The Long Gray Line: The American Journey of West Point's Class of 1966 [Paperback]

A story of epic proportions [and] an awesome feat of biographical reconstruction. The Boston Globe

A classic of its kind,The Long Gray Lineis the twenty-five-year saga of the West Point class of 1966. With a novelist's eye for detail, Rick Atkinson 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 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

Rick Atkinsonis the bestselling author ofThe Guns at Last Light,An Army at Dawn(winner of the Pulitzer Prize for History), The Day Of Battle, In the Company of SoldiersandCrusade. His many other awards include the Pulitzer Prize for Journalism, the George Polk Award, and the Pritzker Military Library Literature Award. A former staff writer and senior editor atThe Washington Post, he lives in Washington, D.C.

Enormously rich in detail and written with a novelist's brilliance& A very moving book. James Salter, The Washington Post Book World

A story of epic proportions [and] awesome feat of biographical reconstruction& A difficult book to put down. Cullen Murphy, The Boston Globe

The Long Gray Line is a profoundly moving saga in which the U.S. Military Academy at West Point stands center stage. In mufti or olive drab, at peace or war, amidst joy or grief, in life or death, the academy shapes all. The author has captured its ethos. If you want to see a slice of the nation's manhood in a drama of troubled times and find its heart, feel its emotions, sense its dilemmas, thlcr