Voices from the Vietnam War

August 2, 2010
Li spent seven years collecting the oral histories of 90 Vietnam War veterans, from combat soldiers to doctors, nurses, and spies. The battlefield experiences of Americans are sobering, but accounts from South and North Vietnamese stand out for their assessments of why the U.S. lost the war and the challenges of guerrilla warfare, respectively. But Li’s achievement is most remarkable for the window he opens onto the lives of Chinese and Russian veterans; their rare accounts appear here for the first time in English. Although American policymakers feared that the Soviets and the Chinese were working in concert, both countries competed for the loyalty of the North Vietnamese, offering men and material from the beginning. American veterans had notoriously difficult re-entries back home, but returning Russians encountered a very bitter pill; Russia still denies any role in the war and has never recognized its veterans at all. “Nobody knew anything about our service,” a retired, pensionless Russian missile training instructor declares. “Thus, our sacrifices are not appreciated by the society or the Russian people.” Photos.

June 1, 2010
This volume of interviews with Vietnam War veterans adds new and surprising dimensions to our understanding of the scope of the war. Americans are, of course, well represented, including grunts, logistical-support troops, and nurses. But this was a war not only fought in Asia but fought largely by Asians. We have a retired North Vietnamese general who will never again see his son, now a U.S. citizen; a South Vietnamese officer now living a penurious existence in Ho Chi Minh City; a South Korean doctor; and Chinese who fought in the jungle or labored like Hercules to keep North Vietnamese railroads running. To round out the war, we even have comments from anonymous Russian officers, who built antiaircraft-missile sites and (more discreetly) spied in Hanoi. Some of this book is heartrending; some of it is as gripping as a thriller; and all of it will add to our understanding of the war.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)