Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975

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. [em](Oct.) [/em]