This is an amazing book! The amount of research that the author poured into this book is astounding! It's an honest, no holding back synopsis of the war from beginning to end. I'd recommend this book to anyone who's interested in the Vietnam War: why it happened, how it affected numerous people, and lessons to be learned.

I was provided a copy of the book from Basic Books/ Hachette Book Group via Netgalley. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

A good book on the war in Vietnam. The author does a good job of looking at the political aspects as well as the human costs of the war. An informative book for the history fans.

Thank you to #NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for my honest opinion.

This is an important and needed book for a classroom setting, especially at the graduate level. As a classical top-down approach, it is an impressive piece of scholarship of classic military history to show why the Vietnam War ended in failure for the USA. It is an important read in order to debunk the political myth making that began to dominate comprehension of the war in the 1980s in that the “military didn’t lose the war because they had to fight with one hand behind their back.” The Vietnam War is a complex one to understand. This book did not go into much detail about the anti-war or peace movements at home, so it would work best if paired with a book like Melvin Small’s “Anti-warriors” to show the domestic bottom-up protests against the war. Beyond that, readers looking for an engaging narrative of the soldier’s experience in the war will find little here, but that has been covered in great detail in countless memoirs already. As such, this book delivers exactly what it promised, which was a military history of the war looking at how commanders and the politicians and bureaucrats that they reported to. Each of these had a hand in failing to understand that there was no clear purely military strategy that could have resulted in American victory.

I've been looking for a history of the Vietnam War, and this is it! Wawro cover major political and military developments in a clear and concise manner, while making clear that the war escalated because of hubris and ignorance. An amazing book!

Pretty comprehensive account of the entire Vietnam War. Not quite as good as Max Hastings' book on the subject but I would recommend this to someone who is looking for just the facts without a lot of other speculation injected into the narrative.

It is interesting that this conflict has produced a plethora of social and cultural studies, but a military history of the conflict itself is far less common. Geoffrey Wawro offers a necessary corrective to this historiographical imbalance. Technically detailed, but also highly accessible for the non-military reader, this account of the operational, strategic, and tactical movements of conflict are second to none. A fantastic achievement that captures the eagle eyed movements of a complex, and ever-changing battlefield