Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

5 Stars If you only ever read one book about Vietnam, you could do a lot worse than Bowden’s “Hue 1968.” Other good choices would be Karnow’s “Vietnam: A History” and Sheehan’s “A Bright and Shining Lie.” However, Hue 1968 delivers not only the facts of the American tragedy in Vietnam , or even a particular point of view of the facts, but it also accurately depicts the feelings of the Americans serving in Vietnam, as well as those of Americans at home, and the Vietnamese who could not escape the war. I was a young marine in Vietnam at the time of the Tet offensive in 1968. I was not an officer and had no strategic view of the conflict. I didn’t even have a clear tactical view of the events in which I was directly involved. That said, Mr. Bowden’s book is such a profound telling of the events that I can almost smell the rice paddies. It is exactly this ability of Mr. Bowden that allows us the readers to either relive events from our own past or experience them ,as nearly as possible, as events that are worlds apart from our experience. He did it in “Black Hawk Down” and and again in“Guests of the Ayatollah.” And now he may have written the best book of his lifetime. Recommended: Absolutely.