Vietnam is another seminal work by Hastings, the bestselling author of World War I and World War II, a truly sweeping tale of an epic struggle. In his new book, Hastings describes the war in Vietnam in great detail: the chronology of military clashes, the life of ordinary people during the war, atrocities on both sides of the conflict, behind-the-scenes political games, personal memories of the participants. The Vietnam War is one of the most controversial conflicts in modern Western world, which became a national humiliation for France in 1954, and then, in 1975, an even greater shame for the United States. In writing the book, Max Hastings spent three years interviewing numerous participants on both sides, researching hundreds of American and Vietnamese documents and memoirs. The Battle of Dien Bien Phu, the Tet Offensive of 1968, the North Vietnamese air blitz, and the lesser-known bloody clash at Dai Do, where a US Marine battalion was almost completely destroyed, are vivid fragments of the overall panorama of a war of jungles and rice fields in which 2 million people died. Many historians view the war as a tragedy for the United States, but Hastings sees it as a tragedy for the Vietnamese, who died 40 times more than the Americans who fought in the conflict. The gross mistakes and brutal war crimes of the American army were quite comparable to the actions of the enemy. The whole world remembered the image of a crying naked girl scorched by napalm, but forgot about the countless innocent victims of the communists. Hastings collected evidence from Viet Cong partisans and American politicians, Saigon bartenders and Hanoi students, Soviet military experts and marines from North Carolina, peaceful peasants and military generals. Neither side, in his opinion, deserved to win this war; it is a sad lesson for future generations about the inappropriate use of military power in response to complex political and cultural challenges.