Vietnam

An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975

By: Max Hastings

Narrated by: Max Hastings, Peter Noble

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.

Spectacular!

I’ve become a fan of Max Hastings’ latter works, and Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy is perhaps the pinnacle of his works. It’s better than the Secret War, Catastrophe, and Inferno — due primarily to his proximity to events as a young foreign correspondent for the BBC at the outset of Vietnam and a subsequent half-century of reflection and personal maturation. Peter Nobel narrates, and is brilliant. The author reads the introduction, and it’s good to preface such a work in his own voice. Sir Max Hastings is uncanny in his ability to find nuance. Highly recommended!

Another Hastings Gem

Best of the many overview histories I have read on the war. Well organized and narrated. Tough subject to keep it down the middle on. He succeeds.

Tragedy and truth

Very well researched and presented facts that every Vietnam veteran needs to know. Well done.

A masterful accomplishment

Another tour de force by Max Hastings. Exhaustively researched, objectively and fairly presented by one of if not the most skillful of Paris’s writers. Both narrators are superb

A Great History

Hastings takes a well-merited “plague on both your houses“ view of the combatants. What I found very useful and informative was his copious use of North Vietnamese sources, both official and unofficial. He illuminates a hitherto virtually unknown (to the public) side of the conflict.