by Tom Bissell
Hayslip, Le Ly, with Jay Wurts. When Heaven and Earth Changed Places: A Vietnamese Woman's Journey from War to Peace. New York: Plume, 2003. (Reprint of the 1989 edition.)
Hedges, Chris. War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. New York: Public-Affairs, 2002.
Heinemann, Larry. Black Virgin Mountain: A Return to Vietnam. New York: Doubleday, 2005. Weirdest—and perhaps most revealing—moment: A Vietnamese veteran of the war tells Heinemann that he read Whitman, Twain, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway and gave lectures on them to North Vietnamese troops on their way to the front. “Then,” Heinemann writes, “Professor Lien asked in all earnest seriousness what Vietnamese literature had the United States Army taught me during the war.”
Henderson, Charles. Goodnight Saigon: The True Story of the U.S. Marines’ Last Days in Vietnam. New York: Berkley, 2005.
Herr, Michael. Dispatches. New York: Vintage, 1991. (Reprint of the 1977 edition.) My favorite line from a book containing nothing but indelible lines: “But once in a while you'd hear something fresh, and a couple of times you'd even hear something high, like the corpsman at Khe Sanh who said, ‘If it ain't the fucking incoming it's the fucking outgoing. Only difference is who gets the fucking grease, and that ain't no fucking difference at all.’ “I have no idea what that means, but goddamn.
Hersh, Seymour. My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath. New York: Vintage, 1972. (Reprint of the 1970 edition.)
Hitchens, Christopher. The Trial of Henry Kissinger. London: Verso, 2001.
Isaacs, Arnold R. Vietnam Shadows: The War, Its Ghosts, and Its Legacy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
Jamieson, Neil L. Understanding Vietnam. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Probably the best book to read before traveling to Vietnam for the first time. Find Nguyen Dinh Tu's “Fare Thee Well” dispatch in full here.
Jomini, Antoine-Henri de. The Art of War. Translated by G. H. Mendell and W. P. Craighill. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott and Company, 1862.
Kaiser, David. American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2000. A major source of information for the Johnson administration's dramatis personae. Here is this book's shattering ending: “Johnson [in July 1965] had a 65 percent approval rating. The Gemini program, the next step on the way to the moon, had just completed a spectacular mission, including a space walk. The economy had been steadily expanding for four years and five months…. One U.S. dollar bought four Deutschmarks and 360 Japanese yen. The Interstate Highway system was well on its way to completion. The Sound of Music was the most popular movie of the year. America's colleges—with the sole exception of the University of California at Berkeley— were filled with well-dressed, industrious, and obedient undergraduates, and in June, in a cover story on the Palisades, California, high school class of 1965, Time announced that American youth seemed to be on the verge of a new golden age. No one knew that a whole era of American history was over.”
Kaplan, Robert D. Soldiers of God: With Islamic Warriors in Afghanistan and Pakistan, rev. ed. New York: Vintage, 2001.
Karnow, Stanley. Vietnam: A History, rev. ed. New York: Penguin, 1997.
Kimball, Jeffrey. The Vietnam War Files: Uncovering the Secret History of the Nixon-Era Strategy. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004.
Kissinger, Henry. Ending the Vietnam War: A History of America's Involvement in and Extrication from the Vietnam War. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003. A disgustingly evasive book from a thoroughly disgusting statesman.
Lamb, David. Vietnam, Now: A Reporter Returns. New York: PublicAffairs, 2002.
Langguth, A. J. Our Vietnam: The War, 1954-1975. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000.
Laurence, John. The Cat from Hue: A Vietnam War Story. New York: Public-Affairs, 2002.
Le Duan. Selected Writings: 1960-1975. Hanoi: The Gioi Publishers, 1997.
Lind, Michael. Vietnam: The Necessary War: A Reinterpretation of America's Most Disastrous Military Conflict. New York: Touchstone, 2002. (Reprint of the 1999 edition.) Lind writes that it “was necessary for the United States to escalate the war in the mid-1960s in order to defend the credibility of the United States as a superpower, but it was necessary for the United States to forfeit the war after 1968, in order to preserve the American domestic political consensus in favor of the Cold War on other fronts.” The thought occurs whether American soldiers on their way to Vietnam would have appreciated knowing that their lives were on the line for “credibility.” Lind has much to say about the totalitarian regime of Ho Chi Minh, but who is totalitarian when, by Lind's reasoning, ten or fifteen thousand lives are regarded as an appropriate sacrifice to an abstraction? As Lind argues, “if one rejects the false morality of pacifism, then such grim calculations are unavoidable.” Change only a couple of Lind's words, and one finds oneself staring at the airtight logic of a Marxist-Leninist starving out peasants for the proletarian commonweal. The biggest problem with Lind's thesis is that, in his view, had the United States not chosen to fight in Vietnam, its reputation would have suffered and something he calls the “bandwagon effect” would have inspired similar insurgencies all over the world. So the United States chose Lind's necessary path and fought. Its reputation suffered, and many insurgencies (by Lind's own admission) were inspired anyway—and not by American inaction but rather by the far more distressing example of American defeat.
Logevall, Fredrik. Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. A fascinating source of information about the Diem years and a surprisingly gripping read.
Macdonald, Dwight. Discriminations: Essays and Afterthoughts. New York: Da Capo Press, 1985. (Reprint of the 1974 edition.)
Mangold, Tom, and John Penycate. The Tunnels of Cu Chi. New York: Berkley, 1986. (Reprint of the 1985 edition.)
Mann, Robert. A Grand Delusion: America's Descent into Vietnam. New York: Basic Books, 2001.
Mao Tse-tung. On Guerrilla Warfare. Translated by Samuel B. Griffith II. Champaign: UniversityoflllinoisPress,2000. (Reprintofthe 1961 edition.)
Maraniss, David. They Marched into Sunlight: War and Peace, Vietnam and America, October 1967. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003. A beautiful, wrenching, horrible book. Much of my information concerning napalm was taken from here, as were some of the details concerning NLF privation. One of the few books about the war that manages to convey an admirably unbroken empathy for all.
Marr, David G. Vietnam 1945: The Quest for Power. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
Mason, Robert. Chickenhawk. New York: The Viking Press, 1983.
McMaster, H. R. Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies that Led to Vietnam. New York: HarperCollins, 1997.
McNamara, Robert S., with Brian VanDeMark. In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam. New York: Vintage, 1996. (A revision of the 1995 edition.)
Military History Institute of Vietnam. Victory in Vietnam: The Official History of the People's Army of Vietnam, 1954-1975. Translated by Merle L. Pribbenow Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002.
Mo'ise, Edwin E. Tonkin Gulf and the Escalation of the Vietnam War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Incredibly well researched and skillfully, even movingly, told.
Moore, Harold G., and Joseph Galloway. We Were Soldiers Once … and Young: la Drang: The Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam. New York: HarperPerennial, 1993. (Reprint of the 1992 edition.)
Murphy, Edward F. Semper Fi—Vietnam: From Danang to the DMZ, Marine Corps Campaigns, 1965-1975. New York: Presidio Press, 1997.
Népote, Jacques, Xavier Guillaume, and Anita Sach. Vietnam. Hong Kong: Odyssey Publications, 1999.
Nghia M. Vo. The Bamboo Gulag: Political Imprisonment in Communist Vietnam. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland and Company, 2004.
Nguyen Cao Ky, with Marvin J. Wolf. Buddha's Child: My Fight to Save South Vietnam.
New York: St. Martin's Press, 2002. Vietnam's current leaders could doubtless do wonders for themselves and their country if they bothered to address the past with General Ky's hard-won, exile-honed honesty. Here are the final lines of this extremely fascinating book: “My biggest mistake was allowing the wrong man the opportunity to lead a guaranty of defeat. For this I beg forgiveness of those who fled into exile, of those who remained, and from those then unborn.”
———. How We Lost the Vietnam War. New York: Cooper Square Press, 2002. (Reprint of the 1979 edition.)
Nguyen Khac Vien. Vietnam: A Long History. Hanoi: The Gioi Publishers, 1993.
Nguyen Phu Trong. Viet Nam on the Path of Renewal. Hanoi: The Gioi Publishers, 2004. Trong, one of Vietnam's foremost political scientists, has this to say about the collapse of the Soviet Union (which “had a glorious and honorable history”): “For a long time, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union made the mistake of taking over and performing the role of the State and almost turned itself into a state by doing tasks of the State, thus failing to bring into full play the role of the State itself.” Uh, yeah.
Nixon, Richard. RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990. (Reprint of the 1978 edition.)
Oberdorfer, Don. Tetl: The Turning Point in the Vietnam War. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. (Reprint of the 1971 edition.)
O’Brien, Tim. If I Die in a Combat Zone Box Me Up and Ship Me Home. New York: Broadway Books, 1999. (Reprint of the 1975 edition.)
———. The Things They Carried. New York: Penguin, 1991. (Reprint of the 1990 edition.)
Olson, James S., and Randy Roberts. My Lai: A Brief History with Documents. Boston: Bedford, 1998.
O’Nan, Stewart, ed. The Vietnam Reader: The Definitive Collection of American Fiction and Nonfiction on the War. New York: Anchor, 1998.
Pham, Andrew X. Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999. A wonderful travelogue of contemporary Vietnam, by one of its most thoughtful sons-in-exile.
Philpott, Tom. Glory Denied: The Saga of the Vietnam Veteran Jim Thompson, America's Longest-Held Prisoner of War. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001. In telling the story of Thompson, a man both tormented and tormenting, Philpott manages in this oral history to relate the horror of the war as it was felt by its warriors, its captives, its captors, and its families. Inarguably the best book about Vietnam's American prisoners of war.
Pike, Douglas. Viet Cong: The Organization and Techniques of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1966.
Reporting Vietnam: American Journalism 1959-1975. New York: Library of America, 2000. The reporting from South Vietnam in its last days by Paul Vogle, Malcolm Browne, Keyes Beech, Philip Caputo, and Bob Tamarkin can all be found here.
Sachs, Dana. The House on Dream Street: Memoir of an American Woman in Vietnam. Emeryville, Calif: Seal Press, 2003. (Reprint of the 2000 edition.) There is so much to love in this book, from its nauseating description of Sachs's first run-in with the Vietnamese delicacy of embryonic duck eggs, to its patient and evocative portrait of mid-1990s Hanoi, to its recounting of Sachs's attempt to make hamburgers for her Vietnamese hosts, to its uncommonly moving love story between Sachs and a working-class Vietnamese man whose heart she breaks. One of the best books available on contemporary Vietnam.
Santoli, Al. Everything We Had: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Thirty-three American Soldiers Who Fought It. New York: Ballantine, 1982. (Reprint of the 1981 edition.)
Shawcross, William. Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon, and the Destruction of Cambodia. New York: Cooper Square Press, 2002. (Reprint of the 1979 edition.)
Shay, Jonathan. Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character. New York: Touchstone, 1995. (Reprint of the 1994 edition.)
Sheehan, Neil. A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam. New York: Random House, 1988. The saddest and most consuming book—it is both The Iliad and The Odyssey—I have read about the war. Any war.
Short, Philip. Mao: A Life. New York: Henry Holt, 2000.
———. Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare. New York: Henry Holt, 2005. Both of Short's biographies of Asia's murderous supremos are excellent. To read one right after the other, however, is not advisable. This writer lost an entire week to drawn shades and hours of stunned, thoughtless banjo picking in their back-to-back aftermath.
Shultz, Richard H., Jr. The Secret War Against Hanoi: The Untold Story of Spies, Saboteurs, and Covert Warriors in North Vietnam. New York: HarperCollins, 1999.
Snepp, Frank. Decent Interval: An Insider's Account of Saigon's Indecent End, Told by the CIAs Chief Strategy Analyst in Vietnam. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002. (Revised version of the 1977 edition.) One of my favorite books about the war and one I mined thoroughly for part one of The Father of All Things. Due to what Snepp condemns as, at best, wishful U.S. thinking about Saigon's chances for holding out in the war's final days, he lost his Vietnamese-Chinese girlfriend, as well as “a child I believe to be ours,” after the Communists conquered the city. This was not Snepp's only debit. The CIA sued its erstwhile officer, and won, after the 1977 publication of Decent Interval, which the CIA claimed had been written in violation of agency protocol. Snepp, whose case went as high as the U.S. Supreme Court, was ultimately forced to forfeit all proceeds of Decent Interval from now until the sun burns out. Unavailable for years (except in pirated editions on the streets of Saigon), this reissued edition continues to garnish the CIA strongbox.
Sorley, Lewis. A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam. New York: Harcourt, 1999.
Spector, Ronald H. After Tet: The Bloodiest Year in Vietnam. New York: Free Press, 1993.
Summers, Harry G. The Vietnam War Almanac. New York: Ballantine Books, 1999. (Reprint of the 1985 edition.) Despite its combative (and unrevised) tone, a terrific source of information concerning the war, in particular its military hardware.
Taubman, William. Khrushchev: The Man and His Era. New York: W. W. Norton, 2003.
Taylor, Keith Weller. The Birth of Vietnam. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. As dry as rice powder, but an immensely helpful study of pre-colonial (and even pre-recorded-history) Vietnam.
Templer, Robert. Shadows and Wind: A View of Modern Vietnam. New York: Penguin, 1999. Gets off to a rough start with its frankly unbelievably unsympathetic tone toward returning American veterans but evolves to become a deeply felt and insightful examination of the postwar(s) culture and economy of Vietnam.
Thompson, Leroy. The Counter-insurgency Manual: Tactics of the Anti-guerrilla Professionals. London: Greenhill Books, 2002.
Tran, Barbara, Monique T D. Truong, and Luu Truong Khoi, eds. Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry and Prose. New York: Asian American Writers’ Workshop, 1998.
Truong Chinh. Selected Writings. Hanoi: The Gioi Publishers, 1994.
Truong Nhu Tang, with David Chanoff and Doan Van Toai. A Viet Cong Memoir: An Inside Account of the Vietnam War and Its Aftermath. New York: Vintage, 1986. (Reprint of the 1985 edition.)
Van Tien Dung. Our Great Spring Victory: An Account of the Liberation of South Vietnam. Translated by John Spragens, Jr. Hanoi: The Gioi Publishers, 2000. (Reprint of the 1977 edition.)
Vo Nguyen Giap. How We Won the War. Philadelphia: RECON Publications, 1976.
Walton, C. Dale. The Myth of Inevitable U.S. Defeat in Vietnam. London: Frank Kass, 2002. Did I mention that this book is nuts?
Wicker, Tom. JFK and LB]: The Influence of Personality upon Politics. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1991.
Wolff, Tobias. In Pharaoh's Army: Memories of the Lost War. New York: Vintage, 1995. (Reprint of the 1994 edition.) In my opinion, the best combatant's memoir to have emerged from the war. So finely written as to be almost cruel.
Young, Marilyn. The Vietnam Wars: 1945-1990. New York: HarperCollins, 1991.
Permi
ssions Acknowledgments
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
Alfred Publishing Co., Inc., Carlin America, Hal Leonard Publishing Co., and Songwriters Guild of America: Excerpt from “Mr. Wonderful,” words and music by Jerry Bock, Larry Holofcener, and George David Weiss. Copyright © 1956 (Renewed) by Abilene Music, Alley Music Corporation, Herald Square Music Company, and Range Road Music, Inc. Copyright assigned to Abilene Music Inc., Range Road Music, Inc., Quartet Music, Inc., and Jerry Bock Enterprises. All rights on behalf of Abilene Music Inc. administered by The Songwriters Guild of America. All rights on behalf of Range Road Music, Inc. and Quartet Music, Inc. administered by Herald Square Music, Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Alfred Publishing Co., Inc., Carlin America, Hal Leonard Publishing Co., and Songwriters Guild of America, on behalf of Abilene Music.
Penguin Group (USA) Inc.: Excerpt from Four Hours in My Lai by Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim. Published by Penguin Group (USA) Inc. in 1992. Reprinted courtesy of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group: Excerpts from The Fall of Saigon by David Butler. Copyright © 1985 by David Butler. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group.
The University of California Press: Excerpt from Understanding Vietnam by Neil L. Jamieson. Copyright © 1993 by The Regents of the University of California. Reprinted by permission of University of California Press, administered by Copyright Clearance Center.
Copyright © 2007 by Thomas Carlisle Bissell
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Portions of this book have appeared in Best American Travel Writing 2005 edited by Jamaica Kincaid (Houghton Mifflin, New York), Columbia, Harper's Magazine, Lost, and The Old Town Review.