?Max Hastings has produced another well researched and elegantly written book. Vietnam appears just in time to help explain the tragedy of that war not only to many who lived through it, but also to new generations of readers who inherited its legacy. Vietnam still matters. Hastings reveals human tragedies that highlight the importance of clear thinking about complex problems, integrity in national security decision making, and a sensitivity to the limits of agency and control in war.? H.R. McMaster

?A characteristically brilliant, monumental work 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 ineptitude, the public confidence and inner doubts that resulted in the tragedy that was Vietnam ? a war that Hastings implies neither side deserved to win.? General David Petraeus

?I believe the book will become the ?bible? for anyone who wants to understand the war.? GENERAL WALT BOOMER, US MARINE VIETNAM VETERAN

?Max Hastings has done it again. This book is a tour de force, a deft, engrossing, and admirably fair-minded chronicle of the three-decades-long struggle for Vietnam. It?s narrative history at its very finest.? FREDRIK LOGEVALL, Harvard University, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America?s Vietnam

?The author brings his usual brilliant descriptive skills to the action, mixing individual anecdotes with big-picture considerations ? The sole satisfying outcome of two recent American interventions in poor nations with incompetent governments is likely to be more superb histories by Hastings. A definitive history, gripping from start to finish but relentlessly disturbing? Kirkus, starred review

From the best-selling author of All Hell Let Loose comes a masterful chronicle of one of the most devastating international conflicts of the 20th century and how its people were affected.

?This is a comprehensive, spellbinding, surprisingly intimate, and altogether magnificent historical narrative.? Tim O?Brien

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 Tet offensive, the air blitz of North Vietnam, and less familiar battles 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 2 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, 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 21st 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.