Was the U.S. military prevented from achieving victory in Vietnam by poor decisions made by civilian leaders, a hostile media, and the antiwar movement, or was it doomed to failure from the start? Twenty-five years after the last U.S. troops left Vietnam, the most divisive foreign U.S. armed conflict since the War of 1812 remains an open wound not only because 58,000 Americans were killed and billions of dollars wasted, but because it was an ignominious, unprecedented defeat.

In this iconoclastic new study, Vietnam veteran and scholar Jeffrey Record looks past the consensual myths of responsibility to offer the most trenchant, balanced, and compelling analysis ever published of the causes for America's first defeat.