Rough Guide to Vietnam - Jan Dodd [388]
Keith Weller Taylor The Birth of Vietnam University of California Press. As a GI, Taylor was struck by the “intelligence and resolve” of his enemy. This meticulous account of the dawn of Vietnamese history, trawling the past from the nation’s first recorded history up to the tenth century, is the result of his attempt to uncover their roots.
Martin Windrow The Last Valley: Dien Bien Phu and the French Defeat in Vietnam. This meticulously researched and detailed account of the battle of Dien Bien Phu gives a brutally realistic picture of what it was like for the French soldiers (many actually Vietnamese, Thai and North African) trapped in what came to be known as the “toilet bowl”. Windrow’s sympathy and admiration for the soldiers – on both sides – comes across loud and clear.
Books |
The American War
Mark Baker Nam. Unflinching firsthand accounts of the GI’s descent from boot camp into the morass of death, paranoia, exhaustion and tedium. Gut-wrenchingly frank at times, the book depicts war as a rite of passage, and moral deterioration as a prerequisite to survival.
Tad Bartimus (ed.) War Torn: Stories of War from the Women Reporters Who Covered Vietnam. Nine pioneering women journalists who covered the American War tell their tales, from the struggle to get there in the first place and be recognized in what was then an almost exclusively male profession to their reactions to the war itself and coming to terms with the aftermath.
Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim Four Hours in My Lai. Brutally candid and immaculately researched reconstruction of the events surrounding the My Lai massacre of 1968; as harrowing a portrayal of the depths plumbed in war as you’ll ever read.
Philip Caputo A Rumour of War. One of the classics of the American War, Caputo’s straightforward narrative is a powerful account of the numbing daily routine of the ordinary US soldier’s life, the strange exhilaration of combat and the brutalization that accompanies war.
Denise Chong The Girl in the Picture. Kim Phuc was the little girl running naked away from her napalm-bombed village in what is arguably the most famous – and most harrowing – photo taken during the American War. Not only did she survive the burns, just, but her resilience and capacity for forgiveness are quite remarkable. Denise Chong tells Kim’s story simply, letting the horrific events speak for themselves.
Michael Clodfelter Mad Minutes and Vietnam Months. Combat reminiscences from a man who found war’s false promise of “courage, sacrifice, glory and adventure” displaced by monotony and, occasionally, atrocity.
W.D. Ehrhart Going Back: An Ex-Marine Returns to Vietnam. A veteran of the battle for Hué, Ehrhart returned to Vietnam in 1985. Going Back, a record of that trip, mixes diary, memory and Ehrhart’s own poetry to very readable effect.
Horst Faas and Tim Page (eds.) Requiem. Turning through this compendium of shots by photographers who subsequently lost their lives in Vietnam, Laos or Cambodia will haunt you for weeks. Never was a book more aptly named.
James Fenton All the Wrong Places. In Vietnam at the moment of Saigon’s liberation, Fenton somehow managed to hitch a lift on the tank that rammed through the palace gates; his easy prose and poet’s eye for detail make his account an engrossing one.
Frances Fitzgerald Fire in the Lake. Pulitzer Prize-winning analysis of the historical, political and cultural context of the war, this time told from the Vietnamese perspective.
Albert French Patches of Fire. Examining his experiences of the infantryman’s life in Vietnam and his attempts to exorcise his war-conjured demons back in the States, French’s autobiography is at once moving and engrossing.
Le Ly Hayslip When Heaven and Earth Changed Places. For giving a human face to the slopes, dinks and gooks of American writing on Vietnam, this heart-rending tale of villagers trying to survive in a climate of