British journalist Max Hastings, noted for his critically acclaimed books about World War II, has fast-forwarded his research and writing talent to a war that many Americans would like to forget.
His 900-page work chronicles Vietnam’s tragic history from Ho Chi Minh’s proclamation of an independent state after the 1945 Japanese surrender to the collapse of the South Vietnamese regime 30 years later after the United States cut off ground and air support. Despite ample accounts of heroism and sacrifice on all sides, it’s a story in which each of the principal players — France, the United States, Saigon, Hanoi and the Viet Cong — comes away with well-deserved opprobrium.
Unsurprisingly, Hastings concludes that Vietnam was a catastrophe, one that took the lives of as many as 2 million to 3 million combatants and civilians. The war claimed 58,000 American lives, but the number of Vietnamese dead was 40 times greater.
This definitive narrative describes how the French debacle at Dien Bien Phu gave rise to the domino theory and the need to halt the spread of communist domination in Southeast Asia. There were more than 500,000 U.S. service personnel in Vietnam by the time of the 1968 Tet offensive, a stunning military defeat for the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong that was transformed into a propaganda victory.
After Tet, the war was never the same. CBS anchor Walter Cronkite declared the nation was mired in stalemate, President Lyndon B. Johnson said he would not seek re-election, and the U.S. abandoned any hope of victory and sought instead to extricate itself while avoiding explicit defeat.
The fighting would continue for another seven years, a period marked by the My Lai massacre, the invasion of Cambodia and the 1972 Christmas bombing, which Hastings says was designed for partisan political purposes and had no military justification.
The narrative includes detailed accounts of all the major battles, with riveting descriptions of what life was like for combatants on both sides. The reader relives the experiences of GIs plodding through booby-trapped jungle, North Vietnamese dodging B52 strikes while heading south on the Ho Chi Minh trail and helicopter pilots braving fire from hot landing zones while inserting troops or extricating the wounded. (AP)
 |
 |
 |
