The Long Rain of Fire

For thirty years the war in Vietnam consumed everything it touched: a French empire, an American presidency and then another, three million Vietnamese lives by the highest estimates, and 58,220 American ones - along with America’s certainty about itself.

Here is the whole story, told from all sides: the thousand-year nation that outlasted China and France; Ho Chi Minh quoting Jefferson in Ba Dinh Square while Washington looked away; Dien Bien Phu and a country cut in two; Diem, the bu…