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"The Trail undeniably lay at the heart of the war," writes John Prados in the introduction to
The Blood Road. The Vietnam War cannot be understood properly without considering this elusive path from North Vietnam to South Vietnam, which helped the Viet Cong defeat the armed forces of a much more powerful country. "Building the Trail or hiking it became the central experience for a generation of Vietnamese from the North," says Prados. The Trail--known as the Truong Son Strategic Supply Route to the Communists and as the Ho Chi Minh Trail to the Americans--was composed of more than 12,000 miles of roads and paths, and it remained open throughout the course of the conflict despite American efforts to close it. When the Nixon administration ordered attacks on Cambodia and Laos, the goal was to destroy the Trail and its supply depots. Prados suggests that the result of the Vietnam War might have been different if the United States had somehow managed to shut down the Trail, even though he also acknowledges the extreme difficulty of succeeding at this task.
The Blood Road offers a fresh look at an old debate, and marks a welcome contribution to the literature on the Vietnam War.
--John J. Miller
From Publishers Weekly
Military historian Prados (The Japanese Navy in World War II) uses the notorious Ho Chi Minh Trail both as a focus for his history and as a metaphor for this blow-by-blow account of America's involvement in Vietnam. For the North, the trail was the "Truong Son Strategic Supply Route"; for Saigon, it was the path over which men and materiel moved to harry the South. And for the U.S., which supported the South after 1954, it was the "infiltration route" to the South and lower Laos, itself the "gateway to Southeast Asia" in America's Cold War against Communism. Prados draws on a wide array of sources, including formerly secret records of the U.S. government obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, to show how the American effort was unable to choke the flow of armaments, troops and civilians along the 12,000-mile road despite a "rain of destruction [that] peaked in 1969, when more than 433,000 tons of munitions fell on the land." Prados also describes the Cold War strategies of U.S. policy wonks like Walt. W. Rostow, JFK's main adviser on Indochina, and espionage services like the CIA. In sections specifically on the history of the Trail, Prados's massing of facts can be rough going. But when he treats the Trail as a microcosm of the war, it does allow for a measure of understanding of two devastating decades in Southeast Asia.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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