Recommended Reading

Behind the Scenes, Monterey CA, Toni Morrison, Map of Vietnam, Conrad, Hemingway, Indochina, Requiem, The Lotus Eaters, Tatjana Soli, behind the scenes about The Lotus Eaters, Vietnam war story,

Although I’ve included a bibliography of the books I read for research writing The Lotus Eaters, here is a more general list of books on Vietnam and the war. I’ve included some “musts” but also some more eclectic, lesser known works.

The Things They Carried

Tim O’Brien

If you want the single more important fictional book on the soldier’s experience in Vietnam, you will not do better than this book. Read it once and then read it again and again because it will teach you everything about Vietnam, the war, soldiers, writing, and “the human heart in conflict with itself.” It is filled with pain and compassion and unbearable beauty.

Going After Cacciato, In the Lake of the Woods, and

If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home

Tim O’Brien

If you are hooked on O’Brien from the above, as you should be, then continue on with this crash course into the war. In his memoir, If I Die…, O’Brien explains his idea of story truth versus real truth: “Can the foot soldier teach anything important about war, merely for having been there? I think not. He can tell war stories.” Cacciato is a complex novel about the human imagination in the face of the brutality of war. In the Lake of the Woods is a novel not overtly about the war, but rather its repercussions, its mysteries, the impossibility of there being one final truth to any story. There is an image of the main character pouring boiling water over houseplants that is as eerie and violent as any I’ve come across.

Dog Soldiers

Robert Stone

The war provides a perfect catalyst to the archetypal flawed Stone character in this novel. It is about people making the wrong decisions, and events larger than themselves taking over their lives. Stone is a master of mixing the personal and the political, and his prose is a thing of beauty.

Dispatches

Michael Herr

This is a wonderful collection of Herr’s articles written for Esquire. In addition to expressing his empathy for the soldier’s experience and sharing his insights into the counterculture, Herr portrays the paradoxical high that he and other journalists experienced during their time covering the war. This quote captures it perfectly: “Vietnam was what we had instead of happy childhoods.”

Requiem

Horst Faas and Tim Page

This is a book of photography taken in Vietnam and Indochina by photographers who were killed in the conflict. Many of the pictures are the iconic ones we all know, others are little known, including ones from Vietnamese and Cambodian photographers. This was the book where I first discovered the picture of Dickey Chapelle. Amazing production values, a real piece of history.

The Sacred Willow

Duong Van Mai Elliott

This is a compelling family saga of four generations of a Vietnamese family. While it portrays the complexity of how the Vietnamese felt about “the American war,” it avoids the political and focuses on the human.

Perfect Spy: The Incredible Double Life of Pham Xuan An

Larry Berman

Although I knew from my research that An was a Time correspondent, a friend to many significant American journalists in Vietnam, and later revealed to be a spy for the Communists, this book was unavailable to me until a few months ago. Fascinating.

Fire in the Lake

Frances Fitzgerald

One of the most balanced, comprehensive studies on the war in that it explores the history of Vietnam, the culture, colonialism, and the American involvement. Essential reading.

Sensing the Enemy and After Sorrow

Lady Borton

These are memoirs by a remarkable woman, one of the few Americans to work both in South and North Vietnam during the war. Borton, a Quaker, worked in a refugee camp for the boat people and escorted the first journalists to the scene of the massacre at My Lai. A rare insight.

An Anthology of Vietnamese Poems

Huynh Sanh Thong

Because there is no better way to understand a people than through their art.