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Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy: 1945-1975

Max Hastings

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Sinopse

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 Tet offensive, the air blitz of North Vietnam, and less familiar battles 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 2 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, 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 21st 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.

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Autor

Max Hastings

Max Hastings é autor de vinte e sete livros, a maioria sobre conflitos militares. Nasceu em Londres em 1945 e formou-se no University College, Oxford, antes de enveredar pelo jornalismo. Em 1967 integrou os quadros do World Press Institute, nos Estados Unidos. A partir de então trabalhou como repórter da BBC e colaborou em diversos jornais ingleses. Cobriu onze conflitos, incluindo o do Vietname, a guerra do Yom Kippur em 1973, e a guerra das Malvinas em 1982. Escreveu Vietnam, Catastrophe, Armageddon, Retribution, Winston’s War, The Korean War e Inferno, entre outros livros. Foi distinguido com inúmeros prémios pelo seu trabalho no jornalismo e nos livros.

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