Vietnam : an Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975
Max Hastings (Author)
"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 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 overwhelmingly as one for 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 we are given testimony from Vietcong guerrillas, Southern paratroopers, Saigon bar girls, 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 Hastings's readers know so well. The author suggests that neither side deserved to win this struggle, and presents many lessons for the twenty-first century about the misuse of military might to confront intractable political and cultural challenges. In Vietnam, Hastings marshals testimony from warlords and peasants, statesmen and soldiers, to create an extraordinary record"-- Jacket
Print Book, English, 2018
First edition View all formats and editions
Harper, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, New York, NY, 2018
Military history
xxxiii, 857 pages, 32 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color), maps ; 24 cm
9780062405661, 0062405667
1001744417
Beauty and many beasts
The "dirty war"
The fortress that never was
Bloody footprints
The twin tyrannies
Some of the way with JFK
1963: coffins for two presidents
The maze
Into the Gulf
"We are puzzled about how to proceed"
The escalator
"Trying to grab smoke"
Graft and peppermint oil
Rolling thunder
Taking the pain
"Waist deep in the Big Muddy"
Our guys, their guys: the Vietnamese war
Tet
The giant reels
Continuous replays
Nixon's inheritance
Losing by installments
Collateral damage
The biggest battle
Big ugly fat fellers
A kiss before dying
The last act
Afterward
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