Book recommendations please - specifically Vietnam/Korean War

I’m within a day or two of finishing up Shelby Foote’s The Civil War - A Narrative, and I’m looking to start educating myself a bit more about the Vietnam War and the Korean War. I’ve read The Best and the Brightest, about the political leaders behind Vietnam, and I’ve read basically nothing about Korea. I’m looking for something like Foote’s book, something that gives the narrative of the war and also the times around it. For example, I loved Delivered From Evil, Robert Leckie’s book about WW II. I also enjoyed his saga of the revolutionary war.

Suggestions?

We Were Soldiers Once…and Young

Vietnam: A History

Both are excellent places to start.

Try Neil Sheehan’s “A Bright Shining Lie”.

Kidder: My Detachment
Swain: River of Time

For the effects on the people who lived there:

Chong: The Girl in the Picture
Nguyen: The Unwanted
Pham: Catfish and Mandala

Here’s my Vietnam shelf, all handily rated for you.

Best nonfiction, IMO is
Dispatches, by Michael Herr
365 Days, by Ronald J. Glasser
Nam, by Mark Baker
A Rumor of War, by Philip Caputo
and for a nurses perspective, you can’t beat * Home Before Morning*, by Lynda Van Devanter.

Best fiction
Going After Cacciato and The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien
The Names of the Dead, by Stewart O’Nan
Meditations in Green, by Stephen Wright

Was this more than you wanted to know? :slight_smile:

Chickenhawk
A Lonely kind of War

Thanks everyone! Looks like I’ve got some reading to do.

Well for fiction about Korea you have:

MAS*H
The Bridges of To-Ko-Ri

Can we have some more Korea reccommendations, please, particularly non-fiction? (Audio is even better!) That’s my dad’s war, and there just isn’t much about it.

T.R. Fehrenbach’s This Kind of War, probably the best single volume history of the Korena War.

Bernard Fall’s Street Without Joy, for the French part of the Vietnam conflict and his Hell in a Small Place, specifically about Dien Bien Phu

A few other non-fiction books for the Korean War:

Clay Blair - The Forgoten War: America in Korea, 1950-1953. My favorite when I did my undergrad thesis on the war. Gives a great set up to the post WW II shrinking of the US Army, and how they paid the price for that in the first few months of the Korean War.

Max Hastings - The Korean War. As Hastings is British, it is skewed quite a bit on the Commenwealth forces, but interesting to see the view from across the pond.