The 50th anniversary of the Vietnam war has produced an outpouring of books, along with Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s 18-hour television spectacular, which sparked in the United States yet another round of heated debate on the war. The journalist and military historian Max Hastings’s fast-paced and often compelling narrative will surely rank as one of the best products of this half-century reappraisal.
Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy is a monumental undertaking. Many books analyse major Vietnam war policy decisions. Others discuss military operations; still others recount personal experiences. Hastings does all three in a single volume, although he gives greatest attention to the on-the-ground activities of North and South Vietnamese, NLF and NVA, Americans, Australians and even New Zealanders.
Americans usually date their Vietnam war from 1961, when John F. Kennedy drastically escalated the US commitment, or from Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 decisions to bomb North Vietnam and send combat troops to the South.
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