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A more nuanced view than Ken Burns' companion book

Revisado: 10-21-18

**About the Narration***
The performance was simply thrilling. Although the introduction is done by Hastings in his thick British accent, the rest of the work is done by someone else. They don't seem to be credited on Audible so I've forgotten their name, but if you are hesitant because you're used to American English and expect a heavy British accent, the actual book's narrator speaks very clearly with an American accent. The narrator reads the book like he's telling a story. It's not monotonous at all. The inflections, emphasis and emotions imbued keep the story moving.

Max Hastings delivers a great overview of the Vietnam War, and much better than Ken Burns did in his documentary and its companion book in my opinion. I enjoyed the Burns book, but I felt like many South Vietnamese felt that it was a lacking in detailing the atrocities of the Communists. I'll admit my biases now however. My own Grandfather was an ARVN grunt who got put in a gulag for years after the war. Ken Burns deserves credit for bringing the Vietnam War back to the forefront, but more details of the beasts that the US and South Vietnam were fighting would have given a more nuanced view of the conflict to the audience. And I say that even though I truly *like* Ken Burns' works and enjoyed his film/its book. I just felt like it was missing key information.

The Communists buried people alive who resisted them to save bullets. They hacked people to death. Summary executions of "enemies of the revolution" were done in order to create a Stalinist society. Westerners sometimes of a romantic view of the Davidian "freedom fighters" throwing off the Goliaths of the west, and label Ho Chi Minh as a Nationalist rather than a Communist. But the North Vietnamese policies were Stalinist policies, and no one but the most ardent Communists today would call Stalin anything other than a ruthless butcher. Hastings did well in discussing Ho's commitment to the Comintern even before WWII, and his purges of the Vietnamese peoples of the various nationalist groups who also fought the French. There were dozens of Nationalists striving for an independent Vietnam. The Viet Minh butchered them all. Americans who remember Afghanistan in the 80s will remember that we did not aid the Taliban, but rather a fractured network of Mudjahideen fighting against Soviet troops. However, the Taliban won the scramble for power in the post-war period and destroyed all other opposition groups. The Viet Minh had done the same thing 30 years earlier.

I believe Hastings put it best when he said something along the lines of "Those who feel like America was wrong had a tendency to take the extra step, and assume that their enemies were right" and that South Vietnam and North Vietnam embarked a bloody conflict that neither "deserved" to win.

Hastings frames it as a tragedy, so the language and prose he uses stir the heart and the stories he collected are truly heartbreaking. Being a journalist, he knows how to write in a manner that a more perhaps "dry" history does not fully capture. Since he is a Brit, I felt that Hastings approached this story with less bias that Vietnamese or American historians tend to. American historians understandably tend to frame it as an American history. Hastings takes a more Vietnamese-centric angle with this work. We also see perspectives from the British officials throughout the work. I simply could not put this book down, because it is so well written.

Overall, I greatly enjoyed this book, and recommend it to anyone who liked Ken Burns' documentary and would like to flesh out their understanding of the conflict.

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A great primer on a forgotten war

Revisado: 10-13-18

Many Americans have forgotten Korea, the war between our greatest triumph against Fascism and Imperial Japan and the great misunderstood tragedy of Vietnam. This book is a fantastic overall view of Korea with plenty of interviews from soldiers and marines of the UN forces, as well as ROK and Chinese Communist forces. The performance is pretty good, and it comes across more as a story than a dry lecture. One thing to note though is that the narrator uses a rather poor American accent when quoting US figures, which at first threw me off a bit but I came to appreciate it because it made it clear what was quotation and what was Max Hasting's writing.

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