Early in his Marine Corps career, which he concluded as a four-star general, Walt Boomer was decorated for valor in Vietnam. He distilled into three words the lesson of that debacle: “Tell the truth.” Max Hastings, an eminent British journalist and historian, has done that in a book that is a painful but perhaps inoculating reimmersion in what Americans would prefer to forget.
“Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975” is a product of Hastings’ prodigious research and his aptitude for pungent judgments. It is an unsparing look, by a warm friend of America, at the mountain of mendacities, political and military, that accumulated as the nation learned the truth of the philosopher Michael Oakeshott’s axiom: “To try to do something which is inherently impossible is always a corrupting enterprise.