Once Upon a Distant War , by William Prochnau . David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan, and Malcolm Browne star in this story of the ground-breaking journalists in Vietnam, from late 1961 through the overthrow of Diem in November 1963. The all-important origins of US involvement are related in detail, from an unusual perspective. Its goal is much like that of the Pentagon Papers , and in size it is just as big as the analysis section of that study. The study was commissioned by the Senate Foreign Relations committee in the late 1970s, and the work was done by Gibbons, a researcher in the Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress, which is about as apolitical a mission and implementation as you can imagine.
Every page is very detailed and impeccably-referenced.
This is a big, serious work, appropriate for only the most dedicated student of the war. My Philosophy for Studying the Vietnam War 1. These points are widely accepted by historians as the important issues. It turns out that studying the Vietnam War in this frame of reference requires a different technique than studying any other major U.S. war. In WWII and prior wars, most of the important history took place in the combat theaters.