Here are 100 books that Letters From Long Binh fans have personally recommended if you like
Letters From Long Binh.
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I am passionate about the Vietnam War because my male relatives served and came back changed by the experience. I spent ten years as the editor of The Patton Saber, writing articles about the experience of World War II soldiers, but when I came across an idea for a novel about past life memories, I decided to focus on memories of the Vietnam War. What I love about this list is that it reflects many facets of the war, including soldiers, nurses, veterans, and the family members touched by those affected by war.
O’Brien’s depiction of American soldiers in Vietnam was vivid and moving. It gave me a deeper understanding of the soldier’s experience. His artful use of the metaphor of what they carried revealed not only the items on hand but also the psychological baggage each soldier dealt with.
The stories were haunting and made me a full witness to the complexity of war and the many ways it is experienced. It is artfully written, moving, complex, touching and unforgettable.
The million-copy bestseller, which is a ground-breaking meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling.
'The Things They Carried' is, on its surface, a sequence of award-winning stories about the madness of the Vietnam War; at the same time it has the cumulative power and unity of a novel, with recurring characters and interwoven strands of plot and theme.
But while Vietnam is central to 'The Things They Carried', it is not simply a book about war. It is also a book about the human heart - about the terrible weight of those things we carry through…
I have been fortunate to write and publish three books on America’s service academies: two on the U.S. Naval Academy, and one on the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. The two nonfiction books were appealing photographic and narrative presentations of academy life at Navy and West Point. The third, my debut novel happening at the Naval Academy, is an inspiring tale of moral courage and dedication to duty with war and peacetime conflicts. Each book was a rewarding creative project.
Matterhornis one of the most memorable works of realistic fiction written about The Vietnam War.The author and a Marine infantry officer, decorated for valor during combat several times in duty tours in Vietnam, presents a striking story about the true nature of warfare. The Marines of Bravo Company with whom his protagonist serves present the sheer toil, strength of character, the cost of lost and wounded brothers, unique personalities, moments of weakness and courage, laughter and sadness, brothers-in-arms’ trust, and the will to literally survive until the battle ends and the next one begins. Matterhorn inspired me while I wrote my debut military novel.
Fire Support Base Matterhorn: a fortress carved out of the grey-green mountain jungle. Cold monsoon clouds wreath its mile-high summit, concealing a battery of 105-mm howitzers surrounded by deep bunkers, carefully constructed fields of fire and the 180 marines of Bravo Company. Just three kilometres from Laos and two from North Vietnam, there is no more isolated outpost of America's increasingly desperate war in Vietnam.
Second Lieutenant Waino Mellas, 21 years old and just a few days into his 13-month tour, has barely arrived at Matterhorn before Bravo Company is ordered to abandon their mountain and sent deep in-country in…
My expertise with the topic is that I served for over 22 months in the army, where I learned many things people do not learn in normal life. I belong to several Vietnam veteran organizations, and I am the first president of the Lehigh Northampton Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
I recommend this book because my author friend, John Schembra, and I served together in Vietnam. He drew on his experiences to write a wonderful novel about the Military Police in Long Binh/Bien Hoa during the Tet Offensive in 1968, The reader is taken back to that war with believable characters, historical settings, and a great plot. Reading his book helped me write my story, set during the actual time we were there. He helped teach me how to write.
As Vincent Torelli stepped off the plane at Bien Hoa Air Base, South Vietnam, in June 1967, he was almost overwhelmed by the stench in the hot, humid air. Drafted into the armed forces five months earlier, he still can't comprehend how he ended up in this place, now a Military Policeman assigned to the 557th MP Co. at Long Binh Post just outside Bien Hoa City.
His year-long tour of duty in Vietnam changes him from a somewhat naïve young man to a battle-hardened veteran. Through unlucky chance, Vince becomes involved in the ferocious '68 Tet offensive, barely surviving…
My expertise with the topic is that I served for over 22 months in the army, where I learned many things people do not learn in normal life. I belong to several Vietnam veteran organizations, and I am the first president of the Lehigh Northampton Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
As Tom took Basic Combat Training, learning to become an infantryman and kill, his religious beliefs would not allow him to kill. He applied for conscientious objector status, but he wound up in Vietnam where he worked as a clerk at the sprawling Long Binh Post. He is treated as a coward and faces criminal charges, but he keeps his faith. As a Christian, this book helped me come to grips with my military time, not wanting to kill, and fortunately, I never had to.
“Yesterday’s Soldier” is a different Vietnam War memoir. Packed into this tidy book is the story of a young man's coming of age in troubled times. The book is about of his transformation from infantryman to conscientious objector and his experiences in Vietnam. War, religion, and morality are always in the background of his story and they move to the surface in every chapter. The author, after years of studying for the priesthood in a religious seminary, leaves and is quickly exposed to the Selective Service. His belief in God and his country inspired him to enlist in the US…
From an early age, I have made a life out of listening to, telling, teaching, and writing about war stories. I am intrigued by their widespread personal and public importance. My changing associations with these stories and their tellers have paralleled evolving stages in my life—son, soldier, father, and college professor. Each stage has spawned different questions and insights about the tales and their narrators. At various moments in my own life, these war stories have also given rise to fantasized adventure, catharsis, emotional highs and lows, insights about human nature tested within the crucible of war, and intriguing relationships with the storytellers—their lives and minds.
As a Vietnam veteran, teacher of war literature, and writer, I am disappointed that I never interviewed Michael Herr. I can only imagine what such an encounter might have been like with this larger-than-life figure, at least the persona (adrenaline junky, reporter on drugs) found in this fragmented collection of war reportage. With its New Journalistic style and content, the sensory-overload writing might be best described as a collection of literary illumination rounds (their underlying message—war is hell and addictive). As a freelance journalist, Herr arrived in Vietnam wanting to reveal the large ugly truths about the war, which he succeeds in doing, but I find the soldiers’ personal war stories more gripping and truthful. For me and even Herr, the real surprise is that this book ultimately chronicles the author’s own war story of innocence lost: the anti-war reporter becomes just as addicted to war as some of his…
A groundbreaking piece of journalism which inspired Stanley Kubrick's classic Vietnam War film Full Metal Jacket.
We took space back quickly, expensively, with total panic and close to maximum brutality. Our machine was devastating. And versatile. It could do everything but stop.
Michael Herr went to Vietnam as a war correspondent for Esquire. He returned to tell the real story in all its hallucinatory madness and brutality, cutting to the quick of the conflict and its seductive, devastating impact on a generation of young men. His unflinching account is haunting in its violence, but…
As I write this, I massage aching bits of shrapnel still embedded beneath silvered scars. I’ve read many Vietnam War stories—praising the war, glorifying combat, condemning the war. My stories are 1st person limited POV, voice of a twenty-year-old sailor. My title is a spin-off of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. By the time I wrote my memoir, I realized that our national goals in Vietnam had been Muddy from the beginning. I too, traveled Jungle Rivers. During my time on the riverboat, I witnessed Rivers of blood—rivers of life, trickle across our deck. And yes, Jungle is a fitting metaphor for our life at that time.
My river boat division (Mobile Riverine Force Division 112) patrolled the Cua Viet River just south of the DMZ between North and South Vietnam during the timeline of this book so I could very much relate to the events, though the Marines took much heavier casualties than our boats did. Keith Nolan does an excellent job documenting the battles—as I read, I relived the bomb and strafing runs done by the navy aircraft carrier F-4 Phantoms (which I also wrote about in my memoir) Nolan’s very detailed account of the Marine battles on the north side of the river answered many decades-old questions for me. His use of dialogue and insights into the Marines keep the reader engrossed.
On April 29, 1968, the North Vietnamese Army is spotted less than four miles from the U.S. Marines’ Dong Ha Combat Base. Intense fighting develops in nearby Dai Do as the 2d Battalion, 4th Marines, known as “the Magnificent Bastards,” struggles to eject NVA forces from this strategic position.
Yet the BLT 2/4Marines defy the brutal onslaught. Pressing forward, America’s finest warriors rout the NVA from their fortress-hamlets–often in deadly hand-to-hand combat.At the end of two weeks of desperate, grinding battles, the Marines and the infantry battalion supporting them are torn to shreds. But against all odds, they beat back…
The Vietnam War was a life changing experience for those who fought it and lived through those times; one that will end only when the last one of them dies. Like so many wars, Vietnam will fade into the distant memory of history as a name, some dates, and a historian’s impersonal commentary. My preparation for that war, my infantry training at Fort Polk, and later as a paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne Division as well as my subsequent experience with friends returning from Vietnam have given me the unique ability to experience it through many different perspectives. My goal is to ensure the reader will experience as closely as possible the things they saw.
In this novel, Leonard Scott utilizes his experience as a U.S. Army officer to tell a story about five people involved in the Vietnam War. One is an NCO with the 75th Rangers. Another is a rebellious rich girl who joins the Red Cross and volunteers for duty in Vietnam. The third is a company commander for the 75th Rangers, and the fourth is a young North Vietnamese Army Platoon leader. Scott’s book weaves an exceptionally well told saga and became one of my five choices because it captures the essence (or if you will: the grotesque stench) of the war in Vietnam from several perspectives, including that of an enemy soldier.
If war may be said to bring out the worst in governments, it frequently brings out the best in people. This is a novel about some of the very best. Some led. Some followed. Some died.
“One of the finest novels yet written about the war in Vietnam.”—The Washington Post
Sergeant David Grady: Leader of Ranger Team 2-2, the Double Deuce, he was a perfectionist who loved his men, his team, and his Army. For a long time they had been his whole world.
Sarah Boyce: Cold. Beautiful. For all her life, she'd been her whole world. She thought she…
I served in Vietnam in 1969 carrying a radio on my back with the 12th Marines on the DMZ. In 1970, I was a door gunner with HMM-364 (Purple Fox Squadron) out of Marble Mountain. Beginning in 1996, I have led 68 tours for veterans, their family members, historians, active-duty military personnel, and others to the jungles, mountains, and battlefields of Vietnam. I currently serve as president and bush guide for the non-profit tour company, Vietnam Battlefield Tours. As an avid reader of non-fiction books on the Vietnam experience, this knowledge base has helped tremendously in my non-profit volunteer service.
It is rare when an actual participant of a battle can produce such a chilling and accurate narrative that keeps a reader’s attention page after page. This was the Tet Offensive urban battle for the Citadel, a walled city containing a labyrinth of buildings and houses jammed around numerous narrow streets. This was city fighting at its worst. In the end, many thousands of the enemy lay dead.
The bloody, month-long battle for the Citadel in Hue during 1968 pitted U.S. Marines against an entrenched, numerically superior North Vietnamese Army force. By official U.S. accounts it was a tactical and moral victory for the Marines and the United States. But a survivor's compulsion to square official accounts with his contrasting experience has produced an entirely different perspective of the battle, the most controversial to emerge from the Vietnam War in decades.
In some of the most frank, vivid prose to come out of the war, author Nicholas Warr describes with urgency and outrage the Marines' savage house-to-house fighting,…
Who hasn’t seen the classic American movies on the Vietnam War–Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, or Platoon? They are fine films, but have you ever asked yourself where the Vietnamese are? Save for a few stereotyped cameo appearances, they are remarkably absent. I teach the history of the wars in Vietnam at the Université du Québec à Montréal. My students and I explore the French and the American sides in the wars for Vietnam, but one of the things that I’ve tried to do with them is weave the Vietnamese and their voices into our course; this list provides a window into those Vietnamese voices.
If you like graphic memoirs and want one on the Vietnam War, Marcelino Truong’s Such a Lovely Little War is for you.
It’s an autobiographical tale of Truong’s life as the son of a Vietnamese diplomat working for the South Vietnam government and a French mother. We see the war through his eyes, but we also see the world he encountered as a teenager in London, Washington, and then back in Saigon.
The dialogue and the graphics are superb. The juxtaposition between his family and this “lovely little war” turning around it makes this memoir of the Vietnam War a highly original one.
This riveting, beautifully produced graphic memoir tells the story of the early years of the Vietnam war as seen through the eyes of a young boy named Marco, the son of a Vietnamese diplomat and his French wife. The book opens in America, where the boy's father works for the South Vietnam embassy; there the boy is made to feel self-conscious about his otherness thanks to schoolmates who play war games against the so-called "Commies." The family is called back to Saigon in 1961, where the father becomes Prime Minister Ngo Dinh Diem's personal interpreter; as the growing conflict between…
Until today’s multiple catastrophes, the Vietnam War was the most harrowing moment in the lives of my fellow baby boomers and me. Drafted into the U.S. Army in early 1970, I spent 365 days in Vietnam as a combat correspondent. That experience changed my life, because as the Argentinian writer Jose Narosky has pointed out, “in war, there are no unwounded soldiers.” I have spent the past five decades trying to heal those wounds, writing three books grounded in my Vietnam experience, and have devoted my life to listening to the voices of our veterans, distilling their memories (often music-based), and sharing their words.
“I think of language as our first music,” notes the celebrated poet Yusef Komunyakaa. His collection of Vietnam poems, Dien Cai Dau (Vietnamese for crazy) fuses images, sounds, and sights from Vietnam into a fearful, lyrical symmetry. Born James Brown in rural Bogalusa, Louisiana, he served in Vietnam as a correspondent and editor of The Southern Cross, the newspaper of the Army’s 23rd Infantry Division (Americal). “The Vietnamese knew what was happening in the American psyche when it came to race,” claims Komunyakaa, “and sometimes they expertly played on it.” The poem “Hanoi Hannah” in Dien Cai Dau is a perfect example of this: “Ray Charles!” His voice/ calls from waist-high grass/& we duck behind gray sandbags./ “Hello, Soul Brothers. Yeah,/Georgia’s also on my mind…Here’s Hannah again…"
“That gets your attention when you’re out in the middle of nowhere,” astutely observes Komunyakaa.