Dick Adair, foreword by Peter Arnett, Dick Adair's Saigon: Sketches and Words from the Artist's Journal. New York and Tokyo: Weatherhill, 1971. 144 pp. Looking more at the Vietnamese than at the Americans.
William T. Allison, "War For Sale: The Black Market, Currency Manipulation and Corruption in the American War in Vietnam." War and Society 21:2 (October 2003).
Gar Alperovitz, Who We Are. Boston: Little, Brown, 1969.
(Harry S. Ashmore, ed.?), Vietnam: Matters for the Agenda. Center Occasional Papers, Volume 1, number 4. Santa Barbara, CA: Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, June 1968. 64 pp. A lot of this is proposals for possible ways of negotiating an end to the war, including "The Third Solution: A Neutral Coalition: A Discussion with Thich Nhan Hanh" (pp. 6-11). The text has been placed online in the Virtual Vietnam Archive of the Vietnam Project, at Texas Tech University.
Wesley Attewell, "The Lifelines of Empire: Logistics as Infrastructural Power in Occupied South Vietnam," American Quarterly 72:4 (December 2020), pp. pp. 909-35. The American logistical system in Vietnam, and unrest in its labor force. Very anti-war in tone.
Philip D. Beidler, Late Thoughts on an Old War: The Legacy of Vietnam. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004. 224 pp. Beidler commanded an armored cavalry platoon.
J. Bowyer Bell, Dragonwars: Armed Struggle and the Conventions of Modern War. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1999. xviii, 455 pp. Examples from the American involvement in Lebanon, Central America, Greece, and Vietnam.
David A. Biggs, "Between the Rivers and Tides: A Hydraulic History of the Mekong Delta, 1820-1975." Ph.D. dissertation, History, University of Washington, 2004. xi, 423 pp. AAT 3131125. The full text is available online if you are browsing the Internet from an institution, such as Clemson University, that has a subscription to ProQuest "Dissertations and Theses: Full Text."
David A. Biggs, Quagmire: Nation-Building and Nature in the Mekong Delta. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010. xviii, 300 pp.
David Biggs, Footprints of War: Militarized Landscapes in Vietnam. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2018. xix, 250 pp. Looks at the impact of military forces on the landscape of the Thuan Thien - Hue area, and as far west as the A Shau Valley.
Georges Boudarel: see The Boudarel Affair
Gisele L. Bousquet and Pierre Brocheux, eds., Viêt Nam Exposé: French Scholarship on Twentieth-Century Vietnamese Society. Ann Arbor: University of Michgan Press, 2002. viii, 476 pp.
Ray Bows, Vietnam Military Lore: Legends, Shadows and Heroes. Hanover, MA: Bows and Sons, 1998. 1180 pp. Extensively researched, mostly from interviews (though to some extent from documents), this book seems intended mainly for browsing. The titles of the 53 chapters are seldom very informative, so it would be difficult to pick out the chapters dealing with a particular type of subject, but reading at random, one finds an enormous range of interesting items. There is a pretty good index (32 pp.), so you can find particular items by looking up a name or an incident. Bows himself served in the 25th Infantry Division, 1968-69; most of this book deals with earlier periods of the war.
T. Louise Brown, War and Aftermath in Vietnam. New York: Routledge, 1991.
Weldon A. Brown, Prelude to Disaster: The American Role in Vietnam, 1940-1963. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1975.
Weldon A. Brown, The Last Chopper: The Denoument of the American Role in Vietnam, 1963-1975. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1976.
B. G. Burkett and Glenna Whitley, Stolen Valor: How the Vietnam Generation Was Robbed of its Heroes and its History. Dallas: Verity Press, 1998. xxvii, 692 pp. What has gotten the most attention has been Burkett's exposure of cases in which people have falsely claimed to have served in Vietnam, or in which actual Vietnam veterans have inflated their records, often claiming medals they never earned. But he is generally critical of ideas that he feels demean Vietnam veterans and treat them as victims rather than heroes, including exaggerated reports about Agent Orange, post-traumatic stress disorder, suicide among veterans, etc.
Jasen J. Castillo, Endurance and War: The National Sources of Military Cohesion. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014. Two of the eight chapters deal with the US and North Vietnamese military forces in the Vietnam War.
David Chananie, Not Yet at Ease: Photographs of America's Continuing Engagement with the Vietnam War. Capturelife, 2002. 160 pp. Some photographs taken during the war, some after the war (notably at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.).
Nayan Chanda, Brother Enemy: The War after the War. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986. pb New York: Collier, 1988. xiv, 479 pp.
David Chandler and Christopher Goscha, L'espace d'un regard: l'Asie de Paul Mus, 1902-1969. Paris: Indes Savantes, 2006. 335 pp.
Denise Chong, The Girl in the Picture: The Story of Kim Phuc, the Photograph, and the Vietnam War. New York: Viking, 2000. 368 pp. Kim Phuc was the girl who was photographed, naked with napalm burns on her skin, running from her village in 1972.
Judith Lee Clavir, "Better Conquer Hearts than Citadels: A Study in the Sociology of Culture and Social Change in Viet Nam." Ph.D. dissertation, Sociology, University of Toronto, 1975. Looks at the Vietnamese Revolution in the light of traditional ideas about the Mandate of Heaven and the Will of the People.
Geoffrey Clifford (photography) and John Balaban (text), Vietnam: The Land We Never Knew. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1989. 144 pp. The photos, mostly in gorgeous color, were almost all taken in the 1980s.
Tom Corey, Frederick Downs, Patrick Duncan, Marsha Four, and Russ Thurman, "The Warrior's Story: Love the Soldier, Hate the War", in The VVA Veteran, August/September 2000. [I believe articles only stay online for two years.] Edited transcript of a panel session at an April 6-8, 2000, symposium "Rendezvous with War," sponsored by Vietnam Veterans of America and the College of William and Mary. There are brief introductory remarks by moderator James Griffin.
Jean-Pierre Debris and André Menras, Rescapés des bagnes de Saigon: nous accusons. Paris: Éditeurs Français Réunis, 1973. 224 pp. Two Frenchmen who publicly demonstrated in favor of the NLF in Saigon in 1970, and suffered prolonged imprisonment as a result.
Seymour J. Deitchman, The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Science Research and Bureaucracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1975. xiv, 483 pp. Deitchman went to work in late 1963 as special assistant for counterinsurgency to Director of Defense Research and Engineering Harold Brown. In that job, he was involved in efforts to use the research of social scientists, including anthropologists, in support of US goals in third world countries, including but not limited to Vietnam. These efforts became a subject of major public controversy in mid 1965. He also dealt with such issues at ARPA in a later stage of his career. A slightly revised edition, with comments added about the use of social science research to suppoort US efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq after 2001: Quantico, VA: Marine Corps University Press, 2014. xv, 325 pp.
David Dellinger, Vietnam Revisited: From Covert Action to Invasion to Reconstruction. Boston: South End Press, 1986. vi, 232 pp. Dellinger, a pacifist, was one of the important leaders of the anti-war movement.
Maurice Demariaux, Poulo-Condore, archipel du Viêtnam: du bagne historique à la nouvelle zone de développement économique. Paris: l'Harmattan, 1999. 257 pp.
Bernard Edelman, "A Legend in Their Own Minds: Poseurs, Fakes, and Wannabes", in The VVA Veteran, January/February 2003. [I believe articles only stay online for two years.]
John Hart Ely, War and Responsibility: Constitutional Lessons of Vietnam and its Aftermath. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.
Bernard Fall, originally an Austrian, moved to France—he served first in the French resistance and then in the French Army during World War II—and then to the United States. He was the most conspicuous Vietnam expert in the United States until he was killed in Vietnam in 1967. After his death, his papers were donated to the JFK Presidential Library. For his writings see Broad Accounts; World War II and the First Indochina War; The End: Dien Bien Phu and the Geneva Conference; Temporary Peace and Renewed War, 1954–1964; and The Communists.
Robert Fahs, "Back to a Forgotten Street: Bernard Fall and the Limits of Armed Intervention". Prologue Magazine, 43:1 (Spring 2011), pp. 38-47. What files in the National Archives reveal about the State Department's negative view of Fall, particularly in 1958.
Dorothy Fall, Bernard Fall: Memories of a Soldier-Scholar. Dulles, Virginia: Potomac Books, 2006. 336 pp. Bernard Fall's widow wrote this biography, and included interesting information on issues such as the FBI's suspicion of, and surveillance of, Fall in the early 1960s.
Nathaniel L. Moir, Number One Realist: Bernard Fall and Vietnamese Revolutionary Warfare. Hurst, 2021. 376 pp. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. xviii, 516 pp.
Ann Finkbeiner The Jasons: The Secret History of Science's Postwar Elite. New York: Viking (Penguin), 2006. xxx, 304 pp. A group of top-grade scientists, mainly physicists, who provided advice to the US goverment. Played an important role in the development of sensor systems.
Philippe Franchini, Continental Saigon. Paris: Métailié, 1995. 287 pp. Franchini, whose mother was Vietnamese, inherited the famous Continental Hotel from his Corsican father in 1965.
Brigitte Friang, Regarde-toi qui meurs. Paris: Laffont, 1970. Friang, a French journalist, covered both Indochina wars.
Sabrina A. Frizzell, "A Little Piece of Home: The United Service Organization During the Vietnam War, 1963-1973." M.A. Thesis, Texas Tech University, 2001. iv, 121 pp. The text has been placed on-line in the Virtual Vietnam Archive of the Vietnam Project at Texas Tech University, in three parts: front matter and pp. 1-40, pp. 41-81, pp. 82-121. USO.
Marc Jason Gilbert, ed., The Vietnam War: Teaching Approaches and Resources. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1991. 312 pp.
Jim Golden, Lt. Gen. Harold Moore, Herbert Fix, Zalen Grant, Ronald Spector, and Peter Arnett, "Desperate Measures: Search and Destroy, Rolling Thunder, Agent Orange, Phoenix, and Taking the Night Away from Charlie", in The VVA Veteran, June/July 2000. Edited transcript of a panel session at an April 6-8, 2000, symposium "Rendezvous with War," sponsored by Vietnam Veterans of America and the College of William and Mary. [I believe articles only stay online for two years.]
William L. Griffen and John Marciano, Lessons of the Vietnam War: A Critical Examination of School Texts and an Interpretive Comparative History Utilizing the Pentagon Papers and Other Documents. Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld, 1979. xx, 183 pp. [I have also seen this listed as Rowman & Littlefield, but I think that is an error.]
William L. Griffen and John Marciano, Teaching the Vietnam War: A Critical Examination of School Texts and an Interpretive Comparative History Utilizing the Pentagon Papers and Other Documents. Montclair, NJ: Allanheld, Osmun & Co., 1979. xx, 183 pp. [I believe this is simply the paperback of the preceding item, under a different title.]
Kenneth Hagan, "Late Vietnam: Loyalty to What?" Naval History, April 1998, pp. 24-29. Summary of a 1997 symposium "Vietnam, 1965-1975."
James Hamilton-Paterson, The Greedy War. New York: McKay, 1972. 278 pp. (Slightly revised version of A Very Personal War: The Story of Cornelius Hawkridge, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1971. 284 pp.) The story of Cornelius Hawkridge, who worked in Vietnam in 1966 in the administration of refugee camps in Qui Nhon, which were crippled by the theft of most of their operating funds and supplies; and in 1967 trying, with minimal success, to hold down the level of theft at two civilian trucking firms hauling US military supplies and equipment in the Saigon area. He believes that theft, corruption, the currency black market, etc., were siphoning off billions of dollars of US funds in Indochina. (See also Hawkridge's article in Life, Aug. 1, 1969.)
Alfred Hassler, intro. by George McGovern, Saigon, USA. New York: Richard W. Baron, 1970. xiv, 291 pp.
Patrick J. Hearden, ed., Vietnam: Four American Perspectives: Lectures by George S. McGovern, William C. Westmoreland, Edward N. Luttwak, Thomas J. McCormick. Foreword by Akiya Iriye. West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 1990. 128 pp.
Charles Hirschman, Samuel Preston, and Vu Manh Loi, "Vietnamese Casualties during the American War: A New Estimate," Population and Development Review, 21:4 (December 1995), pp. 783-812. The estimate of 966,000 deaths (plus or minus 175,000) looked low to me, so I took a brief look at the article. The study was based on questioning 804 adults, half urban and half rural, in a few areas of Vietnam in 1991. People were asked whether their parents and siblings were still alive, and if not, when and how had they died. When extrapolating from these results, the authors do not appear to have made any effort to deal with problems such as (a) that asking people about their parents will give no data about members of the previous generation who were killed before they were able to have children, and (b) that the asking people about the fate of their siblings and parents will give no data about families that were wiped out in the war. Given this, the statement of the authors (p. 797) that "our estimates of mortality are likely to be biased downward" seems an understatement.
Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler, Vietnam: Why We Fought. New York: Knopf, 1990. x, 196 pp. Also published: Cleveland: World Almanac Publications. Directed to young readers, grades 6-12.
Hue-Tam Ho Tai, ed., The Country of Memory: Remaking the Past in Late Socialist Vietnam. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. xiii, 271 pp.
Roger H. Hull and John C. Novogrod, Law and Vietnam. Dobbs Ferry, NY: Oceana, 1968. 211 pp.
Indo-China. Kegan Paul, 2006 (forthcoming). 536 pp. Distributed in the United States by Columbia University Press. A reference work, written during World War II by the Naval Intelligence Division of the British Admiralty.
Olov R.T. Janse, The Peoples of French Indochina. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1944. iv, 28 pp., plus extensive illustations. War Background Studies, No. 19. The text has been placed online at the Virtual Vietnam Archive of the Vietnam Project, at Texas Tech University, in 3 sections: front matter and pp. 1-14 (possibly incomplete; I suspect the original had a table of contents, and I don't see one here), pp. 15-28.
R.L. Turkoly-Joczik, "The Military Role of Asian Ethnic Minorities in the Second Indochina War, 1959-1975". Doctoral dissertation, University of Wales, Aberstwyth, United Kingdom, 1986.
Kregg P.J. Jorgenson, Beaucoup Dinky Dau: Odd, Unusual, and Unique Stories of the Vietnam War. Seattle: Maxwell James Publishing, 1995.
Kregg P.J. Jorgenson, Very Crazy, G.I. Strange but True Stories of the Vietnam War. New York: Ballantine, 2001. Some, but apparently not all, of this material had appeared in the preceding item.
Benedict J. Tria Kerkvliet and David G. Marr, eds., Beyond Hanoi: Local Government in Vietnam. Singapore: ISEAS, 2004. xii, 359 pp. Devoted mostly to the postwar situation, but includes some discussion of pre-war and wartime local government.
Lt. Col. Harlan G. Koch, USA, "Monsoons and Military Operations" Military Review, June 1965 (vol. XLV, no. 6), pp. 25-34.
Heonik Kwon, Ghosts of War in Vietnam. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 232 pp. A study of beliefs and stories, in Vietnam, about the wandering ghosts of the war dead.
Virginia M. Laffey, "The Invisible Regiment: The Wives, Mothers and Girlfriends of American Soldiers in Vietnam." Ph.D. dissertation, Boston University, 2006. DA 3194767.
[P.B. Lafont, ed.?], Les frontières du Vietnam: histoire des frontières de la péninsule Indochinoise. Paris: l'Harmattan, 1989. 268 pp.
Meredith H. Lair, Armed with Abundance: Consumerism and Soldiering in the Vietnam War. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. xviii, 295 pp.
Wendy Wilder Larsen and Tran Thi Nga, Shallow Graves: Two Women and Vietnam. New York: Random House, 1986. Poetry by an American woman who went to Saigon in 1970 to join her journalist husband, and a local woman who worked in her husband's office.
Le Huu Tri, Prisoner of the Word: A Memoir of the Vietnamese Reeducation Camps. Black Heron Press, 2001. 350 pp.
Christopher R. Leahy, Whitewashing War: Historical Myth, Corporate Texbooks, and Possibilities for Democratic Education. New York: Teachers College Press, 2010. xiv, 146 pp.
David W. Levy, The Debate over Vietnam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. xix, 217 pp.
Richard Linnett and Roberto Loiederman, The Eagle Mutiny. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2001. 304 pp. The hijacking of an American ship to Cambodia in 1970 by two crew members.
Jana Lipman, In Camps: Vietnamese Refugees, Asylum Seekers, and Repatriates. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2020. Looks at refugee camps in Guam, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Hong Kong, and the evolution of Asian governments' policies toward the refugees.
Nancy E. Lynch, Vietnam Mailbag: Voice from the War: 1968-1972. Bethel, Delaware: Broad Creek Books, 2008. x, 446 pp. From 1968 to 1972, Nancy Lynch, a reporter, had a column "Nancy's Vietnam Mailbag" in the Morning News of Wilmington, Delaware (and perhaps another newspaper published by the News-Journal Corporation?), in which she published letters sent by soldiers from Delaware who were serving in Vietnam. Part I (pp. 1-349) of this lavishly illustrated volume contains texts of some letters, and brief excerpts from others, with commentary by Lynch. Part II (pp. 351-427) contains recent interviews with a dozen men.
Joseph E. McCarthy, Illusion of Power: American Policy Toward Vietnam, 1954-1966. New York: Carlton, 1967. McCarthy, a US Army Lt. Col. when he wrote this, had been a military advisor in Vietnam, 1956-57. He says very little about events after 1963.
Mary McCarthy, The Seventeenth Degree. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974. A collection of five pieces, some previously published elsewhere: "How it Went", "Vietnam", "Hanoi", "Medina", and "Sons of the Morning" (a negative review of David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest).
Lt. Col. Jerry L. McKain, "Schilling Manor." Military Review, November 1971 (vol. LI, no. 11), pp. 24-29. The Army in 1966 began housing the families of men serving overseas (all or most in Vietnam) on a former Air Force base in Kansas. [See also Moreau, below.]
Robert S. McKelvey, A Gift of Barbed Wire: America's Allies Abandoned in South Vietnam. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002. 280 pp.
Robert S. McNamara, James Blight, Robert Brigham, Thomas Beirsteker, and Col. Herbert Schandler, Argument without End: In Search of Answers to the Vietnam Tragedy. New York: Public Affairs, 1999. xxiii, 479 pp. Includes transcripts of discussions with Vietnamese in Hanoi.
Kim McQuaid, The Anxious Years: America in the Vietnam-Watergate Era. New York: Basic Books, 1989 (hb), 1990 (pb). 368 pp.
Robert S. Mansfield and William L. Worden, Towboats to the Orient: A History of Alaska Barge and Transport in the South China Sea. Seattle: PAC, 1970.
David Mantell, True Americanism: Green Berets and War Resisters, a Study of Commitment. New York: Teachers College Press, 1974. 285 pp.
David Marr, "Concepts of 'Individual' and 'Self' in Twentieth-Century Vietnam," Modern Asian Studies, 34:4 (October 2000), pp. 769-796.
Edwin Anton Martini III, "Invisible Enemies: The American War on Vietnam, 1975-2000." Ph.D. dissertation, University of Maryland, College Park, 2004. AAT 3128874. xiii, 531 pp. Full text available online.
Edwin E. Martini, Invisible Enemies: The American War on Vietnam, 1975-2000. University of Massachusetts Press, 2007. A mixture of diplomatic and cultural history, this study looks at American policy toward Vietnam, and representations of Vietnam in American culture (including discussions of the MIA issue, and movies about the war), in the years after 1975.
Richard A. Melanson, Writing History and Making Policy: The Cold War, Vietnam, and Revisionism (vol. VI in the series American Values Projected Abroad). Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1983.
Edward P. Metzner, Huynh Van Chinh, and Tran Van Phuc, Reeducation in Postwar Vietnam: Personal Postscripts to Peace. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2001. 160 pp.
Jeffrey S. Milstein, Dynamics of the Vietnam War: A Quantitative Analysis and Predictive Computer Simulation. Ohio State University Press, 1974. xv, 274 pp. The full text has been placed online by Ohio State University Press.
Donna Moreau, Waiting Wives: The Story of Schilling Manor, Home Front to the Vietnam War. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005. 336 pp. Schilling Air Force Base, in Salina, Kansas, was closed as a base in 1964. It was then converted into a residence for the families of U.S. military personnel serving in Vietnam. [See also McKain, above.]
Ngo Vinh Long, "Military Victory and the Difficult Tasks of Reconciliation in Vietnam: A Cautionary Tale." Peace & Change 38:4 (October 2013), pp. 474-87.
Nguyen Dinh Hoa, Vietnamese. Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1997. x, 290 pp. A study of the language.
Nguyen Thi Dieu, The Mekong River and the Struggle for Indochina: Water, War, and Peace. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999. 280 pp.
Thich Nhat Hanh, foreword by Daniel Berrigan, Love in Action: Writings on Nonviolent Social Change. Berkeley: Parallax Press, 1993. 154 pp.
Thich Nhat Hanh, foreword by Thomas Merton, Vietnam: Lotus in a Sea of Fire. New York: Hill and Wang, 1967. x, 115 pp.
Ziad Obermeyer, Christopher J.L. Murray, and Emmanuela Gakidou, "Fifty years of violent war deaths from Vietnam to Bosnia: analysis of data from the world health survey programme." BMJ [British Medical Journal], 19 June 2008. Estimates of the deaths tolls from war in various countries from household surveys conducted 2002-3, asking people about deaths of their siblings. Unlike Hirschman et al. (above), these authors attempted to compensate, in extrpolating from their data, for the fact that people who were themselves dead by the time of the survey would have been unable to report the deaths of their siblings. This was surely part of the reason they got a much higher estimate of war-related deaths in Vietnam: 3,812,000 deathsbetween 1955 and 2002. The uncertainty of this estimate was fairly wide; the authors said they had a 95% confidence of the number being between 2,207,000 and 5,942,000. The text is online for some users.
Milton Osborne, The Mekong: Turbulent Past, Uncertain Future. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2000. xvi, 295 pp. The full text is available online to paid subscribers of Questia.
Tim Page, Douglas Niven, and Christopher Riley, eds., Another Vietnam: Pictures of the War from the Other Side. National Geographic Society, 2002.
Stephen Pan and Daniel Lyons, S.J., Vietnam Crisis. New York: Twin Circle, 1966. A strongly anti-Communist view.
Patricia M. Pelley, Postcolonial Vietnam; New Histories of the National Past. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. xi, 326 pp.
Péninsule. Journal published twice a year since 1980, at the Sorbonne in Paris, dealing mostly with Indochina, though to some extent it also covers other parts of Southeast Asia. Formerly Bulletin des Amis du Royaume Lao (1970-1975) and Présence Indochinoise (1978-1979). Web site Péninsule.
Clyde E. Pettit, The Experts: 100 Years of Blunder in Indochina. Lyle Stuart, 1975. Author was on the staff of the US Senate.
John Prados, The Hidden History of the Vietnam War. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1995. xii, 329 pp.
"Programs of Assistance in South Vietnam, Operated and Supported by US Nonprofit Organizations." New York: Technical Assistance Information Clearing House (TAICH), October 1966. 18 pp. The text has been placed on-line in the Virtual Vietnam Archive of the Vietnam Project at Texas Tech University.
Quang-Minh, Dai-Viet Quoc-Dan-Dang: Cach Mang Viet Nam Thoi Can Kim, 1938-1995. Westminster, CA: Van Nghe, n.d. 410 pp.
The RAND Corporation (sometimes Rand Corporation) is a "think tank" that has long done a lot of research, both classified and unclassified, for the US government.
Alex Abella, Soldiers of Reason: The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire. Orlando, FL: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008. 388 pp.
Mai Elliott, RAND in Southeast Asia: A History of the Vietnam War Era. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2010. xxii, 672 pp.
Most unclassified RAND publications can be purchased in hard copy through the RAND Corporation online bookstore, but many also can be read online for free.
T. T. Connors, Milton G. Weiner, and J. A. Wilson, The Land Borders of South Vietnam: Some Physical and Cultural Characteristics. R-483-ARPA. Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation, January 1970. xv, 145 pp. Declassified in 2006.
Victor J. Croizat, The Development of the Plain of Reeds: Some Politico-Military Implications. Santa Monica: Rand, 1969. P-3976. 93 pp.
Milton Gershwin Weiner and Marvin B. Schaffer, Border Security in South Vietnam. Santa Monica: Rand, 1971. R-0572-ARPA. 207 pp.
Mathematical models of warfare: Rand Corporation Studies. The Rand (RAND) Corporation, a "think tank" financed by the U.S. military, published a variety of studies involving mathematical modeling of warfare. Those based on the Lanchester equations tended to be fairly abstract. Those using the FAST-VAL model often compared the model's predictions with actual combat experiences of U.S. Marines in I Corps.
FAST-VAL (Forward Air Strike Evaluation Model). Rand published 18 studies involving this model, which despite its name actually considered the effect of ground weaponry, not just air power. A few appeared between 1966 and 1970, but most were dated November 1971. Most were classified "Secret," but some were "Confidential" or unclassified. Some or all of the classified ones were declassified in 1991. Some but not all are available online. Some that formerly were available have been withdrawn.
K. Harris, R. N. Snow, and Jennifer R. Lind, FAST-VAL: Target Coverage Model. RM-4567-PR. March 1966. Confidential.
Jennifer R. Lind, Fast-Val: A Model for Forward Air Strike Evaluation. P-3076. March 1965. Available on microfiche through NTIS.
Jennifer Lind, K. Harris, and S. G. Spring, A FAST-VAL View of Khe Sanh, 1967. RM-6294-PR. August 1970. Secret.
Jennifer Lind, K. Harris, and S. G. Spring, FAST-VAL: A Study of Close Air Support (A Briefing Summarizing the Comparisons of Model with Combat Results and Illustrating the Influence of Supporting Arms on Fire-fight Outcomes). R-811-PR. November 1971. ix, 35 pp. Declassified 1991.
S. H. Miller, FAST-VAL: Case Study of North Vietnamese Army Mortar Attack on U.S. Marine Infantry Company and Battalion Command Post at Hill 256 near the Ben Hai River. R-823-PR. November 1971. xv, 61 pp. B Company and battalion command post of 1/9 Marines, 17 September 1968.
S. G. Spring, K. Harris, and Jennifer R. Lind, FAST-VAL: Case Study of a Two-Company NVA Attack on a Marine Company in a Defensive Position on Foxtrot Ridge. R-819-PR. November 1971. ix, 68 pp. An attack by PAVN infantry, mortars, and artillery against I Company, 3/4 Marines, on "Foxtrot Ridge" (XD 871383 to XD 877381, near Khe Sanh), 30 June to 1 July, 1968.
S. G. Spring, Jennifer R. Lind, and K. Harris, FAST-VAL: Case Study of an Attack in the DMZ, 8 October 1968. R-818-PR. November 1971. ix, 114 pp. Declassified 1991. Looks at an action fought by E and H Companies, 2/26 Marines, in the vicinity of Don Ong Cay (XC 990690), Northwest of Camp Carroll, 8 October 1968.
S. G. Spring and S. H. Miller, FAST-VAL: Relationships Among Casualties, Suppression, and the Performance of Company-Size Units. RM-6268-PR. March 1970. Available on microfiche through NTIS.
K.K. Weaver and S. G. Spring, FAST-VAL: Case Study of an Attack by A Marine Platoon on an NVA Company near Kin (1) South of Da Nang. R-821-PR. November 1971. xi, 107 pp. 1st Platoon, L Company, 3/5 Marines, attacking PAVN troops in a treeline near the bridge where Route 4 crosses the Suoi Co Ca River, 28 November 1968, during Operation MEADE RIVER.
Lanchester equations
Marvin B. Schaffer, Lanchester Models for Phase II Insurgency. P-3261. Santa Monica, CA: Rand, November 1965. iii, 12 pp.
Marvin B. Schaffer, Lanchester Models of Guerrilla Engagements. RM-5053-ARPA. Santa Monica, CA: Rand, January 1967. ix, 46 pp.
Marvin B. Schaffer, Application of Lanchester Theory to Insurgency Problems. RM-5665-PR. Santa Monica, CA: Rand, 1976. xiv, 35 pp. This is a sanitized version, issued in 1976, of a classified publication originally issued in February 1969. But the cover and title page give only the date February 1969, with no indication that this is actually a different version of the paper, issued in 1976.
Allan Rehm, ed., "Analyzing Guerrilla Warfare." Proceedings of a conference, September 24, 1985, McLean, Virginia. The conference, apparently sponsored by some unidentified intelligence agency, brought together people who had done analysis of the Vietnam War while it was going on, mostly working for the U.S. government either directly or through organizations like the Rand Corporation, to discuss how such analysis had been done. The text has been placed on-line in the Virtual Vietnam Archive of the Vietnam Project at Texas Tech University, in three parts: front matter, assorted introductory speeches, and presentations by Thomas Thayer, John Battilega, and George Allen (CIA); questions and anwers on George Allen's presentation; presentations by Leon Goure (Rand), George Haering (Navy); the beginning of this is, I think, viewgraph slides from Haering's presentation; followed by panel discussion and bibliography.
Ronald Jay Rexilius, "Americans Without Dog Tags: United States Civilians in the Vietnam War, 1950-1975." Ph.D. dissertation, History, University of Nebraska at Lincoln, 2000. 626 pp. AAT 9977015. The full text is available online if you are browsing the Internet from an institution, such as Clemson University, that has a subscription to ProQuest "Dissertations and Theses: Full Text."
Chris Rohlfs, "Essays Measuring Dollar-Fatality Tradeoffs and Other Human Costs of War in World War II and Vietnam." Ph.D. dissertation, Economics, University of Chicago, 2006.
Josef W. Rokus, The Professionals: History of the Phu Lam, Vietnam U.S. Army Communications Base. Philadelphia: Xlibris, 2002. 523 pp. The Phu Lam communications facility, on Highway 4 on the western edge of Saigon, was established early in 1962, and eventually grew to a very large size. All communications equipment was stripped out before it was handed to the ARVN approximately September 1972. Rockus had been assistant operations officer 1967-1968. Partly a narrative history, partly oral history.
Donald M. Rothberg, "Assuming Nothing: How Mortuary Practices Changed During The Vietnam War", in The VVA Veteran, August/September 2001. [I believe articles only stay online for two years.]
Sam Sarkesian, Unconventional Conflicts in a New Security Era: Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1993. xii, 225 pp. The full text is available online to paid subscribers of Questia.
Orrin Schwab, A Clash of Cultures: Civil-Military Relations During the Vietnam War. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006. xvi, 193 pp.
Christina Schwenkel, The American War in Contemporary Vietnam: Transnational Remembrance and Representation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. xiii, 264 pp.
Paul A. Scipione, M.A.R.S. Calling back to 'The World': A History of Military Affiliate Radio Systems Operations during the Vietnam War. Kalamazoo: Center for the Study of the Vietnam War, 1994. Large portions of this book are short accounts of particular incidents, by personnel who participated in the system, which allowed soldiers in Vietnam to talk with their families by a radio hookup that went from M.A.R.S. stations in Vietnam, to "Ham" radio operators in the United States, who then patched the calls to local phone lines.
Neil Sheehan, After the War was Over: Hanoi and Saigon. New York: Random House 1992. 131pp. This book contains material from interviews with Vietnamese who played crucial roles in the war.
Lt. Col. Charles R. Shrader, Amicicide: The Problem of Friendly Fire in Modern War. Fort Leavenworth, Kansas: Combat Studies Institute, US Army Command and General Staff College, 1982. xii, 146 pp. Shrader seems to be the Army's expert on amicide.
Michael Sledge, Soldier Dead: How We Recover, Bury, and Honor Our Military Fallen. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. x, 357 pp. World War I through Iraq.
Small Wars and Insurgencies. London: Frank Cass, 1990- . Publishes quite a lot of articles dealing with the Indochina Wars. Issues since 2001 are available online if you are browsing the Internet from an institution that has paid the fee for Taylor & Francis Journals.
G.D.T. Shaw, "Policeman versus Soldiers, the Debate Leading to MAAG Objections and Washington Rejections of the Core of the British Counter Insurgency Advice." Small Wars and Insurgencies, 12:2 (Summer 2001), pp. 51-78.
William Rosenau, "The Kennedy Administration, US Foreign Internal Security Assistance and the Challenge of 'Subterranean War', 1961-63." Small Wars and Insurgencies, 14:3 (Autumn 2003), pp. 65-99.
Philippe Pottier, "CMA/GMI: A French Experience in Counterinsurgency during the French Indochina War." Small Wars and Insurgencies, 16:2 (June 2005), pp. 125-146. The Groupement de Commandos Mixtes Aéroportés, established in 1951.
James McAllister and Ian Schulte, "The Limits of Influence in Vietnam: Britain, the United States and the Diem Regime, 1959–63." Small Wars and Insurgencies, 17:1 (March 2006), pp. 22-43.
Geraint Hughes, "A 'Post-war' War: The British Occupation of French-Indochina, September 1945–March 1946." Small Wars and Insurgencies, 17:3 (September 2006), pp. 263-286.
Pang Yang Huei, "Beginning of the End: ARVN and Vietnamisation (1969–72)." Small Wars and Insurgencies, 17:3 (September 2006), pp. 287-310.
Sara Elizabeth Smits, "Unclear path: Explosive remnants of war in Vietnam." Ph.D. dissertation, Sociology, Syracuse University, 2007. ix, 206 pp. AAT 3281735. Looks at postwar victims of Vietnam War explosive devices in Quang Tri province, and at Clear Path International, an NGO that deals with this problem.
Eleanor Jane Sterling, Martha Maud Hurley, and Le Duc Minh, Vietnam: A Natural History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. 448 pp.
General Maxwell Taylor, Responsibility and Response. New York: Harper & Row, 1967. xi, 84 pp. Lectures, some dealing with Vietnam, that General Taylor gave at Lehigh University in 1966.
Winburn T. Thomas, "The Vietnam Story of International Voluntary Services, Inc." Washington, DC: International Voluntary Services, 1972. 302 pp. IVS, a respected nongovernmental organization that was to some extent an inspiration for the creation of the Peace Corps, operated in Vietnam from 1956 to 1971.
W. Scott Thompson and Donaldson D. Frizzell, eds., The Lessons of Vietnam. New York: Crane, Russak & Company, 1977. xi, 288 pp. Much of the volume is made up of transcripts from conferences sponsored by the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, in 1973 and 1974. Hawkish in tone.
Jonathan Tran, The Vietnam War and Theologies of Memory: Time and Eternity in the Far Country. Wiley-Blackwell (John Wiley & Sons), forthcoming 2010.
Tran Tam Tinh, Dieu et César: les Catholiques dans l'histoire du Vietnam. Paris: Sudestasie, 1978. 238 pp.
Vietnam Veterans for Factual History (VVFH), an organization that strongly endorses the American war effort in Vietnam, has published a series of volumes on the war:
Our "Pre-sponse" — A Supplement to the TTu-NARA Conference on the Year 1963. Houston: Radix Press, 2013. A volume published in advance, to rebut what VVFH anticipated would be an anti-war bias in presentations at a 2013 conference.
Indochina in the Year of the Dragon - 1964. Houston: Radix Press.
Indochina in the Year of the Snake - 1965. Houston: Radix Press.
Indochina in the Year of the Goat - 1966. Houston: Radix Press.
Indochina in the Year of the Dragon - 1967. Houston: Radix Press.
Indochina in the Year of the Monkey - 1968. Houston: Radix Press, 2017. 272 pp.
Indochina in the Year of the Cock - 1969. Houston: Radix Press, 2017. 257 pp.
Indochina in the Year of the Rabbit - 1975. Houston: Radix Press.
Glenn R. Walker, Jr., "The Evolution of Civil-Military Relations in Vietnam." Master's thesis, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California. 100 pp. Can be ordered as ADA283605 from the National Technical Information Service.
Edmund F. Wehrle, "'Reprehensible Repercussions': The AFL-CIO, Free Trade Unionism, and the Vietnam War, 1947-1975." Ph.D. dissertation, University of Maryland at College Park, 1998. Deals with the AFL-CIO's support for US policy in Vietnam, and for Tran Quoc Buu's Vietnamese Confederation of Labor. 371 pp. DA 9836500.
Edmund F. Wehrle, Between a River and a Mountain: The AFL-CIO and the Vietnam War. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. viii, 304 pp. Based on the dissertation above.
Jac Weller, Fire and Movement: Bargain-Basement Warfare in the Far East. Discusses several guerrilla wars in Asia, not just Vietnam, and the armies that have been involved in those wars.
Richard West, War and Peace in Vietnam. London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1995. 365 pp. West a British journalist, endorses the American war effort, which he covered from 1965 onward. The first half of the book deals mostly with Vietnam, some Laos, Cambodia and Thailand, 1965-75. The second half is on post-1975 issues.
Christine Pelzer White, "Everyday Resistance, Socialist Revolution and Rural Development: The Vietnamese Case," in James C. Scott and Benedict J. Tria Kerkvliet, eds., Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance in South-east Asia (London: Frank Cass, 1986), pp. 49- . Looks at peasant resistance to elites in both colonial and socialist Vietnam.
James Wright, Enduring Vietnam: An American Generation and Its War. Thomas Dunne Books, 2017. 464 pp. Wright interviewed 160 combat veterans and their families.
Joseph J. Zasloff and Allan A. Goodman, eds., Indochina in Conflict: A Political Assessment. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1972. xv, 227 pp. Papers (revised) from a 1971 seminar of the Asia Society's Southeast Asia Development Advisory Group (SEADAG).
See also the section Comparisons between Vietnam and Iraq in my Bibliography of the US-Iraq Wars.
Christian G. Appy, American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity. New York: Viking (Penguin), 2015. 416 pp.
Gordon Arnold, The Afterlife of America's War in Vietnam: Changing Visions in Politics and on Screen. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2006. vii, 230 pp.
Milton J. Bates, The Wars we Took to Vietnam: Cultural Conflict and Storytelling. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. x, 328 pp.
Amber Batura, "The Playboy Way: Playboy Magazine, Soldiers, and the Military in Vietnam," Journal of American East Asian Relations, 22:3 (2015), pp. 221-242.
Keith Beattie, The Scar that Binds: American Culture and the Vietnam War. New York: NYU Press, 1998. x, 230 pp.
Michael Bibby, ed., The Vietnam War and Postmodernity. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000. xvi, 242 pp.
Major Michael J. Brady, "The Army and the Strategic Military Legacy of Vietnam." Thesis, Master of Military Art and Science, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, 1990. ix, 322 pp. The text is online in the Combined Arms Research Library of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College.
Jeffrey Thomas Brierton, "War on Two Fronts: Vietnam and the Heartland: A Study of the Effects of the Vietnam War on an American Community." Ph.D. dissertation, History, Loyola University of Chicago, 2002. 270 pp. AAT 3056408. Looks at Waukegan, Illinois.
Robert Buzzanco, Vietnam and the Transformation of American Life. Malden MA: Blackwell, 1999. 276 pp.
Charotte Cahill, "Fighting the Vietnam Syndrome: The Construction of a Conservative Veterans Politics, 1966-1984." Ph.D. dissertation, History, Northwestern University, 2008. UMI 3336524. 258 pp.
Walter H. Capps, The Unfinished War: Vietnam and the American Conscience. Boston: Beacon Press, 1982. Short and carelessly written.
William W. Cobb, Jr., The American Foundation Myth in Vietnam: Reigning Paradigms and Raining Bombs. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1998. ix, 215 pp.
Thomas Crosbie, "Democratic Oversight and Military Autonomy: The U.S. Army's Management of American Journalism, 1939-2004." Ph.D. Dissertation, Yale, 2014. UMI 3582239. 212 pp. Compares military-media relations in World war II, Vietnam, and the Global War on Terror with particulary focus on Abu Ghraib.
Kenneth B. Cunningham, "Losing hearts and minds: The cultural mediation of the Vietnam War Experience in America." Ph.D. dissertation, Sociology, City University of New York, 2000. AAT 9969686. How the war is remembered and interpreted.
Gregory A. Daddis, Pulp Vietnam: War and Gender in Cold War Men's Adventure Magazines. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 358 pp.
Gerald J. DeGroot, The Sixties Unplugged: A Kaleidoscopic History of a Disorderly Decade. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008. xi, 508 pp. DeGroot is hostile to leftist political movements.
Amanda Demmer, After Saigon's Fall: Refugees and US-Vietnamese Relations, 1975-2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.
Susan Lyn Eastman, The American War in Vietnam: Cultural Memories at the Turn of the Century. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2017. xvi, 228 pp.
Yen Le Espiritu, Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refugees, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014.
Marcia A. Eymann and Charles Wollenberg, eds., What's Going On?: California and the Vietnam Era. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. 209 pp. Deals with pro-war forces (note Jules Tygiel's essay on Ronald Reagan), not just anti-war.
H. Bruce Franklin, Vietnam and Other American Fantasies. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000. 256 pp.
Danielle S. Glassmeyer, "'Sentimental Orientalism' and American Intervention in Vietnam (Graham Greene, Tom Dooley, Eugene Burdick, William J. Lederer, Walter Lang)" Ph.D. dissertation, American Studies(?), Loyola University of Chicago, 2001. 311 pp. AAT 3015509. Deals with the 1950s.
Charles R. Grey, "Four Vietnams: Conflicting visions of the Indochina conflict in American culture." Ph.D. dissertation, English, Florida State University, 2005. iv, 269 pp. AAT 3198219. The full text is available online if you are browsing the Internet from an institution, such as Clemson University, that has a subscription to ProQuest "Dissertations and Theses: Full Text."
Patrick Hagopian, The Vietnam War in American Memory: Veterans, Memorials, and the Politics of Healing. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009. xv, 553 pp.
Mitchell K. Hall, Crossroads: American Popular Culture and the Vietnam Generation. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005. xii, 241 pp.
Andrew Jonathan Huebner, "The Embattled Americans: A cultural history of soldiers and veterans, 1941--1982." Ph.D. dissertation, History, Brown University, 2004. 448 pp. AAT 3134287. The full text is available online if you are browsing the Internet from an institution, such as Clemson University, that has a subscription to ProQuest "Dissertations and Theses: Full Text."
Andrew J. Huebner, The Warrior Image: Soldiers in American Culture from the Second World War to the Vietnam Era. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. x, 369 pp.
Arnold R. Isaacs, Vietnam Shadows: The War, Its Ghosts, and Its Legacy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. xii, 236 pp. The cultural battle within the United States over the meaning of Vietnam.
Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin, America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. 368 pp. 5th ed.: New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. 384 pp.
Susan Jeffords, The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War. Bloomington: Indiana University press, 1989.
David Kieran, Forever vietnam: How a Divisive War Changed American Public Memory. Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014. xii, 305 pp.
Katherine Kinney, Friendly Fire: American Images of the Vietnam War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. 320 pp.
Rebecca E. Klatch, Generation Divided: The New Left, the New Right, and the 1960s. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. xiv, 386 pp.
Scott Laderman, Tours of Vietnam: War, Travel Guides, and Memory. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. xv, 289 pp.
Scott Laderman and Edwin A. Martini, eds., Four Decades On: Vietnam, the United States, and the Legacies of the Second Indochina War. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013. 334 pp.
Jerry Lembcke, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam. New York: NYU Press, 1998. xi, 216 pp. Argues that stories of hostility to soldiers returning from Vietnam have been seriously exaggerated. But the impression I get, glancing through the book, is that Lembcke is exaggerating his argument on the other side.
Lloyd B. Lewis, The Tainted War: Culture and Identity in Vietnam War Narratives. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1985. 193 pp. Analyzes nineteen accounts by men who served in Vietnam.
Mark Hamilton Lytle, America's Uncivil Wars: The Sixties Era from Elvis to the Fall of Richard Nixon. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. xvi, 416 pp.
Robert J. McMahon, "Contested Memory: The Vietnam War and American Society, 1975-2001." Diplomatic History, 26:2 (Spring 2002), pp. 159-84.
Mike Marqusee, Chimes of Freedom: The Politics of Bob Dylan's Art. New York: The New Press, 2003. 327 pp.
Ron Milam, The Vietnam War in Popular Culture: The Influence of America's Most Controversial War on Everyday Life. 2 vols. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger (ABC-CLIO), 2017.
Richard J. Morris and Peter C. Ehrenhaus, eds., Cultural Legacies of Vietnam: Uses of the Past in the Present. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1990. xi, 238 pp.
Linda Ho Peché, Alex-Thai Dinh Vo, and Tuong Vu, eds., Toward a Framework for Vietnamese American Studies: History, Community, and Memory. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2023.
Ron Robin, The Making of the Cold War Enemy: Culture and Politics in the Military-Industrial Complex. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. xvi, 277 pp. A bitter critique of the role of American behavioral scientists (mostly psychologists, sociologists, and political scientists) in the Cold War. Charges that many of these people supported America's Cold-War hostilities in a very simple-minded fashion. Greatest emphasis on the Korean War, but also significant attention to Vietnam.
David Ryan, US Collective Memory, Intervention and Vietnam: The Cultural Politics of US Foreign Policy since 1969. (I have seen this listed as forthcoming from Routledge, 2018, but I cannot find any indication it was actually published.)
Wilbur J. Scott, The Politics of Readjustment: Vietnam Veterans Since the War. New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1993. Republished, with a new afterword by the author, as vietnam Veterans Since the War: The Politics of PTSD, Agent Orange, and the National Memorial. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004.
Robert D. Schulzinger, A Time for Peace: The Legacy of the Vietnam War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. 288 pp.
William V. Spanos, America's Shadow: An Anatomy of Empire. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. 287 pp. Spanos (an English professor) traces U.S. actions in Vietnam to a tradition of imperialist violence going back to the Roman Empire. Written in dense postmodernist jargon; I have not read enough of it to judge whether it says anything worthwhile.
Jean-Marie Stevens, "'They Fought as Bravely as Any American Fighting Men': Conservative Republicans and the Attempt to Save American Exceptionalism from the Loss in Vietnam, 1975-1991l." Ph.D. dissertation, Arizona State University, 2014. UMI 3646123. viii, 238 pp.
Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. x, 358 pp. Looks particularly at the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial ("The Wall") and at the way the war has been reflected in photographs and films.
Robert Timberg, "The Vietnam Fault Line." Naval History, August 1996, pp. 15-19. Timberg, Annapolis '64, Marine Veteran of Vietnam, and in 1996 deputy chief of the Baltimore Sun's Washington Bureau, gave this talk at Annapolis about the divide between Vietnam veterans and those who did not serve.
Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. viii, 374 pp.
John A. Wood, Veteran Narratives and the Collective Memory of the Vietnam War. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2016. viii, 194 pp.
Spencer D. Bakich, Success and failure in limited war: Information and strategy in the Korean, Vietnam, Persian Gulf, and Iraq Wars. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. xiii, 329 pp.
Douglas A. Borer, Superpowers Defeated: Vietnam and Afghanistan Compared. London: Frank Cass, 1999.
Robert K. Brigham, Is Iraq Another Vietnam? New York: PublicAffairs, 2006. xv, 207 pp. I don't know whether any modifications have been made in the paperback edition, Iraq, Vietnam, and the Limits of American Power. New York: PublicAffairs, 2008.
Kenneth J. Campbell, A Tale of Two Quagmires: Iraq, Vietnam, and the Hard Lessons of War. Boulder, Colorado: Paradigm Publishers, 2007. xxi, 136 pp. Very anti-war.
John Dumbrell and David Ryan, eds., Vietnam in Iraq: Tactics, Lessons, Legacies and Ghosts. New York: Routledge (Taylor & Francis), 2007. xi, 240 pp.
Jeffrey Allan Friedman, "Cumulative Dynamics and Strategic Assessment: U.S. Military Decision Making in Iraq, Vietnam, and the American Indian Wars," Ph.D. dissertation, Public Policy, Harvard, 2013. DA 3566879.
Lloyd C. Gardner and Marilyn B. Young, eds., Iraq and the Lessons of Vietnam, Or, How Not to Learn from the Past. New York: The New Press, 2007. 322 pp.
Gary J. Heffner and E. R. Worthington, "Vietnam vs. Iraq: A Comparison of the Soldier's Experience, Preparations for Each War, the Fighting in Each War, and the Return Home for the Soldiers of Each War." Paper presented at the Sixth Triennial Vietnam Symposium, Texas Tech University, 3/14/2008.
Pierre Journoud and Cécile Menétrey-Monchau, eds., Vietnam, 1968–1976: La sortie de guerre/Exiting a War. Bruxelles: P.I.E. Peter Lang, 2011. Enjeux Internationaux/International Issues, no. 17. 378 pp. plus CD.
David L. Schalk, "Vietnam et Irak: les intellectuels américains face à la guerre" (pp. 315-329)
Marianna P. Sullivan, "Vietnam and Iraq: A Comparison of Public Opinion" (pp. 321-342)
David Kieran, "'It's a different time. It's a different era. It's a different place.': The Legacy of Vietnam and contemporary memoirs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan." War & Society, March 2012, pp. 64-83.
James H. Lebovic, The Limits of U.S. Military Capability: Lessons from Vietnam and Iraq. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. x, 297 pp.
Adrian Lewis, The American Culture of War: A History of American Military Force from World War II to Operation Iraqi Freedom. New York: Routledge, 2006. 560 pp.
Timothy J. Lomperis, "To a Baghdad Victory via Saigon: How the Wrong Nation-building Strategy That Failed in Vietnam Can Be Righted to Succeed in Iraq," World Affairs 168:4 (Spring 2006), pp. 147-56.
Kelly McHugh, "Understanding Congress's Role in Terminating Unpopular Wars: A Comparison of the Vietnam and Iraq Wars," Democracy and Security 10:3 (2014), pp. 191-224.
H. R. McMaster, "The Human Element: When Gadgetry Becomes Strategy," World Affairs Winter 2009, pp. 31-43. Also published, slightly abridged, as "This Familiar Battleground,", Hoover Digest, 10/9/2009.
Richard M. Miller, Jr., Funding Extended Conflicts: Korea, Vietnam, and the War on Terror. Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2007. xviii, 179 pp.
"The Politics of Troop Withdrawal" Conference on the politics of American withdrawal from Vietnam, with considerable discussion of withdrawal from Iraq as a comparative case, held at the Miller Center for Public Affairs, University of Virginia, June 5-6, 2008. Audio and in most cases video recordings of the sessions are online at the conference web site. Many of the papers have also been published, more or less modified, in Diplomatic History 34:3 (June 2010). I have listed below only those papers that I am sure contained significant discussion of Iraq; there may also have been some discussion of this topic in some of the others.
Melvin Small,
"Bring the Boys Home Now! What We Can Learn from Antiwar Movement Strategies for U.S. Withdrawal from Vietnam." Published in
Diplomatic History
34:3 (June 2010), pp. 543-553, under the title "Bring the Boys Home Now! Antiwar Activism and Withdrawal from Vietnam--and Iraq."
Comment by Ralph Levering
Jeffrey Record,
"Leaving Vietnam: Insights for Iraq?" Published in Diplomatic History
34:3 (June 2010), pp. 567-576.
Comment by Brig. Gen. Charles F. Brower
Bernard Kalb, Robert G. Kaiser, and Steven Lee Myers, roundtable, "The Politics of Withdrawal: The Case of Iraq"
Mark Atwood Lawrence,
"Too Late or Too Soon? Debating the Withdrawal from Vietnam in the Age of Terrorism." Published in Diplomatic History
34:3 (June 2010), pp. 589-600, under the title "Too Late or Too Soon? Debating the Withdrawal from Vietnam in the Age of Iraq." I thought
this one was very good.
Comment by Robert Schulzinger
Andrew Priest, "From Saigon to Baghdad: The Vietnam Syndrome, the Iraq War and American Foreign Policy" (review essay), Intelligence and National Security, 24:1 (February 2009), pp. 139-171.
Thomas Preston, Pandora's Trap: Presidential Decision Making and Blame Avoidance in Vietnam and Iraq. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011. x, 264 pp.
Jeffrey Record and W. Andrew Terrill, Iraq and Vietnam: Differences, Similarities and Insights. Carlisle Barracks, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, 2004. vii, 69 pp.
Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. xix, 227 pp.
Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, "A Failure in Generalship", Armed Forces Journal, May 2007. Argues that the leaders of the US military collectively failed their responsibilities both in Vietnam and in Iraq.
There are other works that include some comparison between the Vietnam and Iraq wars in various sections of my Iraq Wars Bibliography, especially Doctrine on Insurgency and Counterinsurgency.
Kristin L. Ahlberg, Transplanting the Great Society: Lyndon Johnson and Food for Peace. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2010. xiv, 260 pp. The chapter on the way the P.L. 480 program was used to support the Vietnam War is pp. 175-206.
William Allison, "War for Sale: The Black Market, Currency Manipulation and Corruption in the American War in Vietnam." War & Society, 21 (October 2003), pp. 135-64.
Jean-Pascal Bassino et. al., eds., Quantitative Economic History of Vietnam, 1900-1990: An International Workshop. Tokyo: Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University, 2000. x, 476 pp.
Pierre Brocheux, Une histoire économique du Viet Nam, 1850-2007: la palanche et le camion. Paris: Les Indes Savantes, 2009. 257 pp.
Anthony S. Campagna, The Economic Consequences of the Vietnam War. New York: Praeger, 1991. xiv, 159 pp. The full text is available online to paid subscribers of Questia.
Christopher Nigel Caton, "The Impact of the War in Vietnam on the U.S. Economy." Ph.D. dissertation, Economics, University of Pennsylvania, 1974. 241 pp. 75-14549.
David Ekbladh, The Great American Mission: Modernization and the Construction of an American World Order. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. xvi, 386 pp. Chapter 6, "A TVA on the Mekong: Modernization at War in Southeast Asia, 1960-1973" (pp. 190-225), might be interesting.
Jeffrey W. Helsing, Johnson's War/Johnson's Great Society: The Guns and Butter Trap. Westport: Praeger, 2000. xii, 279 pp.
Helen N. Pho, "'A Billion Dollar Racket': the United States, South Vietnam, and Global Currency Manipulation during War, 1968–9," International History Review 38:4 (2016), pp. 741- .
Thomas Riddell, "A Political Economy of the American War in Indochina: Its Costs and Consequences". Ph.D. dissertation: American University, 1975.
Thomas Riddell, "The Vietnam War and Inflation Revisited," in B. J. Firestone and R. J. Vogt, eds., Lyndon Baines Johnson and the Uses of Power (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), pp. 217-232.
Charles H. Rieper, "The Limits Reached: How International Monetary Policy, Domestic Policy, European Diplomacy, and the Vietnam War Converged in the 1960s." Ph.D. dissertation, Ohio State University, 1995. DA 9612265.
Robert W. Stevens, Vain Hopes, Grim Realities: The Economic Consequences of the Vietnam War. New York: New Viewpoints, 1976. 229 pp.
Louis Wesseling, Fuelling the War: Revealing an Oil Company's Role in Vietnam. London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2000. viii, 207 pp. Wesseling was head of Shell's Vietnamese operations 1972-1974. Discussion of the background of the war is often spectacularly inaccurate; one hopes that what Wesseling says about his own experiences, and oil, is more reliable.
Rosella Cappella Zielinski,
How States Pay for Wars. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016. xv, 187 pp. One chapter (pp. 47-65) deals with the way the
Johnson Administration dealt with the budgetary impact of the Vietnam War.
Copyright © 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, Edwin E. Moise. This document may be reproduced only by permission. Revised January 4, 2024.