FIC O’Brien, Tim — Going After Cacciato (C/BV) Going After Cacciato won the 1979 National Book Award., With a nod to Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, O’Brien narrates his story in a blend of ferocious comedy, hallucination, and bleak horror. Reality and fantasy merge in this fictional account of one private's sudden decision to lay down his rifle and begin a quixotic journey from Indochina to Paris to attend the peace talks. Will Cacciato make it all the way? Or will he be yet another casualty of a conflict that seems to have no end? This novel is a memorable evocation of men both fleeing and meeting the demands of battle. It is more than just a great war novel. Ultimately it's about the forces of fear and heroism that do battle in the hearts of us all.

FIC O’Brien, Tim — The Things They Carried (ALL) Considered perhaps the greatest work of fiction that has been written about the Vietnam War, The Things They Carried is neither a novel nor a short story collection; it is an arc of fictional episodes, taking place in the childhoods of its characters, in the jungles of Vietnam and back home in America two decades later. Each one of the twenty-two short pieces is written with such care, emotional content, and prosaic precision that it could stand on its own. The Things They Carried depicts the men of Alpha Company: Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and of course, the character Tim O'Brien who has survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the age of forty-three. They battle the enemy (or maybe more the idea of the enemy), and occasionally each other. In their relationships we see their isolation and loneliness, their rage and fear. They miss their families, their girlfriends and buddies; they miss the lives they left back home. Yet they find sympathy and kindness for strangers and love for each other, because in Vietnam they are the only family they have.

FIC Soli, Tatjana — The Lotus Eaters (C/BV) A unique and sweeping debut novel about an American female combat photographer in the Vietnam War, as she captures the wrenching chaos and finds herself torn between the love of two men. On a stifling day in 1975, the North Vietnamese army is poised to roll into Saigon. As the fall of the city begins, two lovers make their way through the streets to escape to a new life. Helen Adams, an American photojournalist, must take leave of a war she is addicted to and a devastated country she has come to love. Linh, the Vietnamese man who loves her, must grapple with his own conflicted loyalties of heart and homeland.

FIC Stone, Robert — Dog Soldiers, a novel (ALL) The National Book Award-winning novel Dog Soldiers trades on a hallucinatory vision of Vietnam as a place in which all honor and morality are ceded to the mere business of survival. In Saigon during the waning days of the Vietnam War, a small-time journalist named John Converse thinks he'll find action -and profit- by getting involved in a big-time drug deal. But back in the States, things go horribly wrong for him. Dog Soldiers perfectly captures the underground mood of America in the 1970s, when amateur drug dealers and hippies encountered profiteering cops and professional killers - and the price of survival was dangerously high.

FIC Webb, James — Fields of Fire (C/BV) The author, Jim Webb, served a term as U.S. Senator from Virginia and is a much-decorated former Marine who fought and was wounded in Vietnam. Webb tells the story of a platoon of tough, young Marines enduring the tropical hell of Southeast Asian jungles while facing an invisible enemy--in a war no one understands. Fields of Fire has been called a powerful work that brilliantly expresses the basic ambiguity of war: the repulsion of war's destruction contrasted with the grisly attraction of war as the ultimate test of survival. Critics have compared this bestselling first novel, written in 1978, to All Quiet on the Western Front and The Naked and the Dead, among other masterpieces, for authentically capturing the fury and agony of combat.

Vietnam War Fiction

An Annotated Reading List

Burbank Central Library (C) 110 N. Glenoaks Blvd.

818-238-5600

Buena Vista Branch Library (BV) 300 N. Buena Vista St.

818-238-5620

Northwest Branch Library (NW) 3323 W. Victory Blvd.

818-238-5640

September 2017

burbanklibrary.org

FIC Brown, Larry — Dirty Work (C/BV) Dirty Work is the story of two men, strangers—one white, the other black. Both were born and raised in Mississippi. Both fought in Vietnam. Both were gravely wounded. Now, twenty-two years later, the two men lie in adjacent beds in a VA hospital. Over the course of a day and a night, Walter James and Braiden Chaney talk of memories, of passions, and of fate, in this novel which critics have described as wrenching and devastating. With great vision, humor, and courage, Brown writes mostly about love in a story about the waste of war.

FIC Butler, Robert Owen — A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain (C/BV) Robert Olen Butler's lyrical and poignant collection of stories about the aftermath of the Vietnam War and its impact on the Vietnamese was acclaimed by critics across the nation and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993. In this collection of fifteen stories, narrated in the first person, the author captures the voice and the experiences of the Vietnamese themselves. These stories are set in the Vietnamese refugee enclaves of New Orleans, as the characters remember war and their homeland, and as they struggle to adapt to an alien culture.

FIC Groom, Winston — Better Times Than These (C) Written in 1978, this is the first novel of Winston Groom, who is best known as the author of Forrest Gump. Groom served as a young soldier in Vietnam. It was hailed as an extraordinary first novel, one of the great, authentic novels of the Vietnam War. Set in Vietnam in 1966, with a cast of characters likely to be familiar to every veteran, the story is told from the perspective of Billy Kahn, a college graduate student who is turned unexpectedly into a Commanding Officer over four platoons in Vietnam and responsible for leading over 100 young men into combat. He is drawn into an impassable moral quagmire that could mean his downfall…or his redemption.

FIC Heinemann, Larry — Paco’s Story (C/BV)Paco’s Story–winner of a National Book Award–plunges you into the violence and casual cruelty of the Vietnam War, and the ghostly aftermath that often dealt the harshest blows. Paco Sullivan is the only man in Alpha Company to survive a cataclysmic Viet Cong attack on Fire Base Harriette in Vietnam. Everyone else is annihilated. When a medic finally rescues Paco almost two days later, he is waiting to die, flies and maggots covering his burnt, shattered body. He winds up back in the US with his legs full of pins, daily rations of Librium and Valium, and no sense of what to do next. He tries to confront the demons that haunt him by making a new start of things in the small town of Boone.

FIC Huong, Duong Thu — Novel Without a Name (C/BV) In a book that offers American readers a startlingly different perspective on the war, this book tells the story of twenty-eight-year-old Quan who has been fighting for the Communist cause in North Vietnam for a decade. Filled with idealism and hope when he first left his village, he now spends his days and nights dodging stray bullets and bombs, foraging scraps of food to feed himself and his men. Upon his return home, Quan seeks comfort in childhood memories as he tries to sort out his conflicting feelings of patriotism and disillusionment, memories that bring him face to face with the shattering reality that his innocence has been irretrievably lost in the wake of the war.

FIC Johnson, Denis — Tree of Smoke (C/BV) Winner of the 2007 National Book Award for Fiction, critics have called this Denis Johnson’s most “gripping, beautiful, and powerful work to date.” This is the story of Skip Sands— spy-in-training, engaged in Psychological Operations against the Vietcong—and the disasters that befall him thanks to his famous uncle, a war hero known in intelligence circles simply as the Colonel. This is also the story of the Houston brothers, Bill and James, young men who drift out of the Arizona desert into a war in which the line between disinformation and delusion has blurred away. The story is a vision of human folly, with gritty, sympathetic portraits of men and women desperate for an end to their loneliness, whether in sex or death or by the grace of God.

FIC Mailer, Norman — Armies of the Night (C/BV) Winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, Armies of the Night uniquely and unforgettably captures the Sixties’ tidal wave of love and rage. The setting is the anti-war march on Washington, October 21, 1967. Helicopters hover overhead and federal marshals and soldiers with fixed bayonets await marchers on the Pentagon steps. Among the marchers is a writer named Norman Mailer. From his own singular participation in the day’s events and his even more extraordinary perceptions comes a classic work that deliberately explores the space between fiction and traditional reportage. Intellectuals and hippies, clergymen and cops, poets and army MPs crowd the pages of a book in which facts are fused with techniques of fiction to create the nerve-end reality of experiential truth.

FIC Marlantes, Karl — Matterhorn: A Novel (ALL) Matterhorn was written by a highly decorated Vietnam veteran. It is the story of a young Marine lieutenant, Waino Mellas, and his comrades in Bravo Company, who are dropped into the mountain jungle of Vietnam. They must confront not merely the North Vietnamese but also monsoon rain and mud, leeches and tigers, disease and malnutrition. Almost as daunting, it turns out, are the obstacles they discover between each other: racial tension, competing ambitions, and duplicitous superior officers. But when the company finds itself surrounded and outnumbered by a massive enemy regiment, the Marines are thrust into the raw and all-consuming terror of combat. The experience will change them forever.

FIC Mason, Bobbie Ann Mason — In Country (C/BV) In Country is a coming-of-age novel in which the Vietnam War is central to the life of young Sam Hughes whose father was killed in Vietnam when she was a young girl. It explores the impact of Vietnam on both the generation that served and the generation that followed them. Sam is now living in rural Kentucky with her uncle Emmett who also served in Vietnam. Sam comes to feel that in order to understand her own life she must understand the experience of her father and of her uncle and his veteran friends. They are a central part of her life, but they remain silent about their experiences.

FIC Nguyen, Viet Thanh — The Sympathizer (C/BV) The Sympathizer, was the winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The narrator is a communist double agent who is a captain in the South Vietnamese army. He escapes to America after the Fall of Saigon, from where he secretly reports on the activities of the exiled South Vietnamese military in Los Angeles to his Communist superiors in Vietnam. Captured on an ill-conceived mission he undertakes with a friend who has insisted upon returning to Vietnam, he is interrogated and tortured by those he has helped to win the war. “Haunted by a faith he no longer accepts, insecure in the communist ideology he has embraced, the spy sweeps a vision sharpened by disillusionment across the tangled individual psyches of those close to him a friend, a lover, a comrade and into the warped motives of the imperialists and ideologues governing the world he must navigate.” (From the Booklist review) FIC Ninh, Bio — The Sorrow of War (C/BV) Bao Ninh, a former North Vietnamese soldier, provides a strikingly honest look at how the Vietnam War forever changed his life, his country, and the people who live there. The novel opens just after the war, with Kien working in a unit that recovers soldiers' corpses. Revisiting the sites of battles raises emotional ghosts for him, "a parade of horrific memories" that threatens his sanity. He finds that writing about those years is the only way to purge them. Juxtaposing battle scenes with dreams and childhood remembrances as well as events in Kien's postwar life, this chaotically plotted book builds to a climax of brutality.