The Vietnam War

Vietnam was the modern conflict that divided the Western world most. Max Hastings has spent the last three years interviewing scores of participants from all sides, researching American and Vietnamese documents and memoirs to create an epic narrative of an epic struggle. He portrays the scenes of Dien Bien Phu, the North Vietnamese air attack, and lesser-known battles such as the bloodbath at Daido. Here are the lived realities of the struggle amid the jungle and rice paddies that killed two million people.

Many have treated this war as a tragedy for the United States, yet Hastings does not forget the Vietnamese: in this work there are testimonies from Viet Cong guerrillas, southern paratroopers, Saigon bar girls, and Hanoi students, along with South Dakota infantrymen, North Carolina marines, and Arkansas pilots. No other work on the Vietnam War has blended a political and military narrative of the conflict with poignant personal experiences—the Max Hastings hallmark that readers know so well.