This careful examination of key strategies, events, and personalities in the conflict sheds fresh light on the high points of the Vietnam experience and punctures the enduring mythologies of the war. A model of lucid writing and fair judgement. -Thomas Powers The author of seven books, including two on Vietnam (Valley of Decision, LJ 11/1/91, and The Sky Would Fall, LJ 6/1/83), Prados has written a treatise of sorts that might have been called "How Not To Wage a War 101." Most of the information he presents has been told before, but he manages to assess the political and religious discords of the South Vietnamese military with a new and firm voice. The villains are, among others, Presidents Johnson and Nixon, other incompetent but powerful officials, and many unprepared but enthusiastic generals. The saddest part is Nixon's insistence on fighting American veteran organizations that opposed the war. This book is well researched but not exactly original; some readers may be hesitant to read yet again about America in defeat. For specialized collections.?Ralph DeLucia, Willoughby Wallace Lib., Branford, Ct. Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. From a respected author of national security histories (e.g., Keepers of the Keys , 1991) comes this appraisal of "lessons" of America's military failure in Vietnam. Prados breaks the whole into discrete items, such as counter-insurgency doctrines as they played out in the field, the course of air power and mobile air cavalry, electronic intelligence, and the battle litany of the Gulf of Tonkin incident--the Khe Sanh saga, the South Vietnam army's 1971 fiasco in Laos and near defeat the next year, a defeat averted, some assert, by Nixon's B-52 strikes. In the end, nothing worked: was it because Kennedy, the supposed evacuator, was succeeded by LBJ the escalator? Because the military was restrained by the whiz kids' theories of graduated levels of force? Prados produces immense detail on these purely military matters that illustrate the problems faced by U,S. military and intelligence officers and the inadequacy (short of invading the North) of their war-winning strategies. "Victory was an illusion," Prados writes--perhaps the one lesson all stripes of opinion take from the tragedy. Gilbert Taylor “Perceptive...Prados probes deeply and with knowledgeable insights into the war.” ―George McT. Kahin, author of Intervention “Like sudden shafts of light, these well-aimed essays illuminate all areas of the hidden history of the war...thoroughly exciting and complex.” ―Lloyd C. Gardner, author of Approaching Vietnam “The Hidden History of the Vietnam War is a model of lucid writing and fair judgment which tells us things we need to know.” ―Thomas Powers, author of Heisenberg's War Used Book in Good Condition