Agreed, the earliest of these classics, Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, set during the latter years of the French War, has in some ways not aged well, especially in its stereotypical portrait of the young Vietnamese woman, Phuong-beautiful, passive, available, but in the end inscrutable. It’s more accurate still to talk about the First and Second Indochina Wars, and the themes I explore in my own book on the war and its aftermath, The Long Reckoning, make no sense without embracing the critical role of the famous Ho Chi Minh Trail through neighboring Laos.Īny list of books on the war, whatever we choose to call it, has to include some of the early classics, even if time, hindsight, and new generations of scholarship can sometimes be harsh judges of their shortcomings. My own preference is to talk about the American War in Vietnam, which is what the Vietnamese themselves call it, as opposed to the earlier French War, from which it grew organically. By one estimate, something like thirty thousand books have been written about we call “the Vietnam War.” It’s a term I generally try to avoid, because it distorts our understanding of what the conflict was about, where it was fought, and by whom.

North and south penguin english library