Best Vietnam War books

Some links on this page are affiliate links. If you choose to buy, it supports the site at no extra cost to you. My father was at the Battle of Binh Giã in December 1964, one of the first major engagements of the Vietnam War, fought before most Americans knew there was one. He served as a military advisor. He came home. He went back. He came home again and spent decades not talking about it, in a way that said more than mere words would have. He died from Agent Orange exposure, which means Vietnam was still working on him forty years after he left. I’ve been reading Vietnam War books for most of my adult life. This list is what I found worth keeping: the novels and memoirs that are honest about what the war was and what it cost on both sides. Many of the memoirs from this war appear in the Best memoirs about fathers, war, and what gets passed down post, which is where this reading started. This list goes wider: fiction alongside memoir, Vietnamese perspectives alongside American ones, the literature of the war itself alongside the literature of what came after. The best Vietnam War books The Things They Carried (1990) by Tim O’Brien O’Brien fought in Vietnam, came back, and spent y...