Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975

By Max Hastings
2018
896 pages. Audio: 33 hours and 33 minutes.
Nonfiction

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Sometimes, the subtitle of a book says it all. The title of Max Hastings’s massive history is simply Vietnam, but the subtitle is An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975. And I do mean massive, with more than 750 pages of text followed by 50 pages of footnotes and some wonderful and gut-wrenching photographs.

I was born in 1958, so throughout my childhood and teen years the Vietnam War was always background music—and sometimes much more than that. I was in that generation wondering if the war would be over by the time I got to draft age.

I must admit I never really understood the war then or later, so reading this book was, for me, a way to reckon with a history that never made sense to me. As it turns out, it didn't entirely make sense to the people who were running it and fighting it either.

The Vietnam War destroyed the reputations of a whole generation of American politicians. And no one comes out of this book looking very noble—except of course some of the soldiers on the ground. It destroyed the Johnson presidency. It destroyed the reputation of Robert McNamara and William Westmoreland. It created the backdrop for the Nixon disaster, and Henry Kissinger doesn't come out of this looking very good either. But of course the great tragedy was the death of countless young American soldiers, Vietnamese soldiers, and civilians.

It is difficult today to recapture the paranoia about communism from the 1950s and 1960s, so the notion that Vietnam going communist would somehow tilt the whole world in that direction seems a bit ridiculous today. But it didn’t then.

Hastings does an admirable job of looking at the war from the point of view of American, South Vietnamese, and communist North leaders. He also does a great job of describing the experience of the ordinary soldier on both sides and the civilians caught up in the carnage. While American atrocities were under the harsh light of a free press, he does not let us forget the unending cruelties of North Vietnam to its own people. The Northern leaders do not come out looking like freedom-loving anti-imperialists.

We continue to live with the legacy of the war the Americans lost. And lose it we did. Hastings looks at all the revisionist theories of how the outcome might have been different. What would’ve happened if the Americans had decided to actually invade the North or, as some suggest, use nuclear weapons?

He does a good bit of demythologizing. For instance, the Tet Offensive was pretty much a disaster for the North although that’s not how it got played out in the American press. And in the later stages of the war some American troops simply refused to fight. He does show that the South Vietnamese government was never capable of governing despite American efforts to prop it up.

You should read this book. As Americans are again drawn to overly optimistic adventures in troubled parts of the world, the question is, did we learn anything from Vietnam? Don’t forget the subtitle—an epic tragedy.