New York Times best-selling author Max Hastings spent the past three years interviewing scores of soldiers, officials, and participants on both sides of the decades-long Vietnam war—Vietcong guerrillas, Southern paratroopers, Saigon bargirls, and Hanoi students alongside infantrymen from South Dakota, Marines from North Carolina, and Huey pilots from Arkansas. He also researched a multitude of American and Vietnamese documents and memoirs, to create an epic narrative of an epic struggle.