Vietnam An Epic Tragedy 1945-1975 by Max Hastings

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLERHis
masterpiece Antony Beevor, SpectatorA masterful performance Sunday TimesBy
far the best book on the Vietnam War Gerald Degroot, The Times, Book of the
YearVietnam became the Western worlds 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 Tet offensive, the air blitz of North Vietnam, and less
familiar battles such as the bloodbath at Daido, where a US Marine battalion
was almost wiped out, together with extraordinary recollections of Ho Chi
Minhs warriors. Here are the vivid realities of strife amid jungle and
paddies that killed 2 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, 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