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Republished by the Bodleian Library with original illustrations and a new foreword by Bruns Grayson, who served as a US Army captain in Vietnam, the Pocket Guide takes the reader on a need-to-know tour through the culture, customs, geography, and politics of Vietnam. Among the straightforward words of wisdom on offer are “Don’t think Americans know everything” and “You will fulfill your duty best by remembering at all times that you are in a land where dignity, restraint, and politeness are highly regarded.” The Pocket Guide was designed to instill in soldiers an understanding of and respect for the Vietnamese people—crucial to the success of the venture—and it therefore also sheds further light on the political aspirations of the time.

 

Famously controversial, the Vietnam War is among the defining conflicts of the latter half of the twentieth century and, as such, the key battles and strategies have been dealt with in considerable depth. But beyond these purely militaristic concerns are the everyday lives of the soldiers who served there. A behind-the-front-lines look at a wide range of social situations they might have encountered, the book makes for captivating reading for anyone interested in Vietnam and its cultural, social, political, and military history.

The American war in Vietnam was one of the most morally contentious events of the twentieth century, and it produced an extraordinary outpouring of poetry. Yet the complex ethical terrain of the conflict is remarkably underexplored, and the prodigious poetic voice of its American participants remains largely unheard. In A Shadow on Our Hearts, Adam Gilbert rectifies these oversights by utilizing the vast body of soldier-poetry to examine the war's core moral issues.

The soldier-poets provide important insights into the ethical dimensions of their physical and psychological surroundings before, during, and after the war. They also offer profound perspectives on the relationships between American soldiers and the Vietnamese people. From firsthand experiences, they reflect on what it meant to be witnesses, victims, and perpetrators of the war's violence. And they advance an uncompromising vision of moral responsibility that indicts a range of culprits for the harms caused by the conflict. Gilbert explores the powerful and perceptive work of these soldier-poets through the lens of morality and presents a radically alternative, deeply personal, and ethically penetrating account of the American war in Vietnam.

This epic novel presents a sweeping portrait of war and peace in northern Vietnam from the defeat of the French to the mid-1980s. The story follows the odyssey of Giang Minh Sai, the son of a Confucian scholar in the rural Red River delta, from his early childhood through his decorated service during the American War and his later efforts to adapt to the postwar world of urban Ha Noi. Through two failed marriages, Giang Minh Sai struggles to come to terms with his responsibilities, his past, and his future. The novel's ending leaves its hero and Vietnamese socialism at a problematic and painful crossroads.

In its intricate sketching of complicated alliances, personal debts, and human interactions, A Time Far Past explores the complex layering of family and village history and Party and feudal authority. It also paints a vivid picture of the vast dislocations in Vietnamese culture caused by the political and military turmoil of the Indochina wars.

A Time Far Past was enormously popular in Vietnam, where it was first published in 1986, selling more than 120,000 copies and winning that country's national prize for fiction.

A Trauma Artist examines how O'Brien's works variously rewrite his own traumatization during the war in Vietnam as a never-ending fiction that paradoxically "recovers" personal experience by both recapturing and (re)disguising it. Mark Heberle considers O'Brien's career as a writer through the prisms of post-traumatic stress disorder, postmodernist metafiction, and post-World War II American political uncertainties and public violence.

Based on recent conversations with O'Brien, previously published interviews, and new readings of all his works through 1999, this book is the first study to concentrate on the role and representation of trauma as the central focus of all O'Brien's works, whether situated in Vietnam, in post-Vietnam America, or in the imagination of protagonists suspended between the two. By doing so, Heberle redefines O'Brien as a major U.S. writer of the late twentieth century whose representations of self-damaging experiences and narratives of recovery characterize not only the war in Vietnam but also relationships between fathers and sons and men and women in the post-traumatic culture of the contemporary United States.

A World Transformed looks at the Vietnamese revolution from the perspective of Vietnamese culture itself rather than as a reaction to the Cold War or to the actions of external enemies. Kim N. B. Ninh explores the complex debates within Vietnamese society about the self, culture, and national identity. She shows how a collective sense of the nation's weakness united communists and many intellectuals, who looked to the establishment of a socialist state to offer both the ideology and the organization that would encourage the emergence of a modern, independent, postcolonial Vietnam.
The study covers the period from the Vietnamese communists' initial ascent to power in 1945 to the beginning of the escalation of the American involvement in the country's conflict in 1965, by which time a full-fledged socialist state had been in place in North Vietnam for eleven years. Through a nuanced examination of critical intellectual works, A World Transformed presents a complex view of a period fraught with contradictory possibilities and tensions that continue to resonate in Vietnam today. The extensive use of Vietnamese-language materials, access to archival data never before available, and innovative incorporation of literary and historical sources combine to make this study an invaluable depiction of the Vietnamese revolution.
Kim N. B. Ninh is Assistant Director of the Governance, Law, and Civil Society Programs, The Asia Foundation, San Francisco.

America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam rethinks the motivations behind one of the most ruinous foreign-policy decisions of the postwar era: America’s commitment to preserve an independent South Vietnam under the premiership of Ngo Dinh Diem. The so-called Diem experiment is usually ascribed to U.S. anticommunism and an absence of other candidates for South Vietnam’s highest office. Challenging those explanations, Seth Jacobs utilizes religion and race as categories of analysis to argue that the alliance with Diem cannot be understood apart from America’s mid-century religious revival and policymakers’ perceptions of Asians. Jacobs contends that Diem’s Catholicism and the extent to which he violated American notions of “Oriental” passivity and moral laxity made him a more attractive ally to Washington than many non-Christian South Vietnamese with greater administrative experience and popular support.

A diplomatic and cultural history, America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam draws on government archives, presidential libraries, private papers, novels, newspapers, magazines, movies, and television and radio broadcasts. Jacobs shows in detail how, in the 1950s, U.S. policymakers conceived of Cold War anticommunism as a crusade in which Americans needed to combine with fellow Judeo-Christians against an adversary dangerous as much for its atheism as for its military might. He describes how racist assumptions that Asians were culturally unready for democratic self-government predisposed Americans to excuse Diem’s dictatorship as necessary in “the Orient.” By focusing attention on the role of American religious and racial ideologies, Jacobs makes a crucial contribution to our understanding of the disastrous commitment of the United States to “sink or swim with Ngo Dinh Diem.”