H. Military Personal Narratives and Oral Histories.
Brennan, Matthew. Brennan's War : Vietnam 1965-1969. Novato, CA:
Presidio, 1985; Pocket Books, 1989.
Broughton, Col. Jack. Thud Ridge. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1969; New
York: Bantam, 1985.
Caputo, Philip.
A Rumor of War. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston,
1977; Ballantine, 1978.
*CORE* Award winning memoir by a Lieutenant in the Marine 9th
Expeditionary Brigade in 1965 - 1966. The work is a powerful and
compelling account of the early part of US ground combat involvement,
including Caputo's court-marshall for the killing of a Vietnamese
civilian which raises questions about both the nature of US tactics
and the nature on guerilla warfare. The book also contains a short
section on Caputo's experiences in 1975 as a journalist during the
fall of the South.
Downs, Frederick Jr. The Killing Zone. New York: Norton, 1978.
Mason, Robert.
Chickenhawk. New York: Viking, 1983.
Maurer, Harry. Strange Ground : Americans in Vietnam, 1945-1975:
An Oral History. New York: Henry Holt, 1989.
A strong collection of pieces of oral history from folks in a
miriad of different positions, spanning all eras in the American
involvement.
Metzner, Edward.
More Than a Soldier's War : Pacification in Vietnam.
College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1995.
*CORE* Memoir of a multi-tour US veteran who served as an advisor
on the provincial level. The work provide significant insights into
an aspect of the American involvement that is often overlooked.
Santoli, Al.
Everything We Had : An Oral History of the Vietnam War by
Thirty-three American Soldiers Who Fought It. New York: Random House,
1981; Ballantine, 1982.
Sheppard, Don. Riverine : A Brown-Water Sailor in the Delta, 1967.
Novato, CA: Presidio, 1992; reprint, New York: Pocket Books, 1994.
Terry, Wallace. Bloods : An Oral History of the Vietnam War By Black
Veterans. New York: Random House, 1984; reissue paper, Ballantine
Books, 1989.
Walker, Keith.
A Piece of My Heart : The Stories of Twenty Six American
Women who Served in Vietnam. Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1985; New
York: Ballantine, 1987.
I. Specialized Topics: The Press
Arnett, Peter.
Live from the Battlefield : From Vietnam to Baghdad, 35
Years in the World's War Zones. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994;
Touchstone, 1995.
Braestrup, Peter. Big Story : How the American Press and Television
Reported and Interpreted the Crisis of Tet 1968 in Vietnam and
Washington. Abridged edition. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983;
reprint, Novato, CA: Presideo Press, 1994.
Hallin, Daniel C.
"The Uncensored War" : The Media and Vietnam. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1986; Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1989.
*CORE* A major and systematic scholarly analysis of coverage of
the war by major news organizations, in particular the New York Times
(1961-65) and the television networks (1965-73), and its impact on the
social construction of the war.
Herr, Michael.
Dispatches. New York: Knopf, 1977; Vintage International,
1991.
Prochnau, William W.
Once Upon a Distant War. New York: Times Books, 1995.
A detailed look at the press in the early days of the war -
Sheehan, Halberstam, Browne, Arnett, etc.
Small, Melvin. Covering Dissent : The Media and the Anti-Vietnam War
Movement. Perspectives in the Sixties. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 1994.
J. Specialized Topics: The Draft
Appy, Christian G.
Working Class War : American Combat Soldiers and
Vietnam. Chapel Hill: University North Carolina Press, 1993.
Baskir, Lawrence M. and William A. Strauss. Chance and Circumstance : The
Draft, the War, and the Vietnam Generation. With a Foreword by
Theodore M. Hesburgh. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978.
Still the most complete study of the draft available, as well as
dishonorable and general discharges from the military. Baskir was the
General Counsel and Chief Executive Officier of President Ford's
Clemency Board; Strauss was its Director of Planning and Management as
well as the director of the staff that issued the final report.
Contains extemely important information and statistics about various
aspects and inequalities of the selective service system. The work
was originally sponsored by the University of Notre Dame.
K. Specialized Topics: War Crime Allegations
Bilton, Michael and Kevin Sim.
Four Hours in My Lai. New York: Viking,
1992; Penguin USA, 1993.
*CORE* A fine detailed and relatively unbiased account of the
massacre at My Lai 4, the subsequent cover-up and the investigations
that followed. Bilton and Sim are British journalist who don't bring
to this work as much baggage as American authors do, and there was
some historical distance between the events and their writing.
Vietnam Veterans Against the War. The Winter Soldier Investigation : An
Inquiry into American War Crimes. Boston: Beacon Press, 1972.
L. Culture and Politics in Vietnam.
Hess, Martha.
Then the Americans Came : Voices from Vietnam. New York:
Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993; New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University
Press, 1994.
Hickey, Gerald C. Shattered World : Adaptation and Survival among
Vietnam's Highland Peoples During the Vietnam War. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993.
*CORE* This work, by a pre-eminent anthropologist who is
extensively published in this area, deals with the profound effects of
the Indochina wars on the highland ethnic groups (also known as
Montagnards) in terms of displacement, survival and the effects on
their culture. It provides a unique insight into an area usually
ignored or lightly covered in other sources.
Huynh Kim Khanh. Vietnamese Communism : 1925-1945. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1982.
*CORE* The definitive study of the implanting and evolution of a
European anti-capitalist ideology on a Vietnamese socio-political
conflict of anti-colonial nationalism and anti-feudal peasant
movements within the context of the debate about modernization. The
work traces the formation of the ICP, the ultra-nationalist, non
social reform era of the 20s, the anti-nationalist international era
in the 30s, to a balance emerging at the end of WWII and Ho Chi Minh's
role in this process. Also discussed are the Trotskyite and Stalinist
elements during the thirties.
Jamieson, Neil L.
Understanding Vietnam. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1993.
*CORE* An important study which tries to place the Indochina
Wars within the context of the century long internal debate in
Vietnamese society concerning the means and direction of modernization
in the wake of the French conquest. Using a variety of Vietnamese
cultural and political sourses, Jamieson seeks to place these events
in the framework of the struggle to define Vietnamese tradition and
society within the context of the need to evolve the culture in
reponse to the modern world, a topic which still lies at the heart of
much of today's Vietnamese politics.
Marr, David G.
Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, 1920-1945. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1981.
bibliography continues in part 4
