The Veteran's Bookstore
Hard to Find Books
This list covers books that are hard to find, but well worth reading if you can get a copy. If you click on any of these, Amazon will attempt to find a copy if you order it. They are all out of print, but make up some of the better books written about Vietnam.
Close Quarters
by Larry Heinemann.
Like many other recent high school graduates on the 1960's, Philip Dosier found that if he did not have plans for himself, his country certainly did. Shipped of to Vietnam to fight in a war he knew next to nothing about, he found himself in a world of violence, fear, heat and squalor unlike anything he ever thought could exist. Told in the unflinchingly accurate language of the field soldier, fast, rough slang that becomes a kind of surreal poetry, Close Quarters is the story of Dosiers year in Vietnam. A classic of war fiction, it is the harrowing account of a decent young man who becomes an embittered combat veteran and how he makes his way back to the world he left behind.
The Big Story
by Peter Braestrup. How well (or poorly) did the media cover the 1968 Tet Offensive, and how did that coverage effect the outcome of the war? Peter Braestup, in this scholarly work, throughly looks at this issue.This book is must reading for anyone interested inthe media and its coverage of the Vietnam War.
The Fall of Saigon
by David Butler. The author was a NBC radio reporter stationed in Saigon on those last fateful days of 1975. This story vividly captures in gripping detail the tense human drama, right up to and including the now-famous helicopter evacuation from the U.S. embassy on April 29, 1975. Butler was there, he saw it, he lived it, and in tells it with stunning clarity that you won't soon forget.
The Short Timers
by Gustav Hasford. The movie Full Metal Jacket was based on this book. The book is better than the movie, and unfortunately Stanley Kubrick left out some very good parts and a surprise ending when he made the movie. Worth reading.
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