Thank you so much for this, Jeremy. I would also suggest Six Silent Men and Fire Birds. Platoon Leader was my favorite of the five I read from this list. It reminded me a lot of Company Commander.
Interested in Vietnam? What DID dad or granddad do there? Most of our young folks don’t have a clue. Most of our old folks don’t have a clue about what transpired there either. Which makes Americans in general susceptible to believing a lot of nonsense about this watershed event in our history. Of course most Americans aren’t much interested in ANY history, are they? Nevertheless, I’m fairly certain many of the visitors to James’ blog have more than a passing interest in military history. So for your reading pleasure here’s a list of some of my favorite books on the Vietnam War. Emphasis on the personal accounts. These are not stuffy histories. Most of these are real page turners. Enjoy!
- We were Soldier’s Once …and Young by LTG Harold G. Moore (Ret) and Joseph L. Galloway. Harper Torch 1992. A close up and personal account of the Vietnam War Battle of Ia Drang, 1965 (see also America’s First Battles 1776-1965). Read the book and see the movie starring Mel Gibson as LTC Hal Moore.
-Blood Trails-The Combat Diary of a Foot Soldier in Vietnam by Christopher Ronnau (Ballantine Books 2006). Chris Ronnau kept copious journals of his time in country recording the day to day events plus his impressions of what was happening around him. This combined with the author’s excellent story-telling ability makes for a very detailed and captivating account of the everyday life experiences of an infantry soldier in ‘Nam. In particular you are given a private’s eye view of one of the major “search and destroy” operations conducted during that phase of the war in 1967, namely “Operation Junction City”.
- The Killing Zone by Fredrick Downs. Berkley Books. The true story of an infantry rifle platoon leader in Vietnam 1967-68. Exciting reading about a real hero and real combat leader. After you read about what happened to Fred Downs, all your troubles will seem insignificant.
- Platoon – Bravo Company by Robert Hemphill. ST Martin’s Paperbacks 1998. The real story behind the movie “Platoon” directed by Oliver Stone. Robert Hemphill was Oliver Stone’s company commander during the time the famous director served in Vietnam. Bravo Company 3-25th Infantry Battalion 25th Infantry Division saw a lot of action before and during the 1968 Tet Offensive.
- Platoon Leader “Memoir of Command In Combat” by James R. McDonough. Ballantine Books 1985. McDonaugh tells of his experience as an Infantry Platoon Leader in the 173rd Airborne Brigade who must occupy an isolated outpost in Vietnam in 1971. Great reading. A true life war experience that reads like a novel or a Hollywood screenplay. In fact the story was made into a movie in the 1980’s starring Michael Dudikoff in the role of Second Lieutenant McDonaugh.
- Sappers in the Wire - The Life and Death of Fire Base Mary Ann by William Keith Nolan. During the Night of 27-28 March 1971 a Viet Cong sapper company infiltrated Fire Support Base Mary Ann and killed 30 American soldiers and wounded 82. It is a cautionary tale of why one should always be on guard in a guerilla war and a fascinating tale of combat in the last year of US involvement in Vietnam. May be out of print, but it’s a great read if you can find it.
-Stalking the Vietcong - Inside Operation Phoenix: A Personal Account by Stuart A. Herrington (Ballantine Books 1982). Captain Stuart A. Herrington was an American advisor assigned to help the South Vietnamese Army (ARVN) root out the enemy in Hau Nghia province and destroy the Viet Cong “shadow government” that operated in the countryside to raise “tax” money and organize the populace to support the Communist cause, 1971-72.
- Raider by Charles W. Sasser. St. Martin/’s Paperbacks 2002. The rest of the story behind Ghost Soldiers, as well as the story of the Son Tay prison raid. Private Galen “Kit” Kittleson was one of the “Alamo Scouts” who participated in the Cabanatuan POW rescue along with the company from the 6th Ranger Battalion and the Filipino guerillas. Earlier Kittleson was a member of the Alamo Scout raiding party that rescued Dutch civilians and New Guinea natives held as slave laborers by the Japanese. The Alamo Scouts was a strategic reconnaissance unit formed in the pacific by Sixth Army Commander LTG Walter Kruger. Like so many other unconventional units it was promptly disbanded after the war. Nevertheless it was a ground breaking organization and served as the model for the long range recon patrol units of Vietnam and today (AKA LRRP’s and LRS-D’s). Kittleson rejoined the Army after the war and volunteered for the Special Forces. He served a tour in Vietnam with a Special Forces B Team. Then he volunteered for a super-secret mission that turned out to be the raid to rescue the American POW’s held at Son Tay prison camp in North Vietnam. Thus Galen Kittleson had the distinction of participating in more POW rescue missions than any other individual in the U.S. Armed Forces. Great reading.
- Marine Sniper by Charles Henderson. Berkley Books. The story of SGT Carlos Hathcock USMC, who is credited with 93 confirmed kills as a sniper in Vietnam. The book gives good information on rifle marksmanship and field craft. The true adventures of SGT Hathcock read like a Hollywood screenplay. Read about how Carlos Hathcock takes out the North Vietnamese General, the Frenchman and the Apache Woman. Read how SGT Hathcock wins the Duel of the Snipers. Learn about how one of the deadliest weapons on the battlefield today is still the well-aimed rifle bullet.
- About Face by COL David H. Hackworth (Retired). Touchstone/ Simon and Schuster 1989. COL Hackworth served in the US Army from 1946-1971 and was decorated for valor in Korea and Vietnam. “Hack” first achieved notoriety by denouncing the US Government’s Vietnamization Program, the plan to disengage US combat forces from Vietnam, in an interview on the ABC News television program “Issues and Answers”. He quickly retired to avoid repercussions and lived in self-imposed exile in Australia for years after the war. The book was intended to be an expose on what was wrong with the US Army during Vietnam and afterwards. At the same time it is an excellent first person history of the many changes that took place in the US Army in the post WWII years as well as an auto-biography of COL Hackworth’s adventure filled life.
-The Vietnam Primer by S.L.A. Marshall and David H. Hackworth. Described in Hackworth's book About Face. Interesting reading about what tactics worked well in Vietnam. S.L.A. Marshall is also famous for writing the study Men Against Fire in which he concluded that only 25% of infantryman fired their rifles in battle during WWII.
-Dirty Little Secrets of the Vietnam War “Military Information You’re Not Supposed to Know” by James F. Dunnigan and Albert A. Nofi. William Morrow and Company Inc. An ‘A to Z’ almanac and compendium of what went wrong and what went right in the Vietnam War. A thick tome, but well written and filled with interesting facts. Vietnam was as complex and varied a conflict as was WWII. As British historian Paddy Griffith (Forward into Battle) observed, Vietnam "defies easy study, since it was made up of five closely-woven and concurrent wars: viz. the international political struggle, the strategic bombing campaign, the interdiction campaign, the main-force battle, and the pacification or 'Village War'."
-Inside the VC and NVA - The Real Story of North Vietnam’s Armed Forces by Michael Lee Lanning and Dan Cragg. Ballantine Books 1992. Everything you ever wanted to know and about the organization, training, tactics and morale of the North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong. The material is largely based on the thousands of interviews of Communist prisoners and defectors compiled by the Rand Corporation for the U.S. Army. Also provided are impressions of American leaders and “grunts” who fought in Vietnam. So was “Charlie” an invincible super-soldier or was he a simple “pajama clad” subsistence farmer the U.S. Military should a have been able to beat easily? As the authors point out, the truth is somewhere in between. As one of the U.S generals interviewed, GEN William E. Depuy, observed, the tactics used by the VC and NVA to penetrate allied firebases were largely identical to the tactics used by Erwin Rommel as an infantry company commander to penetrate Italian positions in the Alps during World War One (see Attacks by Erwin Rommel and Sappers in the Wire the Life and Death of Fire Base Mary Ann). So there was nothing “magic” about VC/NVA tactics. In fact the VC/NVA would seldom make a move against a U.S. or ARVN base unless they had complete and thorough intelligence on their target. Therefore the Vietnamese Communists were often thwarted by allied units that simply practiced good operational security and aggressive patrolling around their positions to inhibit enemy reconnaissance efforts.
Best book I've read on Vietnam is Marlantes' Matterhorn.
Highly recommended.
I've read a lot of books on Vietnam. Many of the ones you listed.
I don't know why Americans beat themselves up about Vietnam. We accomplished most of what we set out to do which was to stop the domino effect of Communism in South East Asia.
We purposely limited the war mostly to South Vietnam as we didn't directly invade the North. Mostly because we didn't want to fight a billion Chinese.
I think WWII made us think that the only way was total victory. Wars like WWII are rare. Where you win everything and are in complete control. Mostly people war away on each other until both sides are close to exhaustion and then settle somehow.
This is a solid list. A very solid list. Wondering if any of you fellas have read the Nick Turse book "Kill Anything That Moves" that documents the very dark underside of US involvement in the Vietnam War. It was pretty controversial when it came out a few years back....I might get to it soon.
Dirty Little Secrets of The Vietnam War was a good one for sure if only for the reason that the author does a good job of presenting the multi polar aspect of why the Vietnam War took place. One thing that I would like to see a book published about would be on the religious angle of the conflict. There was a massive schism in that country between Catholics, the various buddhist sects, the Cham (an animist Muslim hybrid), and the Cao Dai religion (a religion that listed Jesus, Muhammed and Victor Hugo as patron saints!!!??)
For an interesting though fictional look at the psychology Victor Charles in the wake of the war that left his beautiful countryside defoliated and over a million of his compatriots corpses seek out a copy of Bao Ninh's novel "The Sorrow of War" about a post war body burial detail. Sad as hell.
Mr. Sam J, I respectfully disagree with your theory that the US unduly beats itself up over our involvement in Vietnam.
Not only did Vietnam fall to communism, Laos fell (and actually has the dubious distinction of being the most bombed country in the world , and Cambodia also was destabilized by the US presence—so much so that the wicked Khmer Rouge were able to take hold. China currently has it's tentacles all over Laos and Cambodia. So much for stopping those dominoes from falling. More about lining the pockets of the defense industry and getting rid of 50,000 chattel and physically and psychologically cripple many thousands more.
( a side note ) As the icing on the cake this country stabbed its former ARVN allies in the back...Just caught this one the other day
namsouth.com/viewtopic.php?t=21&;
highlight=suicides
( The NamSouth forum is pretty interesting reading for anyone interested in the Vietnam war.)
If West Point had required study of the tactics of John S Mosby and advised LBJ accordingly, the preceding books might never need have been written.
amazon.com/Mosbys-Rangers-Jeffry-D-Wert/dp/0671747452
The difference is quite simple but profound. 'Occupied Northern Virginia' was 9,000 miles from DC in 1970.
With zero due respect to Sam J, he's bought into a case of 'the losers wrote the history'
Ronald Thomas West
199th Light Infantry Brigade (Fireball Aviation)
April - October 1970
Mosby's duel with Custer's regular outfit was a classic asymmetrical, long-term engagement. I really enjoyed reading his biography, though I had forgotten the author's name. Thank you for citing the title, Ron.
Since you ask Sam J., “Dirty Little Secrets of the Vietnam War” summed it up best “America lacked the will to win, to see it out to the end. This had never happened before and there was a reluctance on the part of the government to admit this was where it was all going“. Consequently US troops were committed to combat in ‘Nam not to so much to destroy the Vietnamese Communists, but to keep the South Vietnamese from losing, until such time as they could they could stand up for themselves. This made the conduct of operations there seem aimless and repetitious to the folks back home, like conducting the Guadalcanal invasion over and over again. Was America there to fight Communist aggression or was it intervening in a “civil war”? Both. America naturally had a vested interest in seeing the non-Communist side win. On the TV news back then the talking heads kept using the term “credibility gap” over the fact the people were losing faith in the government’s handling of the war. In fact the term was popularized in 1966 by J. William Fulbright, a Democratic Senator from Arkansas, when he could not get a straight answer from President Johnson's Administration regarding the war. Eventually America, both the politicians and the people, wanted the war to be done with, as they had other fish to fry. In the end the whole business caused Americans to lose faith in the honesty and competence of their government. “American troops were not defeated in combat, but the American people refused to pay the price for victory. That’s an important distinction.” The political reluctance of the American government to “take the fight to the enemy” convinced the Vietnamese Communists that the USA “lacked the will to win a protracted war”. Thus as long as the Communists were able to maintain a fighting force in the field, defeat was never a certainty, despite the USA’s material advantages. The North Vietnamese were willing to “lose” for longer than the USA was willing to “win”. The Communists hung on despite the horrendous casualties they suffered (1.5 million dead by the Vietnamese Communists own admission in 1996; compared to 58,148 KIA for the USA or 23 dead for every one American serviceman killed). The Vietnamese Communists’ ultimate success had more to do with the fact that US forces consistently allowed them to decide when and where to initiate fighting and when to disengage from battle, than it did with the Communist forces overall battlefield effectiveness. After every major action the Communist forces were allowed to flee to sanctuaries either inside South Vietnam or across the border in Laos and Cambodia to rest and regroup until they were ready to fight again. When the VC and NVA were forced to fight at a time and place not of their choosing the USA and its allies almost always won. The Communists worldwide exploited the American people’s loss of faith in their government and their traditional institutions to the hilt; their Marxist Left successors are doing the same to this day. The irony is that South Vietnam probably would have survived had Congress not voted to withhold military aid in AUG 1974. Once aid was cut, it took the North Vietnamese only 55 days to defeat the South Vietnamese forces when they launched their final offensive in the following spring of 1975. WWII was the “good war” because it was the only war the American Left ever supported. The USA was allied with their ideal the USSR against Nazi Germany after all. So the Left suppressed all public dissent against the war. When Hitler and Stalin were still allies the Left sided with the isolationists and wanted America to stay out. Once the USA was in the war with the USSR the Left made the always substantial pacifist element in America keep quiet for a change. The Left uses our free speech tradition to their advantage, but at the same time has no shame about suppressing the free speech of those who disagree with them.
I stand by what I said and believe that the press and Democratic party have distorted the history of the whole thing so as to make it seem that there was NO way possible that we could have won or that there was any positive outcome to the war at all. All lies. My views come from Jerry Pournelle( a guy who's been involved in a lot of stuff but who most people never heard of) and Lee Kuan Yew premier of Singapore(no dummy). You note all the countries that fell but not the ones that didn't. Just about every single country in South East Asia had a Communist guerilla war going on. They failed and were beat back in most of the countries. I call that a win.
,"...The irony is that South Vietnam probably would have survived had Congress not voted to withhold military aid in AUG 1974...".
Exactly. The Viet Cong were destroyed. The South Vietnamese army was completely in power and the North was being kept back from overrunning the South. Then the Democratic congress cut off all funds for the South to defend themselves. The Democrats said we couldn't win the war so they just made it so. The last battle of the North against the South was the largest tank battle since Kursk in WWII. The whole North Vietnamaese army was sprawled out on two highways. Congress told Ford if he used air power they would impeach him. With minimal cost we could have completely destroyed them. Utterly. The South Vietnamese fired all the weapons they had at the North, ran out of bullets and then dispersed as they had nothing left to fight with.
The American people didn't lose the Vietnam war or the Army or Nixon or the South Vietnamese. The Democrat party is solely responsible for the loss of Vietnam.
Just like they lost China.
Ronald Thomas West,"...With zero due respect to Sam J, he's bought into a case of 'the losers wrote the history'..."
I don't know what you're talking about. You provide zero evidence I'm wrong. This is the typical way that the present media operates they spew "judgements" and we are expected to fall back in horror at their brilliance and worship their foolish missives as the "truth". Even your missives make no sense as most histories say that Vietnam could never be won at all under any means.
Do you deny that the South Vietnamese ran out of ammo? Do you deny that the Democrat congress cut off funds to the South Vietnamese? Do you deny that a huge mass of tanks and trucks came down the main highways of South Vietnam? Do you deny that they could have been stopped by air power? What are you saying except,"listen to me and damn that Sam J." while providing zero supporting evidence. Maybe I should run everything I write by you first so that I don't create "errors".