I haven’t read this since either Groton or Duke. And now I am trying to re-read it before I make it down to the DMZ and before my visit to Khe Sanh next week. It’s such a good and complete history of this country, and of the war here, that if you want to understand what happened and some of the why behind it, this is the book.
As I sit here in Halong Bay, currently up to the French losing at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 (having suffered over 90,000 dead and wounded at this point) two things have struck me. First, the Vietnamese were going to fight and win no matter how long it took. And second, the French and later the Americans simply never understood the enemy.