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Book

The Vietnam War : a military history

Call Number

  • 959.7043 W356 (CEN)

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Edition

First edition.

Publication Information

New York : Basic Books, 2024.

Physical Description

xiii, 652 pages : illustrations, maps ; 25 cm

Summary

"The Vietnam War cast a shadow over the American psyche from the moment it began. In its time it sparked budget deficits, campus protests, and an erosion of US influence around the world. Long after the last helicopter evacuated Saigon, Americans have continued to battle over whether it was ever a winnable war. Based on thousands of pages of military, diplomatic, and intelligence documents, Geoffrey Wawro's The Vietnam War offers a definitive account of a war of choice that was doomed from its inception. In devastating detail, Wawro narrates campaigns where US troops struggled even to find the enemy in the South Vietnamese wilderness, let alone kill sufficient numbers to turn the tide in their favor. Yet the war dragged on, prolonged by presidents and military leaders who feared the political consequences of accepting defeat. In the end, no number of young lives lost or bombs dropped could prevent America's ally, the corrupt South Vietnamese regime, from collapsing the moment US troops retreated. Broad, definitive, and illuminating, The Vietnam War offers an unsettling, resonant story of the limitations of American power"--

Contents

  • Parody of High Strategy
  • No-Win War
  • Eve of Destruction
  • Strength only for Defeat
  • Ia Drang
  • "Nail the coonskins to the wall"
  • "The country is behind you-50 percent"
  • Jive at Five
  • "We'll just go on bleeding them"
  • "Victory is around the corner"
  • Zenith of Fatuity
  • Year of the Monkey
  • Tet
  • "We can keep on winning the war forever"
  • Khe Sanh
  • Mini-Tet
  • A Better War?
  • Hamburger Hill
  • Search and Avoid
  • "I will not be the first president to lose a war"
  • "Cambodia is a man's job"
  • Quiet Mutiny
  • "The heaviest defeat ever for Nixon & Company"
  • "We've made the war too much of a good thing"
  • "Defeat is not an option"
  • The Fall.

Subjects