Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy by Sir Max Hastings

Beginning in October of 1968, discussions ensued between the Director of the U.S. Army Military History Institute (USAMHI) and the Commandant of the U.S. Army War College to create a “discussion series” on strategic leadership and military history. This initiated what would become the Perspectives in Military History Lecture Series. On Wednesday, October 17, 2018, the U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center (USAHEC) kicked off the 50th year celebration with Sir Max Hastings, author of The Secret War, who presented the General of the Army Omar Nelson Bradley Memorial Lecture. In this lecture, based on his new book, Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, Sir Max Hastings critiques the methods, mistakes, and devastation caused by both sides during the war.
From France’s crippling defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 to the forced reunification between North and South in 1975, parts of the former French colony of Vietnam pushed back even the greatest powers of the world. The decades of war inflicted a huge material and human price on the Western powers, but the greatest cost inflicted by the war was suffered by the Vietnamese people themselves. Both North and South Vietnamese were forced to endure tyrannical and incompetent governments. For every American who died there, forty Vietnamese perished. When the U.S. pulled out of South Vietnam, the entire nation fell to Communist rule. The world remembers America’s excesses, immortalized in gritty photography and the anti-war movement, yet forgets the vicious acts of terrorism carried out against the Vietnamese people by the Communists. Sir Max Hastings spent three years collecting accounts from both sides of the war and gathered the testimonies of people from many walks of life, both soldier and civilian. Giving no undue praise to either side, Hastings masterfully depicts the cost of misused martial power in complex cultural and political issues that reject simple answers.

Lecture Date: October 17, 2018

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