The Vietnam War continues to haunt America's conscience, as well as historians, who keep searching for the truth of how we stumbled into Southeast Asia and stayed for year after bloody year.
Our latest literary attempt at understanding the war comes from Brian VanDeMark, a history professor at the United States Naval Academy who's written "Road to Disaster: A New History of America's Descent Into Vietnam" (Custom House, 542 pp., â??â??â??â?? out of four), an absolutely first-rate analysis of U.S. involvement in that war-torn country.
VanDeMark brings invaluable perspective to this evaluation. He co-authored "In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam," a remarkable 1995 book by former Defense secretary Robert McNamara that gave a compelling account of the events that drove the war.
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