Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975

by Max Hastings

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062405678
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	10/15/2019
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	896
Sales rank:	98,909
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 2.20(d)

About the Author

Max Hastings is the author of twenty-eight books, most about conflict, and between 1986 and 2002 served as editor in chief of the Daily Telegraph, then as editor of the Evening Standard. He has won many prizes, for both his journalism and his books, the most recent of which are the bestsellers Vietnam, The Secret War, Catastrophe, and All Hell Let Loose. Knighted in 2002, Hastings is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, an Honorary Fellow of King’s College London, and a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He has two grown children, Charlotte and Harry, and lives with his wife, Penny, in West Berkshire, where they garden enthusiastically.

Table of Contents

List of Maps xvii

Introduction xix

Note on Styles Adopted in the Text xxvii

Glossary of Common Acronyms and Military Terms xxix

1 Beauty and Many Beasts 1

1 Clinging to an Empire 1

2 The Vietminh March 10

2 The "Dirty War" 21

1 Steamroller Types 21

2 Washington Picks Up the Tab 32

3 Peasants 36

3 The Fortress that Never Was 45

1 Waiting for Giap 45

2 Disaster Beckons 55

4 Bloody Footprints 66

1 Quit or Bomb? 66

2 "A Triumph of the Will" 73

3 Geneva 82

5 The Twin Tyrannies 95

1 "A Regime of Terror" 95

2 "The Only Boy We Got" 104

3 Boom Time 110

4 A Recall to Arms 116

6 Some of the Way With JFK 127

1 "They're Going to Lose Their Country If …" 127

2 McNamara's Monarchy 141

3 Le Duan Raises His Stake 148

7 1963: Coffins for Two Presidents 155

1 Small Battle, Big Story: Ap Bac 155

2 The Buddhists Revolt 166

3 Killing Time 170

8 The Maze 185

1 "Enough War for Everybody" 185

2 Dodging Decisions 197

9 Into the Gulf 213

1 Lies 213

2 Hawks Ascendant 222

10 "We are Puzzled about How to Proceed" 234

1 Down the Trail 234

2 Committal 241

11 The Escalator 256

1 "Bottom of the Barrel" 256

2 New People, New War 268

12 "Trying to Grab Smoke" 288

1 Warriors and Water-Skiers 288

2 Unfriendly Fire 295

3 Traps and Trail Dust 302

13 Graft and Peppermint Oil 312

1 Stealing 312

2 Ruling 315

3 Gurus 321

14 Rolling Thunder 328

1 Stone Age, Missile Age 328

2 "Up North" 340

15 Taking the Pain 358

1 Best of Times, Worst of Times 358

2 Friends 364

16 "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy" 379

1 Peaceniks 379

2 Warniks 386

3 Fieldcraft 392

4 Guns 406

17 Our Guys, their Guys: The Vietnamese War 413

1 Song Qua Ngay-"Let's Just Get Through the Day" 413

2 Fighters 418

3 Saigon Soldiers 429

18 TET 434

1 Prelude 434

2 Fugue 444

3 A Symbolic Humiliation 455

19 The Giant Reels 461

1 Fighting Back 461

2 Surrender of a President 480

20 Continuous Replays 488

1 Dying 488

2 Talking 510

21 Nixon's Inheritance 516

1 A Crumbling Army 516

2 Aussies and Kiwis 533

3 Gods 544

4 Vietnamization 550

22 Losing by Installments 556

1 The Fishhook and the Parrot's Beak 556

2 Counterterror 564

3 Lam Son 719 572

23 Collateral Damage 585

1 Mary Ann 585

2 The "Goat" 593

3 "Let's Go Home" 597

24 The Biggest Battle 601

1 Le Duan Forces the Pace 601

2 The Storm Breaks 606

3 An Empty Victory 633

25 Big Ugly Fat Fellers 639

1 "It Will Absolutely, Totally, Wipe Out McGovern" 639

2 "We'll Bomb the Bejeezus out of Them" 649

26 A Kiss Before Dying 664

1 The Prisoner 664

2 "Peace" 668

3 War of the Flags 675

27 The Last Act 689

1 Invasion 689

2 "Ah, My Country, My Poor Country" 708

28 Afterward 726

1 Vengeance 726

2 The Audit of War 739

Acknowledgments 753

Notes 757

Select Bibliography 811

Index 827

Editorial Reviews

We’ve seen a shelf-load of histories, analyses, memoirs, and novels on Vietnam. But what Hastings does in Vietnam is pull all these genres together in a highly readable and vivid narrative that, I think, will become the standard on the war for many years to come.” — NPR.org

“This is a comprehensive, spellbinding, surprisingly intimate, and altogether magnificent historical narrative.” — Tim O’Brien, author of Pulitzer Prize finalist The Things They Carried

“This balanced and insightful book is a pleasure to read. It destroys the fantasy that one side or the other held the moral high ground or a monopoly on devastating folly.” — Karl Marlantes, author of What It Is Like to Go to War and Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War

“A gripping, well-researched look at a divisive American war.” — New York Post

“A comprehensive and compelling narrative that illuminates political and military tactics and strategies — and the daily realities of a war that killed 2 million people.” — Pittsburgh Post Gazette

From the Publisher

A gripping, well-researched look at a divisive American war.

New York Post

A comprehensive and compelling narrative that illuminates political and military tactics and strategies — and the daily realities of a war that killed 2 million people.

Pittsburgh Post Gazette

We’ve seen a shelf-load of histories, analyses, memoirs, and novels on Vietnam. But what Hastings does in Vietnam is pull all these genres together in a highly readable and vivid narrative that, I think, will become the standard on the war for many years to come.

NPR.org

A gripping, well-researched look at a divisive American war.

New York Post

Hastings’ Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy: 1945-1975 might be the best overview of the French and American failures in southeast Asia to yet appear, incorporating as it does some of the more recent revisionist research that balances out earlier, more ideologically tendentious interpretations drawn from the anti-war movement and the 1960s ‘New Left’”.

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

Hastings sees the Vietnam War in much the same way as that anguished villager. In his telling, it was a conflict without good guys....Through vivid accounts of battle and suffering, Hastings shows that the American war machine devastated the society it intended to save....he deserves enormous credit for helping us, half a century after the peak of the fighting, to see beyond old arguments about which side was right. What is visible when the blinders come off is indeed no pretty sight.

New York Times Book Review

Exceptionally thorough…[Hastings’s] greatest service is to demystify the Vietnam war and to place this conflict squarely into a broader history of other wars of the 20th century. Who better to accomplish this task than Hastings, who in previous works has helped us understand the first world war’s Battle of the Argonne Forest, the Normandy invasion of the second world war, and the Battle of Chosin Reservoir in Korea?

Financial Times

Vietnam by Max Hastings is masterful account of the war…Hastings’ narrative, along with Ken Burns’ masterful series on PBS, offers a well-balanced account of a war that ended more than four decades ago. The author weaves anecdotal and first-person accounts from both sides into the overall history to produce a compelling account that veterans of the war, those who felt its impact at home and readers born decades after the fighting ended will find hard to put down.

Associated Press Staff

“Vietnam is a product of Hastings’ prodigious research and his aptitude for pungent judgments. It is an unsparing look, by a warm friend of America, at the mountain of mendacities, political and military….Almost every Hastings page contains riveting facts…. as successful as printed words can be in achieving his aim of answering the question ‘What was the war like?’

Houston Chronicle

Hastings has been going to the wars for close on half a century. Fascinated since he was a boy by all things military, he has reported with distinction on many conflicts as well as writing as a historian about those that occurred before his time. It has been an obsession, but one that he has nurtured into a major talent... Now he has turned his formidable guns on the Vietnam war…This is a work of considerable quality, marked by a possibly unique combination of military expertise, historical grasp and journalistic skill in unearthing hitherto undiscovered human stories of the war, as well as judiciously selecting from among others already known. It helps, too, not to be an American, because that lends a certain useful distance…It is a very sad story and one that Hastings tells very well.

The Guardian

A characteristically brilliant, monumental work by Max Hastings that masterfully presents the political, cultural, military, and social factors that produced the most divisive and disastrous conflict in American history.  Hastings synthesizes innumerable sources, including many from North Vietnam, that, in an unflinching, clear-eyed manner capture the brutality of both sides in this war, as well as the heroism and the ineptitude, the public confidence and the inner doubts that resulted in the tragedy that was Vietnam – a war that Hastings implies neither side deserved to win.” 

General David Petraeus (US Army

Max Hastings’ meticulously researched, superbly written account will now become the standard by which all other histories of the Vietnam War are judged.  He leaves no stone unturned in examining three decades of conflict from the vantage points of all combatants at all levels—from offices in Washington, Hanoi, and Saigon and conference tables in Geneva and Paris, to treacherous trips down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, savage fire-fights in jungles and rice paddies, and terror-inducing air attacks.  The result is a work both eminently readable and definitive.

National War College Professor Mark Clodfelter

…monumental…In [Hastings's] telling, it was a conflict without good guys, an appalling conflagration in which the brutality, cynicism and incompetence of the United States and its South Vietnamese ally were equaled only by the wickedness of their enemies, leaving the hapless bulk of the Vietnamese population to suffer the consequences…It's a depressing but also curiously refreshing and mostly convincing way of thinking about the war. All too often…historians have treated it as a morality play pitting the forces of justice against the forces of repression…Hastings is hardly the first to suggest something more complicated. But the strongest tendency among chroniclers inclined to paint in shades of gray…has been to credit all sides with fighting sincerely for principles that made sense to them. Hastings goes in a darker direction, finding rough parity not in the validity of the goals for which the rivals fought but in their insensitivity to the staggering destruction they wrought…He deserves enormous credit for helping us, half a century after the peak of the fighting, to see beyond old arguments about which side was right. What is visible when the blinders come off is indeed no pretty sight.

The New York Times Book Review - Mark Atwood Lawrence

10/15/2018
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. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

This is a comprehensive, spellbinding, surprisingly intimate, and altogether magnificent historical narrative.

Tim O’Brien

This balanced and insightful book is a pleasure to read. It destroys the fantasy that one side or the other held the moral high ground or a monopoly on devastating folly.

Karl Marlantes

This is a comprehensive, spellbinding, surprisingly intimate, and altogether magnificent historical narrative.

Tim O'Brien