Fans pick 100 books like Such A Lovely Little War

The original Vietnamese title of this novel was The Fate of Love. The hero is a veteran of the North Vietnamese Army who fought in The War Against the Americans to Save the Nation. He suffers from PTSD and mourns the loss of his fiancee. The novel proceeds as a series of discontinuous episodes as the hero relives traumatic memories.

In this book, Andrew Pham tells the story of his father’s life through three wars for Vietnam—the brutal Japanese occupation of the country during the Second World War, the French colonial assault on Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam, and the failed American intervention in South Vietnam to protect it from communism.

We see each war through the eyes of Pham Van Thong, from his experiences growing up as a child in contested areas south of Hanoi to his family’s exodus to the south after the division of Vietnam into two halves in 1954.

It’s a tragic story of a wealthy, non-communist family in central Vietnam uprooted by the vagaries of war, but it’s also the record of extraordinary human resiliency. This powerful memoir will not leave you indifferent.

This riveting memoir will take you into the world of a young non-communist nationalist, Nguyen Cong Luan, whose father joined Ho Chi Minh in 1945 to fight the French colonialists despite distrusting Ho’s communist core.

Luan’s father dies in a communist prison shortly thereafter, leaving his son to grow up largely on his own in dangerous areas contested by the French, the communists, and the non-communists. What makes Luan’s account so eye-opening is that he shows that the communists led by Ho Chi Minh were not the only nationalists to fight during some thirty years of war. The non-communists did, too, as his own journey into adulthood and the army of South Vietnam reveals.

At a deeper level, Nguyen Cong Luan reminds us that though the struggle for Vietnam was a French and American one, at its core, it was a civil war among the Vietnamese. 

Women participated in the Vietnam War, and Duong Thu Huong was among them. In 1965, she joined the Communist Youth Brigade in Hanoi and found herself within months serving in it on the frontlines in South Vietnam.

Like Bao Ninh, she experienced the horrors of the Vietnam War close-up. In her Novel Without a Name, however, Duong Thu Huong tells her story through the eyes of a young male soldier, Quan. We don’t go into battle with him; rather, we follow him behind the lines, on visits home, in meetings with friends and former lovers, and even into his dreams, where he begins to question the war he is fighting.

It’s a journey into disillusionment, convincingly told by someone who knew what she was talking about. 

In this brilliantly written novel, the unnamed narrator embodies the divisiveness that war causes in individuals and their families, with loyalty to one side conflicting with affection for the enemy.

The novel is based on a real-life double agent who fed accurate (but incomplete) information to American journalists and more complete information to the National Liberation Front. After the war, he was sidelined for being too friendly to Americans.

I loved Waltzing With The Dragons for its autobiographical sense of history and description of mother/daughter bonds that are truly universal. 

The story begins in 1922 with Ly, the daughter of one of the last Mandarins in north Vietnam, who flees an arranged marriage at thirteen to stay with her father’s friends, a French couple, and lives through the WWII Japanese occupation, finally fleeing to the South where she falls in love with a French Army doctor and gives birth to a daughter, Mai-Tam, in 1952. 

Mai-Tam, who is Eurasian and never feels she belongs, grows up in the shadow of the American-Vietnam war. The novel ends in 1967, preserving a mother-daughter kinship that sustains migration and separation. 

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… show more.

If you don’t mind a long read and are after a novel rather than non-fiction then this is my pick. It is an epic saga of the last decades of the French in Indochina, following the story of American Joseph Sherman who becomes enchanted by the country and entangled in the lives of two different families, one French and one Vietnamese. It is essentially a love story involving a Mandarin’s daughter but it will give you a flavour of the political plot twists and military conflicts that were the reality of this turbulent period of history. The book spans 50 years to the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, but refreshingly does not try to push any real political perspective. Once again, it is a novel but it will certainly give you a taste of Indochine and an idea of the grand sweep of Vietnam’s tumultuous history. 

Absolution is about the wives of American men with non-combat roles in the U.S. government in Vietnam. The men have brought their families to Saigon. Tricia is a new arrival, and Charlene lures her into the insular world of the American wives. I’ve always been interested in the politics of the late 1960s in the U.S., so I found this book fascinating because it takes place in 1963, before the Kennedy assassination. 

I was captivated by Tricia and Charlene’s friendship because it is complicated and intense. I loved how Tricia is intrigued by Charlene but also intimidated by her and aware that they’d never be friends if they’d met under different circumstances. McDermott skillfully portrays the ambiguity inherent in many friendships, and I appreciated her exploration of this dynamic.

Sherry Buchanan takes us on the Ho Chi Minh trail in a riveting and as relevant a journey to study today as it was 50 years ago. She charts new territory - especially in the vivid, often heartbreaking stories of women who fought in the war as teenagers and the forced roles of housewives who stood on rooftops facing death to shoot down US planes that bombed their homes. Buchanan details the countless centuries of Vietnam's perilous path to freedom. But her vivid writing and crystal clear interviews with women--their youthful dreams and present-day realities--shine a powerful light on a war and a previously unexplored dimension that should never be forgotten.