Some Vietnam War Reading

Earlier this year I planned out a series of posts on book-groupings - Ten Books on Vietnam, Ten Books on Chicago, ten on the Middle East, the Cold War, Cricket, and so on. I managed to get the World War Two one together and started lists for the others but never got much further than that. (Maybe the others will appear on Goodreads someday. I like books.) I was looking over the notes I took for my 'Nam list, though, and they were mostly more or less good to go. A productive laundry day. So here we are. 

Vietnam's one of those topics where everyone knows one or two things about it, but few people agree on more than one or two things about it. And the ones more in the know usually are the first to say no one really knows anything. Lots of angles, lots of things that don't add up, lots of misdirection and evasion, not to mention outright lying. Tragedy in its aftermath for the whole region, indeed the whole world. 

The below is by no means a comprehensive list nor an attempt to offer anything but some books I enjoy and why and others I plan to read on a topic I enjoy. Ten(ish) I've read, and ten(ish I haven't. Let's go. 

STARTER KIT 

I assume you have the basics: a completely unreadable map, The Complete Idiots Guide to Vietnam, ten issues of the 'Nam magazine (reprinting an entire year in the life of the garden variety grunt), and Walter Cronkite's overview of how the conflict played out on CBS?

aka "Ways To Freak Out Your Wife 101"

Then we're good to go!

ONES I'VE READ

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(1988)

It’s unfortunate we still refer to the military operations in and around the A Shau Valley in 1969 by the epithet of the title. (The book came out in 1988, but it's still the case in 2021.) It’s almost like isolating one costly day in the campaign to liberate Europe – D-Day, let’s say – and referring to it as Hamburger Beach. It’s an imperfect comparison, I grant you; for one, the Allies didn’t just shove off after D-Day and let the Germans slowly re-fortify their positions on the beach. But a book like this one does a great job of explaining how Hill 937 / Dong Ap Bia (HH, if you must) fits into the broader context of the war in the Central Highlands.

Great read. Start to finish gripping, easy to follow, and you'll get a much better understanding of military operations (and terrain) from reading this than many other 'Nam books. If all you know of these events is the movie with Dylan McDermott, this is a great mind cleanse of that experience. You have to understand the battle for the mountain in context of clearing out the A Shau Valley and how it came to be that way. What happened afterward was political. No argument from me - politics got (and get) people killed and betrayed (and betray) allies. There's little heroism in Realpolitik. ("Into the Valley of Death rode the six hundred...")

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Once upon a time anyway, the short story "The Things They Carried" was, like Updike's "A&P" or Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" that was assigned a lot. Don't know if it still is, but I hope so. Just don't start and end here, as too many do. O'Brien's take on Vietnam is definitely worth reading, at least in these two books. Others, like Going After Cacciato, I found unreadable. That thing won the National Book Award in 1979, so what do I know. 

Of the two above, The Things They Carried is probably more accessible, or perhaps better written, but If I Die... should be read, as well. These aren't books to agree or disagree with, only to take in, to bear witness to. 

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Well, I intended to reproduce a few passages from this book, but trying to hold the book open to copy them out overtaxed the abilities at my command. What I wouldn't give for an assistant around here. Sometimes I recruit the kids for such things, but this wouldn't be a good one for that. Sorry about that, folks - take my word for it and trust me when I say there are pages here that'll stick with you for years. I looked over at goodreads to see if they had any of the same quotes I had in mind but no luck. 

Tobias Woff is one of the best living writers in America so no surprise his memoir is as good as it is. My Dad read it and didn't like it - Wolff was exactly the sort of officer, perhaps the sort of man, he hated while he was in Vietnam and it turned him off. Understandable, but this for me is the strength of the book: his unflinching honesty in how bad he was at his job, how he got it (I was tall and spoke decisively) and how it got people killed and how he struggled to operate within the limited window of his agency. It's a fascinating firsthand account to Tet, as well, and the domestic scene of both DC and California. 

There are all sorts of books on Vietnam. A lot of personal memoirs, more than a few military-focused ones, fictional narratives, propaganda narratives, cynical masterpieces, action-adventures, you name it. Different audiences with different entry and exit points to the discussion, different areas of expertise and expectation. In Pharoah's Army would be the one I give English majors with little taste for the military timeline stuff. Not so with this next one: 

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Here's one you give people who really want the military timeline stuff: all the equipment and ranks and troop movements and after-action analysis and participants' remarks and impressions years later. 

When I was reading Ripcord, I got physically tense every time I cracked it open. It comes as close as I ever want to come to holding it together under withering - and escalating - mortar fire on some godforsaken firebase in the bush, gathering the enemy around you for a planned offensive that never materialized. The evacuation of FSB Ripcord under fire has to be some kind of miracle, one too many paid for with their lives. It should be studied both for what those pilots and crew accomplished and for the kind of thing that can happen when you yield the high ground in a military conflict. 

The book on the right is the memoir of one of the generals in charge of the operation. He returned to Vietnam in the 1990s and met his NVA counterpart in the battle, and together they give a joint account of their own sides. I wouldn't recommend it over Ripcord, but it's a worthy coda to it. I wish someone had filmed it for a documentary. 

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I'm just going to quote this blog here, for the most part:

"Add one more title to the list of undeservedly obscure American novels. Robert Roth's Sand in the Wind, the first major American literary work to emerge from the Vietnam War was a Book of the Month Club selection upon publication, but then both novel and author slipped into obscurity. Perhaps the novel was a victim of its own precocity: in 1973-74, who wanted to spend 600+ pages in a war the U.S. had only yesterday extricated itself from? If Sand in the Wind had been published a few years later, it might have become canonical. (No) Google search answers the question "Whatever happened to Robert Roth?" He seems to have laid this one amazing book on us and promptly Houdinied himself out of the literary scene. Whatever and wherever its author is today, Sand in the Wind is a remarkable novel punctuated by scenes of astonishingly assured power. 

Fitting his combat experience to Edmund Wilson's textbook definition of Modernism, Roth synthesizes the Naturalistic war novel of Crane, Hemingway, Mailer and Jones with a sometimes sneaky Symbolism that looks back to Melville and Poe. This synthesis holds until about halfway through the novel, when a gruesome act of (redacted) shifts the novel from Modernism to a kind of Postmodernism. The narrative attempts to re-establish itself, but cannot overcome its fragmentation into various types of pastiche: Heller pastiche, Altman pastiche, James Jones pastiche, etc. All of which can be easily interpreted as a flight from the unassimilable knowledge of that descent into cannibalistic horror." 

That all holds with how I was experiencing the book. I think it's remarkable, although it does kind of include every last little thing rather than parse the details and symbolism for the essentials. 

Were it not for the (redacted), which might strain things too much or take it into the realm of a novel the rest of it can't support, this would sit as the best of the one-year-in-the-life sort of 'Nam books, of which the following are often recommended: 

I like aspects of these, but they don't hang together as novels for me. This one (caveat aside) does, but what struck me most was how many sections of it seemed lifted verbatim for Full Metal Jacket. I've never heard Michael Herr (whose Vietnam memoir Dispatches got him the job) or Gustav Hasford (whose novel The Short-Timers was the direct inspiration for the film) ever mention Roth or the book in any press I've read on it. 

There has to be some answer beyond blatant plagiarism, here, but I don't know what it is. 

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(1998)

Here's a very confusing book. I need to read it again - it's likely doing so will clear up some of the contradictions and questions I had at the end. I've only known one other person to have ever read it, and he didn't know what I was talking about when I asked him, so it'll be one of those things destined to bug me forever. (One of many examples: is this guy real, or what? If he is, what the hell is going on in this book? It needs annotation.)

Which is kind of a nice side effect of Vietnam reading: you download a sense of the systemic confusion and trauma and firewall of classified-intel just by studying it. 

Confusion aside, this is a great read. Like Ripcord, you really feel dropped in the shit in each chapter. Season three of Tour of Duty is sprinkled with details and events depicted herein, and pretty faithfully. You walk away simultaneously impressed and dumbfounded. One thing everyone agrees on, though, across all these books: helicopter pilots in 'Nam were nuts. Crazy-brave and damn good at their jobs, but nuts. One understands the proliferation of "ex-helicopter-pilot" descriptors as shorthand in 80s media.

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Here's the Goodreads write-up:

Bao Ninh, a former North Vietnamese soldier, provides a strikingly honest look at how the Vietnam War forever changed his life, his country, and the people who live there. Originally published against government wishes in Vietnam because of its non-heroic, non-ideological tone, The Sorrow of War has won worldwide acclaim and become an international bestseller.

And that's fair. I include it for the perspective it brings. It's more of an anti-war novel from the NV side, which is kind of fascinating. Undoubtedly, the North Vietnamese were a complex people and underestimated on all sides for many centuries. Still are, most likely. That complexity is on display here, but it's not something I will likely ever read again. 

When you start diving into the pre-colonial history of Vietnam and demographics of the tribes who were more or less wiped out by the war (from the Hmong to the Pacohs), you see how old the conflict really is. The Americans (and even the French) were just a blip on the timeline. I got that sense from Pierre Boulle's My Own River Kwai, as well, which takes place all over Indochina during WW2. 

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Chronologically the first book on Vietnam I ever read, as part of my History Day Project in ninth grade. But I didn't really read it, just enough to crib sections of it for the presentation. 

When I finally did read it years later, holy moley. The engineering of both the Ho Chi Minh Trail and the tunnel systems the NVA used blows my mind. Sorry for the ahistorical commentary, it's just nuts. One must admire their determination even while lamenting its being wielded in the name of international communism. If only we could have made an ally of the Vietnamese - as Uncle Ho once sought above all else - instead of an enemy. 

Imagine crawling through a tunnel purposefully designed to discourage big American GIs from following, memorizing miles worth of traps and potential hazards, just to drag a bag of laundry and letters three hundred kilometers, empty it, then bring the bag up to be filled again. Over and over. I have no illusions about how the communists "motivated" the North Vietnamese (or treated those under their charge) but undoubtedly a resourceful and determined foe. 

Anyway: this isn't about the NVA, it's about the tunnel rats on the American and ARVN side that went after them. Hell on earth. All the above but going in blind. No thanks! I'd hump a thousand boonies with a sixty pound bag and constipation and sniper fire and Punji spikes before jumping in to one of these things. 

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I presented these alphabetically, but this one is probably the one I'd recommend for the most comprehensive and mainstream history of the war. If you're looking for a straight-up account that doesn't go down any rabbits holes or get too bogged down in any one area, this is it.

Not a short book. But worth it for the start-to-finish perspective. 

INTERLUDE

These books always come up whenever I mention Vietnam reading:

so I thought I'd mention them here. I couldn't get into Fields of Fire, and I straight-up disliked Dog Soldiers. It won the NBA in '79, so what do I know, but the characters, cynicism, and themes all fell flat with me. Blonde Ghost is interesting, but hard to really dig into the work of the intelligence community in the 60s and 70s without relying on hearsay. And some of that hearsay seems authored by Moscow. Just saying! 

But I recommend reading it all. That's my approach to everything: read it yourself. Ted Shackley wasn't quite the sociopath Alan Moore made him out to be in Brought To Light, it seems to me, but the Phoenix Program deserves to be studied from all sides. As with many conventional wisdoms about Vietnam, the most effective military strategies were the ones most Americans believed (thanks, commies!) were ineffective. Funny how that works. 

STILL TO READ

What? Still more? You betcha'!

There won't be a sequel to this post, but if there was, these would be the books on it. Can't wait to get to all of them. Just a sneak preview of the ones I'll be reading over the next few years.

If you have any to recommend or any remarks on the above, hit me up in the comments.

MY DAD'S VIETNAM YEARBOOKS

Here's a few you won't find in any bookstore, but I very much count them as among my favorite Vietnam books. 

The glamorous life of US Naval Construction! Construimus, Batuimus.
Love you, Dad. 

~

Still Further Reading If You Want It: Because why not? In Country by Bobbie Ann Mason, Vietnam: Lotus in a Sea of Fire by Thich Nhat Hanh, The Logic of Withdrawal by Howard Zinn, Do It! by Jerry Rubin, and this series of reviews of Ken Burns' Vietnam series by John Del Vecchio. That blog (Peaking at 70) I'd recommend in general. I don't recommend the Zinn and Rubin ones because they make sense, only for context/ know-your-enemy. Also because the Rubin one is hilarious. (Unintentionally.) 

Thanks for reading.