Vietnam has been called the first “television” war. But it has also inspired generations of writers who have explored its origins, its horrors, its aftermath and the innate flaws and miscalculations that drove the world’s most powerful country, the U.S., into a long, gruesome and hopeless conflict.
FICTION
“The Quiet American,” Graham Greene (1955)
British author Graham Greene’s novel has long held the stature of tragic prophecy. Alden Pyle is a naive CIA agent whose dreams of forging a better path for Vietnam — a “Third Force” between communism and colonialism that existed only in books — leads to senseless destruction. “The Quiet American” was released when U.S. military involvement in Vietnam was just beginning, yet anticipated the Americans’ prolonged and deadly failure to comprehend the country they claimed to be saving.
“The Things They Carried,” Tim O’Brien (1990)
The Vietnam War was the last extended conflict waged while the U.S. still had a military draft, and the last to inspire a wide range of notable, first-hand fiction — none more celebrated or popular than O’Brien’s 1990 collection of interconnected stories. O’Brien served in an infantry unit in 1969-70, and the million-selling “The Things They Carried” has tales ranging from a soldier who wears his girlfriend’s stockings around his neck, even in battle, to the author trying to conjure the life story of a Vietnamese soldier he killed. O’Brien’s book has become standard reading about the war and inspired an exhibit at the National Veterans Art Museum in Chicago.
“Matterhorn,” Karl Marlantes (2009)
Karl Marlantes, a Rhodes scholar and decorated Marine commander, fictionalized his experiences in his 600-plus page novel about a recent college graduate and his fellow members of Bravo Company as they seek to retake a base near the border with Laos. Like “The Quiet American,” “Matterhorn” is, in part, the story of disillusionment, a young man’s discovery that education and privilege are no shields against enemy fire. “No strategy was perfect,” he realizes. “All choices were bad in some way.”
“The Sympathizer,” Viet Thanh Nguyen (2015)
Viet Thanh Nguyen was just 4 when his family fled Vietnam in 1975, eventually settling in San Jose, California. “The Sympathizer,” winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 2016, is Nguyen’s first book and high in the canon of Vietnamese American literature. The novel unfolds as the confessions of a onetime spy for North Vietnam who becomes a Hollywood consultant and later returns to Vietnam fighting on the opposite side. “I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces,” the narrator tells us. “Perhaps not surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds.”
“The Mountains Sing,” Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai (2020)
Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai was born in North Vietnam in 1973, two years before the U.S. departure, and was reared on stories of her native country’s haunted and heroic past. Her novel alternates narration between a grandmother born in 1920 and a granddaughter born 40 years later. Together, they take readers through much of 20th century Vietnam, from French colonialism and Japanese occupation to the rise of Communism and the growing and brutal American military campaign to fight it. Quế Mai dedicates the novel to various ancestors, including an uncle whose “youth the Vietnam War consumed.”
NONFICTION
“The Best and the Brightest,” David Halberstam (1972)
As a young reporter in Vietnam, David Halberstam had been among the first journalists to report candidly on the military’s failures and the government’s deceptions. The title of his bestseller became a catchphrase and the book itself a document of how the supposedly finest minds of the post-World War II generation — the elite set of advisers in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations — could so badly miscalculate the planning and execution of a war and so misunderstand the country they were fighting against.
“Fire in the Lake,” Frances FitzGerald (1972)
Frances FitzGerald’s celebrated book was published the same year and stands with “The Best and the Brightest” as an early and prescient take on the war’s legacy. Fitzgerald had reported from South Vietnam for the Village Voice and The New Yorker, and she drew upon firsthand observations and deep research in contending that the U.S. was fatally ignorant of Vietnamese history and culture.
“Dispatches,” Michael Herr (1977)
Michael Herr, who would eventually help write “Apocalypse Now,” was a Vietnam correspondent for Esquire who brought an off-hand, charged-up rock ‘n’ roll sensibility to his highly praised and influential book. In one “dispatch,” he tells of a soldier who “took his pills by the fistful,” uppers in one pocket and downers in another. “He told me they cooled out things just right for him,” Herr wrote, “that he could see that old jungle at night like he was looking at it through a starlight scope.”
“Bloods,” Wallace Terry (1984)
A landmark, “Bloods” was among the first books to center the experiences of Black veterans. Former Time magazine correspondent Wallace Terry compiled the oral histories of 20 Black veterans of varying backgrounds and ranks. One interviewee, Richard J. Ford III, was wounded three times and remembered being visited at the hospital by generals and other officers: “They respected you and pat you on the back. They said, ‘You brave and you courageous. You America’s finest. America’s best.’ Back in the states, the same officers that pat me on the back wouldn’t even speak to me.”
“A Bright Shining Lie,” Neil Sheehan (1988)
Halberstam’s sources as a reporter included Lt. Col. John Paul Vann, a U.S. adviser to South Vietnam who became a determined critic of American military leadership and eventually died in battle in 1972. Vann’s story is told in full in “A Bright Shining Lie,” by Neil Sheehan, the New York Times reporter known for breaking the story of the Pentagon Papers and how they revealed the U.S. government’s long history of deceiving the public about the war. Winner of the Pulitzer in 1989, “A Bright Shining Lie” was adapted into an HBO movie starring Bill Paxton as Vann.
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For more coverage of the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War’s end, visit https://apnews.com/hub/vietnam-war.