Fifteen top books on the Vietnam war

George Black is the author of The Long Reckoning: A Story of War, Peace, and Redemption in Vietnam.

At LitHub he tagged six "foundational books" on the “Vietnam War,” then tagged a few more that "had an especially profound impact on my thinking as I wrote The Long Reckoning. One title on the list:

Vietnam-Perkasie: A Combat Marine Memoir by W.D. Ehrhart

There are many great memoirs of Vietnam by combat veterans, especially by Marines who had the misfortune to serve in I Corps, where much of my own book is set. But Erhart’s unsparing confessional of one Marine’s descent into hell is unique in the intensity of the moral questions it raises about what war does to young men. It shows how an ordinary 18-year-old from a small town in Pennsylvania could be transformed into someone who could gun down an unarmed old woman simply because she is wearing black pajamas and running away, or yuk it up with his buddies as they destroy an abandoned Buddhist temple just for the hell of it, or take his place in a line of Marines waiting for their turn with a starving woman trading her body for a can of C-rations. An unforgettable book by a man who went on to become the unrivaled poet of the war.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue