Patriots; The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides

New York: Viking, 2003. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. xxvii, [3], 574, [2] pages. Acknowledgments. Index. DJ has slight wear. Christian Gerard Appy (born April 5, 1955) is the author of three books on American History and a Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts. His most recent book is called American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity and it was released in February 2015. Appy is widely known as a leading historian and expert on the Vietnam War experience. His book Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides is widely assigned to college students studying the Vietnam War, due to its unique and nearly comprehensive view of those involved in the war. The book includes 135 oral histories drawn from 300 interviews conducted by Appy over the course of researching the book. It also won the 2004 Massachusetts Book Award for nonfiction. Derived from a Kirkus review: To make this sprawling anthology, Appy ranged across the US and Vietnam, eventually interviewing 350 participants in the war (and the antiwar movement). Most were quite forthcoming, and one of the best qualities of this already exceptional gathering is its thoroughgoing candor. Of great value are the words from Vietcong and North Vietnamese fighters, though American veterans will likely be upset by some of what they have to say, as when cadre Tran Thi Gung, then a teenage girl, recalls, "As soon as I started to fire, I killed an American. After he fell, some of his friends came rushing to his aid. They held his body and cried. They cried a lot. This made them sitting ducks. Very easy to shoot." Even Sergei Khrushchev, Nikita's son, joins in, remarking that the Americans were wrong in thinking that Moscow was guiding the war: his father, he remarks, mistrusted the Communist Vietnamese, who in all events were fighting their own war and "had their own ideas." An excellent addition to the literature of the Vietnam War, instructive and moving-but also likely to reopen old wounds.