Vietnam War: Help please with book recs

[libnnc]

I'm trying to prepare a syllabus for a class and my topic is the Vietnam war. This topic is out of my scope and I'm struggling to find those "classic" or fundamental books on the war. Any suggestions on major works in the historiography?

[chieftain]

1. I would suggest a couple of books and one film.

Fire in the Lake by Geraldine Fitzgerald and Vietnam by Stanley Karnow are good books both on what happened during the war and the context in which it occurred. Also I would recommend Battle of Algiers as a way of dramatizing the futility that occupying forces face when confronting national wars of liberation.

[Lithos]

2. Battle of Algiers is a great book

The movie is great too, though both will need some grounding for people learning about the conflict.

Fire in the lake has been strongly recommended to me, but I've not read it. One I've read and recommend is Dr. Glasser's "365 Days", a great first person account and I think a must read for that reason alone.

L-

On Edit: Glasser, not Glassner

[Adsos Letter]

3. Another good movie

"Go Tell the Spartans" w/Burt Lancaster. "Dispatches" by Herr, "America's Longest War" (can't remember the author and I'm too lazy to get it off the top shelf of the bookcase :D "Vietnam: A Television History" by WGBH is very good.

[Sequoia]

4. "A Rumor of War" by Philip Caputo

For anyone who has ever asked, "What was Vietnam really like," Marine Lieutenant Philip Caputo's book, "A Rumor of War," is a must read. In this autobiographical account of his time as an infantry officer in, "the `Nam," he describes the experience in authoritative terms enhanced by collegiate English studies and time spent as a combat journalist. The result is the most well written account of life in an infantry platoon in Vietnam that I have ever read.
Phil Caputo could have been virtually anyone in America in the early `60's. A young, idealistic, all-American boy who joined the Marines in search of adventure, and out of a patriotic desire to answer John Kennedy's challenge to, "Ask not what your country can do for you. . ." He and his platoon marched off to war to find glory and honor. What they found was, "death, death, death."

Caputo takes you into the muddy foxhole with him, making you feel the heat and annoyance of the ever-present insects, and the sniper shots that all united to deprive you of the precious commodity of sleep. He takes you on patrol with them down, "Purple Heart Trail," where the main enemies were the heat, the insects, and endless mines and booby traps. The reader can feel the rage of the infantrymen who fought endless battles with an enemy that was everywhere, yet nowhere. Gradually enthusiasm turned to pessimism; pessimism to despair; and despair to rage; rage that ultimately vented itself in mindless violence against anything Vietnamese. They were then left with the heat, the insects, and guilt borne of actions taken that they would never have dreamed of a few short months before.

http://www.amazon.com

[BrotherBuzz]

5. Street Without Joy was the classic every 2LT read early in the war

Street Without Joy, by Bernard Fall

French journalist Fall surveys the French war in Indochina from 1945 to 1954 in this classic history. The warning signs are all here, but American policy-makers decided to make their own mistakes. After all, the helicopter gave American troops a level of mobility that the French sadly lacked.

Cue Buffalo Springfield: There's something happening here What it is ain't exactly clear...

[Uncle Sinister]

6. "Vietnam: A History", "A Bright and Shining Lie". , "We Were...

...Soldiers once, and Young" (the book, not the movie), "Deriliction of Duty", "Pentagon Papers", and "Stolen Valor".

And the movies "Apocalypse Now", "Fog of War", and "The Killing Fields"