Vietnam
by Max Hastings
Military HistoryVietnam WarMilitary history of the United StatesMilitary history of VietnamHistory
4.5
Open LibraryAbout this book
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…
Themes & subjects
Military HistoryVietnam WarMilitary history of the United StatesMilitary history of VietnamHistoryNew York Times reviewed
Setting
VietnamUnited States1961-1975
About the author
Max Hastings
28 Dec 1945
Sir Max Hugh Macdonald Hastings (born 28 December 1945) is a British journalist and military historian, who has worked as a foreign correspondent for the BBC, editor-in-chief of *The Daily Telegraph*, and editor of the *Evening Standard*. He is also the author of numerous books, chiefly on defence matters, which have won several major awards. **Source**: [Max Hastings](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Hastings) on Wikipedia
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