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    Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam
    Unavailable
    Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam
    Unavailable
    Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam
    Ebook863 pages14 hours

    Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam

    By Mark Bowden

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

  • A New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Indie bestseller. A Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist in History. Longlisted for the 2017 Andrew Carnegie Medal for excellence in nonfiction. Named by the Wall Street Journal and Publishers Lunch as one of the top 10 nonfiction books of 2017, an Amazon top 100 book of the year, one of the Washington Post's 50 notable works of nonfiction in 2017, one of the Christian Science Monitor's best 30 books of 2017, an ALA notable book of the year, and a Kirkus Reviews and Hudson Booksellers best book of the year in nonfiction. A GoodReads Choice Award Best History First Round pick. A Military Times and Chicago Public Library best book of the year. And selected for a Kindle Daily Deal in January 2018 (selling 3,913 copies the week of the deal).



  • Hue 1968 has been excerpted by Vanity Fair online (http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/05/the-true-story-of-the-marine-on-the-tank-vietnam-war) and by Tom Ricks on the Foreign Policy website. It was an Amazon Best Book of the Month in the history category for June 2017, a New York Times Book Review editors' choice, and on the Chicago Tribune's "ultimate summer reading list." Bowden was interviewed by Dave Davies on NPR's Fresh Air on June 12. It was also chosen as one of the New York Times's "20 Must-Read Books on the Vietnam War" alongside David Halberstam's The Best and Brightest and Neil Sheehan's A Bright Shining Lie; one of nine books on Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel's summer reading list; one of the Christian Science Monitor's 10 best books of June; and as The Week's book of the week in the "review of reviews" section. In his “By the Book” interview for the New York Times Book Review, Tom Hanks named Hue 1968 as the last book that made him cry.



  • Hue 1968 is Mark Bowden's most monumental work of narrative nonfiction. The culmination of six years of research—including almost 50 original interviews with relevant Vietnamese figures and dozens more with American veterans, reporters, photographers, and other key characters—the book offers the most comprehensive and vivid account of combat in the longest American war of the 20th Century.



  • We are launching Hue 1968 in June and have a detailed plan to continue promotion, focused marketing, publicity, and author appearances through October. In September Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s major 10-part, 18-hour documentary film series, “The Vietnam War,” will premiere on PBS. Novick has been supportive of Bowden writing this book, and viewers will be a perfect target audience for the book.



  • We are promoting the book with a full-page ad in the New York Times, in the New Yorker (plus digital ads in the New Yorker newsletter), trade advertising, and targeted military outreach through digital advertising and Facebook groups.



  • The 50th anniversary of the Battle of Hue and the Tet Offensive at the end of January 2018 will offer an opportunity for further promotion of the book.



  • Though Hue 1968 is primarily based on first-hand interviews, Bowden has also done extensive archival research across the United States and in the archives of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam in Hanoi (previously untapped by any American writing for a trade audience), and drawn on contemporary media clippings, diaries, letters, official documents, and more.



  • The combat veterans and correspondents (including key players who reported for the New York Times, CBS, and Stars and Stripes) Bowden has interviewed for the book are excited about its publication and will help spread the word. We will send out a several-hundred-copy big-mouth mailing.



  • This is the first time Bowden has written a book about an

    • Editor's Note

    Blow-by-blow of the bloodiest battle…

    Drawn from first-person interviews, “Hue 1968” is a brutal, day-by-day and block-by-block account of the North Vietnamese surprise attack and the American and South Vietnamese fight to retake Hue. Mark Bowden (“Black Hawk Down”) shows the folly of self-serving belief and the risks of adventurism in parts of the globe America doesn’t understand.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAtlantic Monthly Press
    Release dateJun 6, 2017
    ISBN9780802189240
    Unavailable
    Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam
    Author

    Mark Bowden

    Mark Bowden, voted the number one body language professional in the world by Global Gurus, is a renowned thought leader in the field of nonverbal communication. Principal at groundbreaking communications organization TRUTHPLANE, Mark is sought after internationally for his entertaining and inspirational keynote speeches. He has a popular TEDx talk, media appearances worldwide, and bestselling books enjoyed by millions. Tracey Thomson, co-founder of TRUTHPLANE, advises the world's top companies and individuals on issues involving communication and body language. Her background in directing and training performers internationally in the psychology of movement, as well as her professional experience analyzing and supplying solutions to the dramas we find ourselves in, gives her unique insights into human behavior and what people are really thinking.

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    Reviews for Hue 1968

    4/5

    221 ratings12 reviews

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    • 4/5
      This was a very good look at one of the most pivotal battles in the entire Vietnam War. Note to publisher: next time, include the index in the book.
    • 5/5
      At the end of January 1968, the beginning of the Tet holiday, the North Vietnamese army (NLA) and Viet Cong (VC) launched simultaneous attacks on cities in South Vietnam including Saigon. They had thought that the people would rise up to support them and this would lead to the overthrow of South Vietnamese government. This did not happen and the attacks were mostly suppressed after a few days. However, in Hue, the NLA and VC had managed, in the weeks preceding Tet, to amass 10,000 troops in and around the city without detection. In the early morning of January 31, they over ran the city securing it all except for two small outposts. Vastly outnumbered, the outposts hung on and thus begins a grinding month-long campaign to retake the city. The failure of high command to recognize the number of disciplined, well-trained NLA troops led them to insist repeatedly that the Marines attack against superior odds. Bowden, the author of Black Hawk Down, describes the battle by following the experiences of the Marines and, to lesser extent, the Vietnamese, who fought it. I had trouble keeping the many participants straight but that made the book no less compelling. It is long, 539 pages, excluding notes, but once I started reading I could not stop. The book is not for the faint of heart: casualties were heavy and deaths to civilians were many; descriptions are often gruesome. The fear, miserable conditions, stench and exhaustion are palpable. In the end, both sides claimed victory, but the battle changed the way Americans thought about the war in Vietnam.
    • 5/5
      A graphic and tremendously well researched book on the battle for the city of Hue which the author sees as the crucial turning point (the Tet Offensive) that will seal America's fate in the Vietnam War. Both sides misjudged the attack - the Communists believing the citizenry would rise up and support them and the American leadership misjudging the abilities and commitment of the North Vietnamese. If there is a villain it is General Westmoreland that feeds President Johnson and the American people over optimistic information throughout. A great study.
    • 5/5
      Hue 1968 is a superbly written account of a most tragic battle.
    • 5/5
      I was almost drafted to serve in Vietnam and I have always wondered what it was really like to be a soldier there. This book changed my long-held views in many ways by helping me to see the whole, integrated picture. Thank You!
    • 3/5
      A balanced account of the 1968 battles in Hué constructed in the author's style from many first person accounts on both sides and from trapped civilians. Perhaps because of the hectic nature of the battle, the multiple simultaneous areas of action, and the number of people involved, the story can get confusing. The maps are helpful, but you will need a magnifying glass to see them on the Kindle. The sometimes chaotic nature of this assemblage is brought home in chapter 13, where Bowden starts to end his story with the longer and uninterrupted story of Alvin Bert Grantham. I found it to be the best and most moving part of the book. There is also an excellent epilogue with a laudably clear view of the whole battle and its consequences. If you are interested in leadership, this account has many fine examples of the best and the worst, from a corporal thrust unexpectedly into a battlefield leadership role to Westmoreland and LBJ at the top.
    • 4/5
      A well written history of the battle for Hue, during the Tet Offensive, in the Vietnamese war. It focuses on the American participation, largely ignoring the ARVN role. Well worth reading.
    • 5/5
      This book by Mark Bowden is an absolutely stunning one. I am not familiar with the details of the Vietnam war, and this book brings the crucial battle at Hue to life. It brings it to a life that makes the horrors of war immediate and very real to all of us. The writing is vivid. While he does write from an American perspective, he does show considerable respect for the Vietnamese. Through the telling of the tale of American bravery, we come across some heroic characters and are reminded of the perfidy of politicians of all hues. A bullet wound, as one soldier mentions, is not a neat round hole that we see in movies. It is mangled limbs, shattered lungs, skulls blown off. War is shitting in the trenches, not bathing, shaving, living in constant fear that the next minute will be your last. The men who fight are the ones who deserve glory and respect. They are, sadly, expendable. This is a brilliant book.
    • 5/5
      A monumental effort. The first Vietnam analysis I have found which reflects the three parties to the conflict: the National Liberation Front; South Vietnamese and Americans; and the civilians caught in the crossfire.
    • 4/5
      The Battle of Hue, one of the longest and bloodiest battles of the war, was characterized by intense urban fighting by Marines who were not well trained for urban combat and as a result they improvised tactics and weapons as they went. It was the inspiration for Full Metal Jacket, for example the scene with the sniper who left victims alive in the street as bait actually occurred. Like most everything about Vietnam it was cruel and surreal. It was a civil war inside a civil war, inside a cold war, a war of civil rights and generational conflict. Bowden does an excellent job placing it into broader context politically. His thesis is that the battle led directly to LBJ declaring he would not seek reelection for a second term, and Walter Cronkite's now-famous report the war was not winnable, which for the first time made opposition to the war acceptable. The book is long and I found the first half a slog. Once the battle is fully in motion it's a montage of scenes and people that together enforce the chaos and relentless fighting. This is a good book for understanding the battle and the war.
    • 4/5
      > the high command still had not accepted the fact that Hue was in enemy hands> Westin got a letter from Mimi that really pissed him off. Thirty guys from his unit had been wounded. He was in constant danger. He was living in a fucking hole in the ground. And Mimi was worried about him fooling around with other women.> Even as the fight stretched into its third week, Westy [General Westmoreland] persistently downplayed it. Hue was rarely even mentioned in his daily dispatches to Washington, and when it was, it was only to say that the enemy was about to be crushed—on February 4 it was “in the next few days”; on the ninth it was “several more days”; on the twelfth it was “a couple of days”; and on the twenty-first it was “by the end of this week.”> Over the roughly four weeks of fighting, more than 80 percent of the city’s structures were either destroyed or sustained serious damage> the Front engaged in a systematic effort to find and punish those allied with the Saigon regime, just as that regime undertook its own reprisals when the battle ended—no one has offered an official count of those victims. A conservative guess of those executed would be two thousand. This brings us to a combined civilian death toll—those killed by accident and those put to death—of about eight thousand> When you add the numbers of combatants killed to estimates of civilian deaths, the final toll of the Battle of Hue numbers well over ten thousand, making it by far the bloodiest of the Vietnam War. Over six months, the shellings and bombings in and around Khe Sanh accumulated a comparable total, perhaps even more, but no other single battle came close.> “On one hand the military has said we had quite a victory out there …, on the other hand, they now say that it was such a big victory that we need one hundred and twenty thousand more men.”> A month after it ended, President Johnson decided not to seek reelection, and Westmoreland would shortly thereafter be removed as its commander. Richard Nixon was elected president eight months later mendaciously promising not victory, but a secret plan to bring the war to an “honorable end.” The secret plan prolonged the conflict seven more years, spreading misery and death throughout Indochina.> The bombing of Communist sanctuaries in Cambodia destabilized that neutral country, leading to the overthrow of Prince Norodom Sihanouk in 1970 and the rise of the murderous Khmer Rouge, which would be responsible for the deaths of millions of Cambodians in ensuing years.> it achieved complete tactical surprise, despite Westy’s claims otherwise. Conversely, it represents perhaps the worst allied intelligence failure of the war. That’s true of the entire Tet Offensive, and particularly true of the attack on Hue. Hanoi spent months amassing an army around the city without attracting notice. And although it is true that after three weeks of heavy fighting the enemy was driven off, it was the impact of the initial blow that resonated most loudly.> Bringing the war to city streets deeply undermined the faith of middle-of-the road Vietnamese in President Thieu’s government. Nonideological citizens—read, most citizens—were concerned primarily with survival. They wanted to be on the winning side when the war ended. Tet lowered the odds on Saigon as the safer bet> The professional soldiers in particular were puzzled by my focus on this one event, when their careers were spent fighting so many battles—some had fought also against the French, the Chinese, and the Cambodians. It brought home to me how much the Vietnamese perspective on modern history differs from America’s. To them Hue, the entire American War, was just one chapter in a much longer story.
    • 5/5
      Although none of us who have never engaged in combat can begin to imagine what terror war holds, this was distinctly written to give us a very good feeling for it. Men (some just boys) sent to war to fight communism which is an ideal cause but we became mired down with political egos and government bungling. I still feel great anger that so many years ago my small town lost two terrific guys to this mess. This was written with a great deal of care and compassion and I thank the author for enlightening me and perhaps offering solace to those who did come home. God Bless.