Five Books on Vietnam
Where to read up on America's long and controversial war in Southeast Asia
Virtually all of America’s major wars have been deeply controversial, from the War of 1812 to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. But America’s war in Vietnam remains lodged in the national consciousness as perhaps the nation’s most divisive conflict—and the most serious commitment of national resources to a military cause since World War II. At the height of America’s ill-fated involvement in Vietnam, the United States had nearly 550,000 troops in the country versus 285,000 for the invasion of Iraq. Some 58,000 Americans died in Vietnam, along with millions of Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians.
Even today, debates and disputes over the war in Vietnam color and shape our national life; only the Civil War and World War II left deeper marks on the American psyche. But that’s only one reason to delve into the war. Vietnam remains a historical tragedy of epic proportions, with both American and Vietnamese leaders making decisions knowing full well the catastrophes that would likely ensue—and ordinary Americans and Vietnamese paid the heavy price for these fateful choices.
Here are five of books that chronicle America’s torturous involvement in Vietnam:
Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam: Historian Fredrik Logevell’s account of France’s war in Indochina—and America’s steadily increasing involvement in the conflict—won a Pulitzer Prize, and deservedly so. His narrative of the battle of Dien Bien Phu alone makes the book worth reading. Overall, though, it’s a rich history that shatters some of the shibboleths surrounding the war; President Dwight Eisenhower and his administration, for instance, bears greater responsibility for entangling the United States ever-deeper in Vietnam than many previous narratives recognized. Logevall doesn’t romanticize Vietnamese communists, either, or present their victory as inevitable. Contingency is Logevall’s watchword here, the sense that things might well have gone another way had even modestly different decisions been made at crucial times.
Westmoreland’s War: Reassessing American Strategy in Vietnam: A wide range of critics have long argued that Gen. William Westmoreland, commander of American troops in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968, shoulders much of the blame for the U.S. military’s failures in the war. They assert he pursued a firepower-heavy, large-scale conventional strategy when he ought to have cleaved to a “population-centric” counterinsurgency approach instead. Historian Gregory Daddis disputes this dominant interpretation, convincingly arguing that American military strategy under Westmoreland made sense given the state of the war when he took command: by the mid-1960s, only large, conventional U.S. military units could block a communist victory and give America’s South Vietnamese allies breathing space. That this strategy failed to deliver the desired results, Daddis contends, says more about the general limits of military power and excessive ambition of American political objectives in Vietnam than anything inherent to Westmoreland’s specific approach.
Hue 1968: Journalist Mark Bowden is best known for writing Black Hawk Down, the definitive account of the 1993 battle of Mogadishu. Here, he turns his attention to the devastating battle for Hue during the Tet Offensive of 1968, producing a narrative that effectively conveys the brutality of what still likely remains the most intense episode of ground combat for the United States military since Korea—if not World War II. It’s also a book that has no truck with the romantic mythology of the guerrilla: no popular uprising greeted communist seizure of the city, civilians were gang-pressed into military support roles, and widespread massacres left thousands of them dead. Though the book’s subtitle bills it as telling the story of “a turning point of the American war in Vietnam,” it’s less concerned with the big picture and more with the details of urban combat—and is better off when it focuses on them.
A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam: Another Pulitzer Prize-winner, journalist Neil Sheehan’s magisterial book looks at the war via the experience of John Paul Vann, from his early role as a U.S. military adviser to his position as a USAID official attempting to implement a counterinsurgency approach a decade later. A reporter assigned to Saigon in the early 1960s, Sheehan knew Vann personally and, like other reporters, took his view of the war to heart. As a result, Sheehan’s account rehearses the traditional criticism of American military strategy as overly conventional and focused on firepower—the same criticisms Vann leveled during his time as an advisor to the South Vietnamese military. But Sheehan’s operatic narrative elevates the book above these historical debates and depicts the war as a grand tragedy, a question of hubris and nemesis rather than strategy and policy. In Sheehan’s telling, Vann himself embodied many of these qualities in microcosm—epitomizing the conflicting motives and impulses at the heart of America’s war in Vietnam.
Without Honor: Defeat in Vietnam and Cambodia: This lesser-known book by journalist Arnold Isaacs details the final years and days before the collapse of South Vietnam and Cambodia in 1975—a calamity he personally experienced as a correspondent for the Baltimore Sun. Neither polemical nor bombastic, it’s a powerful indictment of both America’s overall involvement in Vietnam over more than a decade as well as the way the Nixon and Ford administrations brought that involvement to a shameful, ignominious end. These administrations—most notably National Security Adviser and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger—deluded themselves into believing they had struck a workable diplomatic agreement that would stand up after the United States pulled out its last troops and that the South Vietnamese government could withstand a full-on communist offensive; worse, they led the South Vietnamese to believe that the United States would come to its aid until the very end. Not America’s finest hour by any definition.
But perhaps the definitive take on the war can be found in the 2017 documentary series The Vietnam War by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. Burns and Novick focus on the American experience in Vietnam but present it from just about every relevant perspective, from high-level decision-makers in Hanoi and Washington to ordinary American and Vietnamese soldiers and civilians. They detail American war crimes and Vietnamese communist atrocities without moralizing, letting the damning facts of the matter speak for themselves.
For a fictional account of the American infantryman’s war in Vietnam, read the searing semi-autobiographical novel Matterhorn by Vietnam veteran Karl Marlantes. And to get a sense of how American journalists came to understand Vietnam—both the war and the nation itself—by the early 1970s, check out Frances FitzGerald’s Fire in the Lake.
Someday this war’s gonna end…
Vietnam has had a profound effect on American culture, and especially on American cinema. Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now is one of my favorite movies, but it’s as much set in Vietnam as it’s about the war itself. The Robin Williams comedy-cum-drama Good Morning, Vietnam portrays the complexities of the conflict, while Brian DePalma’s underrated Casualties of War features Michael J. Fox and Sean Penn in a story that foregrounds the perils of speaking out against war crimes.