There was in American history a stark foreshadowing of the Vietnam trauma: General William Tecumseh Sherman's "March to the Sea" when civilians and their communities were ravaged and, in the Civil War's aftermath, the festering bitterness of Reconstruction.

With the piercing insights that have characterized all his writings, James Reston, Jr., confronts the striking parallel between America's two most tragic conflicts, the enormity of total war. By addressing the moral issues raised by both wars, Reston puts Vietnam in perspective. He also deals with the poignant problems of amnesty and reconciliation and their legacy of fierce divisiveness. Reston personally traveled to Sherman's battle sites, recalling the key characters and commenting on the decisive events, always with Vietnam in mind.

How much did Sherman ravage? Not the least of Reston's accomplishments is to clarify discrepancies between myth and reality. In the South, the mere mention of Sherman still "elicits an instant emotional response." But we see how often legend has replaced truth. Reston, with his novelistic eye and ear, also evokes the New South, a "civilization" remote from the one Sherman helped destroy. His troops' destruction by the time his armies moved through South Carolina is no less indisputable than our wreckage in Vietnam. Still, the most astonishing episode in Sherman's career is elaborated on: Sherman's offering a wholly generous peace to the South, soon repudiated in Washington, but an act of magnanimity that Reston makes part of our history.

On the Vietnam war, Reston emphasizes that there has been no "second Reconstruction." No groups emerged in Congress after Vietnam comparable to the Radical Republicans after the Civil War. He is devastating in his criticism of the treatment of the 400,000 Vietnam veterans cashiered with less than honorable discharges. His vignettes of Vietnam are among the most compelling accounts of what Vietnam was really like.