(Occasionally Fortified with Thoughts Toward Recommended Reading)
Addington, Larry H. Americans War in Vietnam: A Short Narrative History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. Among the best short histories of the war available.
Adler, Bill. Letters from Vietnam. New York: Ballantine, 2003.
Anderegg, Michael, ed. Inventing Vietnam: The War in Film and Television. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991.
Anderson, Kent. Sympathy for the Devil. New York: Bantam, 1999. (Reprint of the 1987 edition.) A curiously underknown and terrifyingly convincing novel of the war.
Anton, Frank, with Tommy Denton. Why Didn't You Get Me Out?: A POWs Nightmare in Vietnam. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000. (Reprint of the 1997 edition.)
Appy, Christian G. Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides. New York: Viking, 2003. Possibly the best book about the war to be published in more than a decade, and without question its finest oral history.
Baker, Mark. Nam: The Vietnam War in the Words of the Men and Women Who Fought There. New York: Cooper Square Press, 2001. (Reprint of the 1981 edition.)
Bao Ninh. The Sorrow of War: A Novel of North Vietnam. Translated by Phan Thanh Hao. New York: Riverhead, 1996. (Reprint of the 1995 edition.)
Bilton, Michael, and Kevin Sim. Four Hours in My Lai. New York: Penguin, 1993. (Reprint of the 1992 edition.)
Bizot, François. The Gate. Translated by Euan Cameron. London: Harvill Press, 2003.
Borton, Lady. Ho Chi Minh: A Portrait. Hanoi: Youth Publishing House, 2003. A beautifully designed and interesting book that nevertheless soft-pedals on every single controversial fact regarding Ho's life and politics.
Broyles, William, Jr. Brothers in Arms: A Journey from War to Peace. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986.
Bui Tin. From Enemy to Friend: A North Vietnamese Perspective on the War. Translated by Nguyen Ngoc Bich. Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2002.
Burkett, B. G., and Glenna Whitley. Stolen Valor: How the Vietnam Generation Was Robbed of Its Heroes and Its History. Dallas: Verity Press, 1998.
Butler, David. The Fall of Saigon: Scenes from the Sudden End of a Long War. New York: Dell, 1986. (Reprint of the 1985 edition.) A book it is hard not to ingest in one emotionally paralyzed sitting. Butler has the humility to include letters written to his wife in the last month of Saigon's siege in which he assures her that the city will not fall. As is obvious from the text, a major source for the first part of this book.
Caputo, Philip. Means of Escape: A Memoir. New York: HarperCollins, 1991.
———. A Rumor of War. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1977.
Chandler, David P. Brother Number One: A Political Biography of Pol Pot. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1999.
Chomsky, Noam. At War with Asia. Oakland: AK Press, 2005. (Reprint of the 1970 edition.) My second favorite passage: “Others regard ‘Khmer socialism’ as being a step toward an egalitarian and modern society, within the specific context of Cambodian history and culture. I do not have enough information to attempt a judgment.” My favorite passage: “My personal guess is that, unhindered by imperialist intervention, the Vietnamese would develop a modern industrial society with much popular participation in implementation and direct democracy at the lower level of organization, a highly egalitarian society with excellent conditions of welfare and technical education.” The passage with which it is impossible to take issue: “Perhaps someday they [U.S. war planners] will acknowledge their ‘honest errors’ in their memoirs, speaking of the burdens of world leadership and the tragic irony of history. Their victims, the peasants of Indochina, will write no memoirs and will be forgotten. They will join the countless millions of earlier victims of tyrants and oppressors.”
Clark, Johnnie. Guns Up!, rev. ed. New York: Presidio Press, 2002.
Clausewitz, Carl von. On War. Edited and translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993.
Coll, Steve. Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001. New York: Penguin Press, 2004. An amazing and deeply sobering history, the reading of which should be the duty of every American.
Dallek, Robert. Flawed Giant: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1960-1973. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
———. An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963. New York: Little, Brown, 2003.
Dang Nghiem Van, Chu Thai Son, and Luu Hung. Ethnic Minorities in Vietnam. Hanoi: The Gioi Publishers, 2000.
Downs, Frederick. The Killing Zone: My Life in the Vietnam War. New York: W. W. Norton, 1993. (Reprint of the 1978 edition.) One is hesitant to criticize Mr. Downs (he lost his right arm during combat), but sentences such as “Never again would I trust any dinks” and “It turned out most of us liked to kill other men. Some of the guys would shoot at a dink much as they would at a target” make it very, very hard to sympathize with him.
Duiker, William J. The Communist Road to Power in Vietnam, 2nd ed. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1996.
———. Historical Dictionary of Vietnam, 2nd ed. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1998.
———. Ho Chi Minh: A Life. New York: Hyperion, 2000. Although I was not aware of it at the time of my first journey, this book, despite being dedicated to “the Vietnamese People,” is banned in Vietnam because of the information on pages 199 and 200, which concern Ho's probable wife, Nguyen Thi Minh Khai; her lover; and Ho's possible role, glancingly treated by Duiker, in their arrest and execution by the French.
Duong Thu Huong. Novel Without a Name. Translated by Phan Huy Duong and Nina McPherson. New York: Penguin Books, 1996. (Reprint of the 1995 edition.) Written by a woman who led a PAVN Communist Youth Brigade of forty volunteers to South Vietnam. She was one of her brigade's three survivors. Almost all of Huong's work has been banned by the Vietnamese government.
Elliott, David W. P. The Vietnamese War: Revolution and Social Change in the Mekong Delta, 1930-1975, 2 vols. Armonk, N.Y: M. E. Sharpe, 2003. Written by a U.S. Army veteran of the war who later worked for the Rand Corporation in Vietnam, this two-volume monster is, at 1,547 small-print pages, quite possibly the most elaborate examination of the war's development and consequences. Despite its zeroed-in focus on only one area of Vietnam, it is also tremendously enthralling. Highly recommended to any reader looking to understand how the war affected average Vietnamese and incomparable for its evenhandedness and emotional sobriety.
Ellsberg, Daniel. Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers. New York: Penguin, 2003. (Reprint of the 2002 edition.) Better written and more entertaining than it has any right to be. Here is Ellsberg's take on The Pentagon Papers themselves: “[I]t was not any individual page or revelation, or even a small set of them, that was very important. It was the overall detailed documentation of our involvement over the years and the repetitive patterns of internal pessimism and desperate escalation and deception of the public in the face of what was, realistically, hopeless stalemate. It was the total lack of a good reason for what we were doing anywhere in the whole story.” Strangely, Ellsberg broke no existing law in leaking the Papers to The New York Times,but as his lawyer explained to him, “Well, let's face it, Dan. Copying seven thousand pages of top secret documents and giving them to The New York Times has a bad ring to it.”
Engelmann, Larry. Tears Before the Rain: An Oral History of the Fall of South Vietnam. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. A splendidly discordant oral history, made all the more so by the many revealing inconsistencies within its shared memories. A major source for part one of this book.
Fall, Bernard. Hell in a Very Small Place: The Siege of Dien Bien Phu. Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 2002. (Reprint of the 1966 edition.)
———. Last Reflections on a War. Mechanicsburg, Pa.: Stackpole Books, 2000.
———. Street Without Joy. Mechanicsburg, Pa.: Stackpole Books, 1994. (Reprint of the 1964 edition.)
Fenton, James. All the Wrong Places: Adrift in the Politics of the Pacific Rim. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1988. Contains one of my favorite accounts of the fall of Saigon: Mr. Fenton, a poet and Englishman, personally looted the U.S. Embassy. And this: “I went as a supporter of the Viet-cong, wanting to see them win. I saw them win. What feeling did that leave me with, and where does it leave me now? I know that by the end of my stay in Saigon I had grown to loathe the apparatchiks who were arriving every day with their cardboard suitcases from Hanoi. I know that I loathed their institutional lies and their mockery of political justice. But as the banners went up in honor of Lenin, Marx, and Stalin, I know too that I had known this was coming. Had we not supported the NLF ‘without illusions’? Must I not accept that the disappearances, the gagging of the press, the political distortion of reality was all part of a classical Stalinism which nevertheless ‘had its progressive features’?… We had been seduced by Ho. My political associates in England were not the kind of people who denied that Stalinism existed. We not only knew about it, we were very interested in it. We also opposed it. Why then did we also support it? Or did we?”
FitzGerald, Frances. Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam. New York: Back Bay Books, 2002. (Reprint of the 1972 edition.)
Gaiduk, Ilya V. The Soviet Union and the Vietnam War. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996.
Gannon, Kathy I Is for Infidel: From Holy War to Holy Terror: 18 Years Inside Afghanistan. New York: PublicAffairs, 2005.
Greene, Graham. The Quiet American. New York: Penguin, 1977. (Reprint of the 1955 edition.)
Grossman, Dave. On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. New York: Little, Brown, 1996. (Reprint of the 1995 edition.)
Guillon, Emmanuel. Cham Art: Treasures from the Da Nang Museum, Vietnam. Bangkok: River Books, 2001.
Halberstam, David. Ho. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971.
Hammes. T.X. The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century. Saint Paul, Minn.: Zenith Press, 2004.
Harrison, James P. The Endless War: Vietnam's Struggle for Independence. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.
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.