Patriots : the Vietnam War remembered from all sides
Christian G. Appy's oral history of the Vietnam War probes the war's path through both the United States and Vietnam. These testimonies of 135 men and women span the entire history of the Vietnam conflict, from its murky origins in the 1940s to the chaotic fall of Saigon in 1975. Sometimes detached and reflective, often raw and emotional, they allow us to see and feel what this war meant to people literally on all sides -- Americans and Vietnamese, generals and grunts, policymakers and protesters, guerrillas and CIA operatives, pilots and doctors, artists and journalists, and a variety of ordinary citizens whose lives were swept up in a cataclysm that killed three million people
Personal narratives
xxvii, 574 pages : maps ; 24 cm
9780142004494, 9780670032143, 0142004499, 067003214X
50606515
Commanders
War heroes
Paying the price
Where is Vietnam?
"History is not made with ifs"
"Deliver us from evil"
"Kick the tires and light the fires"
"The emperor has no clothes
"Paradise island"
Trails to war
"You want me to start World War III?"
Central Highlands
From civil rights to antiwar
"The ultimate protest"
Free-fire zone
Triage
Morale boosters
Air war
Prisoners of war (I)
Cameras, books, and guns
Antiwar escalations
"They slept at our house"
Tet
Memorial Day 1968
From Johnson to Nixon
"A three-square-mile piece of the United States"
Families at war
My Lai
"You look like a gook"
"An acute lack of forgetfulness"
From Cambodia to Kent State
The end of the tunnel
"We really believed ..."
Watergate
"The world was coming to an end"
"Everybody thought we'd won the war"
Paris
Prisoners of war (II)
Collapse
"The merriment was short-lived"
Missing in action
War-zone childhoods
Silences
Souvenirs
Taps
Includes index