The Veteran's Bookstore
 Once upon a Distant War
by William Prochnau.
Out of the Vietnam quagmire occasionally rise fine books like this, a worthy companion to classics like Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest or Sheehan's A Bright Shining Lie. Those reporters peopled their angry epics with arrogant or flawed heroes; Prochnau turns the tables and peels back what drove the reporters and a dozen competing colleagues when they were in Vietnam. The time frame is 1961- 63. The weird Ngo family rules Saigon, a sultry stew of palace intrigue and VC spies. There Kennedy decides to make a cold war stand, and where the American flag is planted, sure to follow are America's major, pre-TV-age press outlets: AP, UPI, Time, and the New York Times. Enter the Young Turks, then ambitious no-names who rapidly soured on the party line that the war was going just fine. The antagonism solidified after a firefight that Sheehan made the centerpiece of his saga, and Prochnau has replicated here: the Ap Bac fiasco in January 1963.
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 Vietnam, Now: A Reporter Returns
by David Lamb.
For most Americans, writes veteran correspondent David Lamb, "Vietnam was a war, not a country"--even worse, it was sometimes merely "an adjective, usually with a negative connotation." The author was practically a cub reporter when he covered the war a generation ago; in Vietnam, Now, he returns to it, bringing with him a sharp analytic eye developed over the ensuing years. His key observations include the unexpected fact that "the Vietnamese liked Americans.... They had put the war behind them in a way that many Americans hadn't."
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 Reporting Vietnam: American Journalism 1959-1969 (Part One)
by Library of America.
In the last few years historians and former correspondents have been examining closely the role of journalism in the conduct of the Vietnam War. The two volumes of Reporting Vietnam offer a trove of material for such studies.
Part One contains combat-front writing by journalists who are well known to students of Vietnam War history--Stanley Karnow, David Halberstam, Frances FitzGerald, Bernard Fall, Neil Sheehan, Ward Just, and Zalin Grant among them. The hefty volume covers the home front as well, from which the likes of Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe have their say.
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 Reporting Vietnam: American Journalism 1969 - 1975 (Part Two)
by Library of America.
In the predawn morning of May 9, 1970, Richard Nixon left the White House and went to the Lincoln Memorial to speak with a handful of antiwar protesters, most of them college students. The nervous president, who, an assistant later said, "wanted to know what they thought," and the awed students talked amiably for a time, and then all concerned went about their business, Nixon conducting a war, the students trying to end it. So reported Dan Oberdorfer for the Washington Post in one of the dozens of stories, profiles, articles, and dispatches collected in this volume of Vietnam War-era journalism, the second of two content-packed books in a Library of America set. Includes reports by New York Times correspondent Sydney Schanberg and Seymour Hersh.
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 War Torn: Stories of War from the Women Reporters who Covered Vietnam
by Tad Bartimus (Editor), Tracy Wood, Kate Webb, Laura Palmer, Edith Lederer, Jurate Kazickas.
Often only hours before you took that first sip of ricard or your martini... you had been watching a medic give up on a kid of eighteen or nineteen and flip a cold poncho over his face. Often you could hear the artillery of a battle across the Saigon River. So Kate Webb, a former UPI correspondent, recalls her days as a reporter in Vietnam, moving back and forth between the devastation of the field and the decadent and chaotic nightlife of Saigon. Her story is part of War Torn: Stories of War from the Women Reporters Who Covered Vietnam, written by former correspondents including Denby Fawcett, Jurate Kazickas and UPI's Webb and Tracy Wood. The book collects nine reporters' memoirs that recall the period of 1966 1975, when women's reportage, as Gloria Emerson notes in her introduction, was much rarer than today.
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 Larry Burrows, Vietnam
by Larry Burrows (Photographer), David Halberstam (Introduction).
In the heat of battle, in the devastated countryside, among troops and civilians equally hurt by the
savagery of war, Larry Burrows photographed the conflict in Vietnam from 1962, the earliest days of American involvement, until 1971, when he died in a helicopter shot down on the Vietnam–Laos border. His images, published in Life magazine, brought the war home, scorching the consciousness of the public and inspiring much of the anti-war sentiment that convulsed American society in the 1960s.
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 Reporting Vietnam: Media and Military at War
by William M. Hammond.
For many Americans during the Vietnam era, the war on the home front seemed nearly as wrenching and hardfought as the one in Southeast Asia. Its primary battlefield was the news media, its primary casualty the truth. But as William Hammond reveals, animosity between government and media wasn't always the rule; what happened between the two during the Vietnam War was symptomatic of the nation's experiences in general. As the "light at the end of the tunnel" dimmed, relations between them grew ever darker.
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 The Mark: A War Correspondent's Memoir of Vietnam and Cambodia
by Jacques Leslie.
A historical memoir, a coming-of-age story, and an exploration of the inner workings of journalism. Leslie, who became war correspondent for the Los Angeles Times in 1972 at age 24, chronicles the actions of the reporters--at once observers and participants--who covered the war in Vietnam and writes about his experiences of some of the worst of the fighting. He also attempts to identify the source of his own "mark," or obsession: the feeling some journalists have of being most alive in the horror of a war zone.
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