered the Vietnam War—something which was very unusual and extremely brave, at the time.
Max Hastings, a noted British Journalist of military affairs who covered the Vietnam War during the LBJ years and is a New York Times best-selling Author, has written a new book on that war. True to its title, his history portrays Vietnam as a “tragedy.” Hastings narrative of over 700 pages further depicts this tragedy as truly ‘epic’ – mainly from the view of and its impact on the Vietnamese people. Indeed, from the start, it is clear that author’s intent is to convey “something of the enormity of the experience that the Vietnamese people endured over three generations, from the consequences of which they remain unliberated to this day.” To make his point to those who see the war from an American prism, he reminds his readers that “this was predominantly an Asian tragedy, upon which a US nightmare was overlaid [and in which] around forty Vietnamese perished for every American.”
In focusing on the war as largely a Vietnamese tragedy, Hastings’ book does much to fill a void in some notable histories of the war. For example, several popular histories such as Halberstam’s “The Best and the Brightest,” Sheehan’s “A Bright Shining Lie,” and Karnow’s “Vietnam: A History”focus primarily on the US actors and actions; and do not cover in much depth the role of the Vietnamese played in the conflict – other than South Vietnam and its Army was corrupt and inefficient, and North Vietnam, its Army and supporting southerners, determined and driven. Now we have a history that rightfully pays much more attention, especially as seen from the years 1945 to 1975, to what the conflict meant to the Vietnamese as a whole, to include its leaders, soldiers, and people – both in the North and South.
In doing so, Hastings’ book also does a service in dispelling several popular and orthodox lingering myths about the conflict. For example, using more extensive and broader interviews than the Ken Burns TV series, he shows that the North Vietnamese did not hold a monopoly over the nationalist aspirations of the Vietnamese people. Rather, he demonstrates that many in the south had similar aspirations; and they fought equally as hard and bravely for their vision of a Vietnam state free from the yoke and what would turn out to be the horrors of communism. The great tragedy for those Southern Vietnamese, Hastings argues, is that their leaders were too focused on themselves, rather than resolving national issues; and in the end were sold out for political expediency by their US supporters.
Other myths the author dispels is that the war was initially fought primarily over Southern Vietnamese domestic discontent of an illegally formed political entity that did not represent or honor the heritage of the Vietnamese people; and begun and mainly fought by Southern communist nationalists supported by their Northern brethren. While he holds no punches in criticizing the corruptness and ineptitude of the various Southern Vietnamese governments and their senior military officials, he convincingly shows that the Northern Communist leaders and its Army dominated both the nature and conduct of the war; that Northern leaders, to include Ho Chi Minh, ruthlessly imposed at great human costs their views of what the future of the Vietnamese peoples must be; and that, in the end, the North betrayed the aspirations of its Southern communists.
In focusing this history on the struggle and plight of the Vietnamese, Mr. Hastings sometimes relegates or neglects certain important aspects the role and nature of the American involvement. The result is a lack of balance in his observations and conclusions on the relationships between the US conduct of the war with the South Vietnamese civil and military aspects. Thus, the author buys in to the common, but misrepresented, view that the US military neglected the importance of civil affairs and security and focused too much on the shooting war. Moreover, the authors predominate focus on what was indeed an epic tragedy to the Vietnamese people, often leads to a scant, brief, and underrepresented explanation of important decisions and mistakes of US civilian and military leaders that often affecting the Vietnamese, as well as how the war also was a tragedy for Americans.
Nevertheless, Mr. Hastings’ book is an important contribution to an understanding of the Vietnam War. It corrects many past and current misperceptions, and brings to focus the plight, cost, and present situation of the Vietnamese people. This is a must read for anyone who seeks to understand the immense tragedy of the war, not just from the American perspective.
I’ll mention this when some young person asks for a way into Nam lit. Good sketches of Vietnamese, from both sides. I think he emphasizes commie imperfection at the cost of accurate appreciation of the David V Goliath aspect, and when talking about lit and film I wish at least one heavyweight historian would figure out that Pierre Schoendoerffer made the best flicks, not Stone, certainly not the Apacolyptic Cow, and I wish he’d managed to mention Go Tell The Spartans.. But Sir Max is easy reading, strikes a nice balance between thoroughness and unhappy heft, and mostly knows what he’s talking about.
Every American should read.
Good history of the background and the actual conflict known as the Vietnam War
The sad story of how we in the west mistreated and misread Vietnam.The author may overstate some elements, but the fundamental truth of our collective inability to recognize or admit our errors is laid out in plain language.
A pretty damn good general history of Viet Nam…An Epic Tragedy indeed.