Vietnam
An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975
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4.3 • 127 Ratings
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Hastings (The Secret War), serves up a mammoth history of the Vietnam war, drawing on many secondary and primary sources and interviews he conducted with veterans of all sides. The book, he says, is not an attempt to "chronicle or even mention every action"; rather, it's intended to "capture the spirit of Vietnam's experience" for the general reader. Much of the book covers well-trod but appropriate ground: Dien Bien Phu, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the Tet offensive, the perfidies of Nixon and Kissinger and North Vietnam's Le Duan, and so on. Many of Hastings's conclusions are sound, but one calls the enterprise into question: writing about Americans who served in the war, Hastings says, "Maybe two-thirds of the men who came home calling themselves veterans entitled to wear the medal and talk about their PTSD troubles had been exposed to no greater risk than a man might incur from ill-judged sex or bad shit' drugs." In addition to being factually questionable, this rhetoric is likely to alienate readers who have a personal connection to the war. Readers interested in recent in-depth Vietnam histories might do better to look to Road to Disaster: A New History of America's Descent into Vietnam.
Customer Reviews
Vietnam
A lot I did no know
An eye opening masterpiece
I have read several books about Vietnam over the course of the last few years, but this one may very well be the best yet. It ranks right up there with David Halberstam’s the best and the brightest. Author Max Hastings does a remarkable job, capturing the events, people, and the circumstances which led to a war that nobody really won. It may be is that said that the north did win because it conquered the South Vietnam and reunited the country. In reality, based upon Hastings’ closing chapter, the communists in the north brought their little to the civilians and to their own troops in terms of benefit.
Hastings brilliantly portrays the US involvement in the Vietnam war as a complete fiasco. He describes him on military leaders as well as our political ones failed to recognize early on that the government and Saigon was so corrupt and oblivious to the needs of the people of their country that the US should have put its foot down and demanded immediate government change. Despite the fact that the president of South Vietnam was overthrown by a coup within the military, Diem’s successor was barely better than him over the remaining 12 years of military conflict.
This narrative also points out that both presidents Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon both believed that they could bomb North Vietnam into total submission. Both men were proved wrong.
One has to wonder, based on the facts presented in this book, with interfere in foreign entertainment that mounted to a civil war.
I strongly recommend that anyone with an interest in the history of what happened in Vietnam that involved both the US, France, and both the north south Vietnam should read this book. It’s lengthy, but it’s well worth taking the time to read.
Sensational and Highly Flawed
The author likely spent too much time in Saigon hotel bars among other journalists of similar leftist persuasions and should have made more of an effort to interview soldiers and marines out in the fight. Also like many leftist authors, instead of real facts, he typically offers only sensationalized ad hoc examples to support his conclusions. And almost always he describes the communist leaders and soldiers in rosy terms while minimizing the character and efforts of US leaders, soldiers and their allies. But if you were a draft dodger, or an anti-war protester and want to feel good about being duped by Soviet propaganda to help the enemies of Western civilization, then you will like this book.