Enormously rich in detail and written with a novelist's brilliance . . . A very moving book. James Salter, The Washington Post Book World
A classic of its kind, The Long Gray Line is the twenty-five-year saga of the West Point class of 1966. With a novelist's eye for detail, Rick Atkinson (author of An Army at Dawn) illuminates this powerful story through the lives of three classmates and the women they lovedfrom the boisterous cadet years, to the fires of Vietnam, to the hard peace and internal struggles that followed the war. The rich cast of characters also includes Douglas MacArthur, William C. Westmoreland, and a score of other memorable figures. The class of 1966 straddled a fault line in American military history, and Atkinson's masterly book speaks for a generation of American men and women about innocence, patriotism, and the price we pay for our dreams.
An immediate New York Times bestseller upon its original publication, the twentieth anniversary edition includes a new foreword by the author.
