"This is the history of the war in Vietnam we have been waiting for. This is a marvelous achievement--meticulously documented, excitingly narrated, written with grace, wit, and passion."– Howard Zinn
"This terrible history is told with such clarity and passion, detail, intelligence it's hard to stop reading. The tension in the writing keeps your sadness in some kind of check as you read about opportunities for peace lost again and again, and think of today's newspapers and how we are, with some differences, modification, and more firepower, once again half the world away confusing credibility with honor." – Grace Paley

In this remarkably researched account of the American and Vietnamese political and diplomatic sides of the Vietnam War, Marilyn Young offers some correctives to pervasive myths that surround the conflicts leading up to the first clashes, pertaining to popular terms found in American rhetoric when discussing "the enemy," and the impact of American interference in foreign affairs.