Category: Vietnam

The first in a trio of insightful monographs on key decision points in the US war in Vietnam, “Planning a Tragedy: The Americanization of the War in Vietnam”, which focuses on the Johnson administration’s actions in the fateful year of 1965, may be the best of the three. The material that Larry Berman covers has…

Vo Nguyen Giap died in Hanoi in 2013 at the ripe old age of 102. Given his arduous early military life in the bush followed by his decades long leadership in a brutal war for national independence, joisting continuously with firepower-rich foreign enemies and deadly internal political rivals, he at least deserves to be remembered…

Bernard Fall was one of the great foreign war correspondents. A Frenchman of Austrian Jewish birth, he spent most of his adult life studying and teaching in the United States when not in Southeast Asia covering the Vietnamese communist war against the French and then the Americans. This book, the story of the epic siege…

Much ink has been spilled writing memoirs from the Vietnam War. “The Things They Carried” may be the very best. Not because the tale it tells is the most heroic or gut-wrenching or historically significant, but rather because the experience of Alpha Company, 5th Battalion, 46th Infantry Regiment, 198th Infantry Brigade operating in Quang Ngai…

“No Peace, No Honor,” the final installment in Larry Berman’s excellent trilogy on the Vietnam War, focuses on the tortured three-year-long negotiations that ultimately led to the 1973 Paris Peace Accords. Never mind the superlative on the back cover from Mark Clodfelter claiming that this book is “The most complete analysis of the Nixon era…

Ho Chi Minh was one of the most important political figures of the twentieth century. Yet much of his life has been shrouded in mystery. In this scholarly and highly detailed biography first published in 2000, the former Vietnam-based foreign service officer turned professor William Duiker seeks to pull back the veil of secrecy surrounding…