Hastings is perfectly suited to write about the Vietnam War. He witnessed its peculiar tragedies at first hand, arriving in Saigon in 1971 as a reporter at the age of 24. It’s fitting that a journalist should chronicle this war, since journalists played such a prominent part. The fact that Hastings is British is an additional advantage, since American writers are often blinded by their insularity ... This is a long book but not a bloated one; this war demands the detail that Hastings provides. His basic arguments are not particularly new, but the book itself is still original. What makes it so magnificent is its intimacy. Hastings possesses the journalist’s instinct for a good story, the tiny anecdote that exposes a big truth. Large tragedies are illustrated through very personal pain.
With Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975, British military historian Max Hastings offers a literary analogue to PBS’ series; in his introduction he acknowledges a debt to Burns and Novick. But while equally stellar, Hastings’ book skews differently, an outsider’s detailed, under-the-hood investigation into the United States’ unwinnable war; China and the Soviet Union’s chicanery; and a people determined to strip away the bonds of colonialism, even to the point of self-immolation. Richly drawn, the dramatis personae leap from Hastings’ pages. There’s moral rot aplenty, on all sides ... while the tragic arc is familiar, Hastings paints his mural in fresh hues, his strokes concise yet colorful, guiding us through each trauma-wracked episode, from the acrimonious collapse of French imperialism to the Geneva Convention’s partition of Vietnam to mounting war ... the complete story is here, masterfully told, in the tradition of David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan and Seymour Hersh.
Max Hastings’s Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975 reads like a gripping work of fiction. The storyline is as fluid as it is riveting, and the main characters are finely delineated ... The suffering and losses endured by civilians are vividly illustrated, humanizing them to a degree few accounts have ... But then Hastings falls into the trap of essentialism, egregiously reducing Hanoi policymakers to narrow, ugly caricatures bordering on travesties ... Fear of the regime, Hastings suggests, was the average Notherner’s only motivation, a proposition so hyperbolic as to be preposterous. The assessment of Southern leaders and combatants is no less galling ... a critical flaw of the book is its failure to seriously engage the ever-expanding documentary record on the Vietnam wars. In at least one instance, Hastings references a document cited elsewhere without crediting that source. As all this suggests, Hastings opted to sacrifice scholarly rigor for the sake of sensationalist retelling. Gratuitously graphic descriptions of massacres and other atrocities permeate the narrative ... For many of the wrong reasons, some readers will love this book. And that is tragic, too.
... monumental ... [Hastings' approach to the war is] a depressing but also curiously refreshing and mostly convincing way of thinking about the war. All too often, as Hastings points out, historians have treated it as a morality play pitting the forces of justice against the forces of repression ... The main problem with Hastings’s focus on the human toll of the war is his tendency to underplay the motives that led all sides to consider it worth waging. The result is sometimes to flatten decision makers into callous villains and everyone else, both soldiers and civilians, into victims ... Hastings could have written a more complete account by addressing these themes in greater detail. Actually, closer attention to the big ideas that drove each side might have reinforced his central point by underlining how much damage was done in the name of competing ideologies that meshed poorly with the needs of Vietnamese society. But Hastings is hardly wrong to place the emphasis on consequences rather than motives. In fact, he deserves enormous credit for helping us, half a century after the peak of the fighting, to see beyond old arguments about which side was right.
This is very much a book about soldiers for soldiers. After interviewing dozens of veterans and trawling through scores of oral histories, as well as the memoirs of North Vietnamese and Vietcong cadres who became disillusioned after victory and fled to the US, Hastings chronicles every battle over a 30-year period. There’s inspiring but also grim material, tales of heroism, self-sacrifice and risk-taking, brutality and war crimes, frustrated and frightened soldiers, drug-taking and desertions ... Hastings’s emphasis on the soldiers’ war gives his book a lopsided feel. It underplays the drama of the political war at home, and the scale of opposition.
Although Hastings deals with the high politics brilliantly, it is his account of the war on the ground that lifts this book above its competitors. Unlike almost all other military historians, he is never boring and never gets bogged down in obscure data. And he has a peerless eye for colourful and revealing details ... Even by Hastings’s own standards, this is a masterful performance: deftly balanced, immaculately researched and written with immense flair.
We have here not so much a portmanteau account of the campaigns in Vietnam... but a veritable Victorian steamer trunk, crammed with the facts and figures, of dead and maimed, villages wrecked and atrocities committed, and tonnage of ordnance discharged. It surely will be the last word on the tactical and military chronicle of the war, the main reference book for schools and universities for future generations ... Wider aspects of Vietnam and why it still has such impact are hardly explored at all. The culture of books, movies and journalism is largely skipped over, which is a pity. The legacy in science, from post traumatic stress disorder, which Vietnam veterans brought to the attention of the world, to the use of Agent Orange defoliant is almost brushed aside.
This is a work of considerable quality, marked by a possibly unique combination of military expertise, historical grasp and journalistic skill in unearthing hitherto undiscovered human stories of the war, as well as judiciously selecting from among others already known. It helps, too, not to be an American, because that lends a certain useful distance. There are some omissions... Such cavils aside, Hastings presents a vast panorama, admirably balanced and well managed, which does not neglect the geopolitical or the strategic but vividly brings home the reality of the war as experienced by individuals ... Hastings makes even a reader familiar with these events grasp anew that it is entirely justified.
We've seen a shelf-load of histories, analyses, memoirs, and novels on Vietnam. But what Hastings does in Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy (1945-1975) is pull all these genres together in a highly readable and vivid narrative that, I think, will become the standard on the war for many years to come ... This is a thoughtful and balanced work — and an aggressive one. He takes on all sides ... Hastings was once a journalist — and it shows. He's a vivid story teller, and his vast knowledge of military operations adds weight to every chapter ... It's how he crafts his story with color and detail and pathos that makes Hasting's Vietnam a great book. It's sort of a blend of David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest, Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried and Truong Nhu Tang's A Vietcong Memoir.
In Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, Hastings has brought his flair for military histories to the search for a deeper reckoning about the war and its complex legacy ... This exceptionally thorough and hefty tome lands like a piece of live ordnance in a firefight. It is a worthy addition to the small library of books Hastings has produced in his prolific career ... What is important about this book are the fresh perspectives on the war that are given centre stage in the retelling ... Hastings has taken us back to the battlefields of Vietnam and the results as depicted in these pages are at once illuminating and tragically confounding.
The author brings his usual brilliant descriptive skills to the action, mixing individual anecdotes with big-picture considerations ... A definitive history, gripping from start to finish but relentlessly disturbing.
