Hastings does a fine job of turning an immensely complex conflict into something very readable within 650 pages.
He covers all the major battles with some politics thrown in but it is more the story of the combatants.
The absurdity of war and bureaucrats is summed up when Dein Bien Phu is written of: As the French were desperately trying to hold on they parachuted untrained troops in but refused to issue then with parachute badges afterwards because they hadn't done the formal parachute course, brilliant stuff.
The war was lost by 1968 when Johnson stated he would not run again but they kept it going for another sevens years with thousands of more totally unnecessary deaths. Utterly criminal and understandable that there were major discipline issues from this time onward.
Hastings is nothing but fair when it come to laying out the facts on atrocities committed by both sides, mass murder in other words, thousands slaughtered and this is civilians here not combatant.
Interesting aside regarding My Lai; the massacre was basically written off as "nothing to see here' by staff officer Major Colin Powell.This was the killing of up to 500 civilians and they pinned it all on a sub-intelligent Lieutenant who finally served 42 months under house arrest as a punishment.
The North Vietnamese and Vietcong were just as brutal, the true extent of the atrocities they committed against their own people will never be known.
I took away from this book what a total arsehole Robert McNamara appears to have been, He just kept throwing humans into a meat grinder with no plan, no hope of success. He compounded this by everything he did previously with Project 100,000, where people who were deemed too unintelligent to be enlisted previously were then signed up. McNamara okayed the lowering of the IQ and physical standards, so basically mental defectives were enlisted and sent off to die.
This is a great read, like all Hastings histories he keeps it moving an provides wonderful overviews of what was an 'epic tragedy".
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