More than forty years have passed since the official end of the Vietnam War, yet the war’s legacies endure. Its history and iconography still provide fodder for film and fiction, communities of war refugees have spawned a wide Vietnamese diaspora, and the United States military remains embroiled in unwinnable wars with eerie echoes of Vietnam. Looking Back on the Vietnam War brings together scholars from a broad variety of disciplines, who offer fresh insights on the war’s psychological, economic, artistic, political, and environmental impacts. Each essay examines a different facet of the war, from its representation in Marvel comic books to the experiences of Vietnamese soldiers exposed to Agent Orange. By putting these pieces together, the contributors assemble an expansive yet nuanced composite portrait of the war and its global legacies. Though they come from diverse scholarly backgrounds, ranging from anthropology to film studies, the contributors are united in their commitment to original research. Whether exploring rare archives or engaging in extensive interviews, they voice perspectives that have been excluded from standard historical accounts. Looking Back on the Vietnam War thus embarks on an interdisciplinary and international investigation to discover what we remember about the war, how we remember it, and why.

A portrait of the American recon platoon of the 101st Airborne Division describes their sixty-day fight for survival during the 1968 Tet Offensive, tracing their postwar difficulties with acclimating into a peacetime America that did not want to hear their story.

A classic work of American literature that has not stopped changing minds and lives since it burst onto the literary scene, The Things They Carried is a ground-breaking meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling. The Things They Carried depicts the men of Alpha Company: Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and the character Tim O’Brien, who has survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the age of forty-three. Taught everywhere—from high school classrooms to graduate seminars in creative writing—it has become required reading for any American and continues to challenge readers in their perceptions of fact and fiction, war and peace, courage and fear and longing. The Things They Carried won France's prestigious Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize; it was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

The purpose of the Vietnam Veterans Memorials is to honor members of the United States Armed Forces who fought and died during the Vietnam War. The memorial consists of a roughly 250-foot long series of polished black gabbros walls sunk into the surrounding countryside The author was one of the veterans who dedicated himself to making the Vietnam Memorial Wall a reality and visited it regularly where he would sit in his wheelchair with his reflection looking back at him from the black burnished granite. He always left behind a long-stemmed red rose in memory of the names on the wall and he never forgot the suffering that misguided war had inflicted on his Vietnam vet comrades, his generation of Americans, and on the people of Vietnam. This book is a story of the cruelty, destruction, and insanity of war, but it is also a moving story of the powerful bond of love between a father and his son.

Unlike the hero status given to the returning soldiers from World War II, the soldiers that served in Vietnam were portrayed as baby killers, psychos, drug addicts, and warmongers. ... Movies and television shows began depicting returning soldiers as deranged monsters even before the war ended. This book combines interviews with family members and friends of fallen soldiers with the stories of Pennsbury's Vietnam veterans who survived the war and came home to lead full lives. We learn from the family interviews about the true cost of war: unfinished lives that create an unfillable hole in the hearts of those left behind. From returning veterans, we discover the war has never really ended. We hear from several Vietnam veterans who are battling illnesses linked to the Agent Orange dioxins sprayed from airplanes by their government. These veterans of an unpopular war talk about being spat upon by anti-war protestors when they returned from Vietnam. We also learn that these Vietnam veterans are filled with pride. They acknowledge their time in the military shaped them as young men. And now, in their graying years, they are part of an exclusive club. Only they can recall the shattering sounds of the Vietnam War. Only they can remember various smells of South Vietnam, or how a heavy rainstorm turned the ground into mud during monsoon season.

"The best book to have been written about the Vietnam War" (The New York Times Book Review); an instant classic straight from the front lines. From its terrifying opening pages to its final eloquent words, Dispatches makes us see, in unforgettable and unflinching detail, the chaos and fervor of the war and the surreal insanity of life in that singular combat zone. Michael Herr’s unsparing, unorthodox retellings of the day-to-day events in Vietnam take on the force of poetry, rendering clarity from one of the most incomprehensible and nightmarish events of our time. Dispatches is among the most blistering and compassionate accounts of war in our literature.