ANNALS OF VIETNAM

Phillip Jennings wrote the impossibly funny (and politically incorrect) Vietnam novel, Nam-a-Rama. Now he has turned to non-fiction (which, he discovers, is a whole lot more difficult than fiction, given that you have to use footnotes, spell things correctly, and remember lots of stuff instead of just making it up). As he emailed me the other day, he was inspired to write the new book when he discovered what his daughter was being taught about the Vietnam War at Oklahoma State. So here it is: The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Vietnam War. It brings up such startling facts as that the U.S. Army left South Vietnam in 1973, two years before the North Vietnamese invaded across the 17th parallel and conquered the country that they had been infiltrating for the past ten or twelve years. So remind me again: how is it that we are supposed to have lost the war, two years after we withdrew?

Here's one of the best combat stories I have ever read, not about Vietnam as such, but relevant because it's about U.S. Army Special Forces: The Only Thing Worth Dying For: How Eleven Green Berets Forged a New Afghanistan, by Eric Blehm. It's a journalist's recreation of the Special Forces mission that inserted Hamid Karzai into Afghanistan in November 2001. You just have to marvel at how good these guys are--eleven men and fifty or a hundred ragtag guerrillas, routinely defeating a thousand or so Taliban with the help of a laptop, an internet connection, and American fighter-bombers circling at 30,000 feet. Then the stuff hits the fan, and a combination of headquarters meddling, human error, and an unfamiliar gadget directs a 2,000-pound bomb on the friendlies' position. Breathtaking. Get it. Read it. Pass it on.

Incident at Muc Wa: a story of war in Vietnam is available in digital format for a third of the paperback price. My own preference is $4.99 PDF file that can be read on any computer. (PayPal rolls your credit card; I send the file by email.) Other options: get it in Kindle format for Amazon's dedicated e-book reader (which, with the right app, also works on the Apple iPhone or Touch, or indeed on any Windows PC). Or in a Smashwords edition for almost any computer, PDA, or e-book reader. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford