Here are 100 books that MP - A Novel of Vietnam fans have personally recommended if you like
MP - A Novel of Vietnam.
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Who can really claim that they know everything about the human heart, the mind, the soul? The infinite mysteries and complexities of what makes someone who we can call “human.” I'm betting no one. Certainly not me. But what's important is the passion to keep exploring, to keep digging through the mind in an effort to understand myself. That effort, along with what I discover, is one of the most tangible things that not only enriches my living life, but also gives me comfort facing the inevitable end. These books were passionate companions, inspiring me, for however long, to further my efforts in self-discovery.
The book resonates with me on many levels. Firstly, of course, I’m a combat veteran, so the military and living through the hell of war are part of my identity. The author and I share an innate connection there.
But on a different level, it delves into the intangible burdens that resonate for years after the experience – the grief, the guilt, the terror, even the longing to return because it’s what you know.
The title is explicit, and I share the load with all my fellow veterans.
The million-copy bestseller, which is a ground-breaking meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling.
'The Things They Carried' is, on its surface, a sequence of award-winning stories about the madness of the Vietnam War; at the same time it has the cumulative power and unity of a novel, with recurring characters and interwoven strands of plot and theme.
But while Vietnam is central to 'The Things They Carried', it is not simply a book about war. It is also a book about the human heart - about the terrible weight of those things we carry through…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I have been fortunate to write and publish three books on America’s service academies: two on the U.S. Naval Academy, and one on the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. The two nonfiction books were appealing photographic and narrative presentations of academy life at Navy and West Point. The third, my debut novel happening at the Naval Academy, is an inspiring tale of moral courage and dedication to duty with war and peacetime conflicts. Each book was a rewarding creative project.
Matterhornis one of the most memorable works of realistic fiction written about The Vietnam War.The author and a Marine infantry officer, decorated for valor during combat several times in duty tours in Vietnam, presents a striking story about the true nature of warfare. The Marines of Bravo Company with whom his protagonist serves present the sheer toil, strength of character, the cost of lost and wounded brothers, unique personalities, moments of weakness and courage, laughter and sadness, brothers-in-arms’ trust, and the will to literally survive until the battle ends and the next one begins. Matterhorn inspired me while I wrote my debut military novel.
Fire Support Base Matterhorn: a fortress carved out of the grey-green mountain jungle. Cold monsoon clouds wreath its mile-high summit, concealing a battery of 105-mm howitzers surrounded by deep bunkers, carefully constructed fields of fire and the 180 marines of Bravo Company. Just three kilometres from Laos and two from North Vietnam, there is no more isolated outpost of America's increasingly desperate war in Vietnam.
Second Lieutenant Waino Mellas, 21 years old and just a few days into his 13-month tour, has barely arrived at Matterhorn before Bravo Company is ordered to abandon their mountain and sent deep in-country in…
My expertise with the topic is that I served for over 22 months in the army, where I learned many things people do not learn in normal life. I belong to several Vietnam veteran organizations, and I am the first president of the Lehigh Northampton Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
Randy was a military policeman with the 615th MP Company in Vietnam in 1967, The 615th patrolled the entire Long Binh complex, which was approximately 50 miles around, with over 30,000 men stationed on the post. His letters offered the reader an honest appraisal of the life of a Military Policeman 10,000 miles from home.
I boarded the plane to Vietnam at exactly midnight on January 1st, 1967. I was a 19 year old soldier with pen and paper in hand. I began to write. “Letters from Long Binh gives the reader an honest appraisal of the everyday life of an MP in Vietnam. Sometimes poignant,sometimes humorous, but always gripping, the book is written with a deep sense of respect for his fellow brothers-in-arms in a war-torn country.”
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
My expertise with the topic is that I served for over 22 months in the army, where I learned many things people do not learn in normal life. I belong to several Vietnam veteran organizations, and I am the first president of the Lehigh Northampton Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
As Tom took Basic Combat Training, learning to become an infantryman and kill, his religious beliefs would not allow him to kill. He applied for conscientious objector status, but he wound up in Vietnam where he worked as a clerk at the sprawling Long Binh Post. He is treated as a coward and faces criminal charges, but he keeps his faith. As a Christian, this book helped me come to grips with my military time, not wanting to kill, and fortunately, I never had to.
“Yesterday’s Soldier” is a different Vietnam War memoir. Packed into this tidy book is the story of a young man's coming of age in troubled times. The book is about of his transformation from infantryman to conscientious objector and his experiences in Vietnam. War, religion, and morality are always in the background of his story and they move to the surface in every chapter. The author, after years of studying for the priesthood in a religious seminary, leaves and is quickly exposed to the Selective Service. His belief in God and his country inspired him to enlist in the US…
I served in Vietnam in 1969 carrying a radio on my back with the 12th Marines on the DMZ. In 1970, I was a door gunner with HMM-364 (Purple Fox Squadron) out of Marble Mountain. Beginning in 1996, I have led 68 tours for veterans, their family members, historians, active-duty military personnel, and others to the jungles, mountains, and battlefields of Vietnam. I currently serve as president and bush guide for the non-profit tour company, Vietnam Battlefield Tours. As an avid reader of non-fiction books on the Vietnam experience, this knowledge base has helped tremendously in my non-profit volunteer service.
It is rare when an actual participant of a battle can produce such a chilling and accurate narrative that keeps a reader’s attention page after page. This was the Tet Offensive urban battle for the Citadel, a walled city containing a labyrinth of buildings and houses jammed around numerous narrow streets. This was city fighting at its worst. In the end, many thousands of the enemy lay dead.
The bloody, month-long battle for the Citadel in Hue during 1968 pitted U.S. Marines against an entrenched, numerically superior North Vietnamese Army force. By official U.S. accounts it was a tactical and moral victory for the Marines and the United States. But a survivor's compulsion to square official accounts with his contrasting experience has produced an entirely different perspective of the battle, the most controversial to emerge from the Vietnam War in decades.
In some of the most frank, vivid prose to come out of the war, author Nicholas Warr describes with urgency and outrage the Marines' savage house-to-house fighting,…
As someone who served in Iraq with the Army in 2004, I have been inspired and—in many ways—saved by the work of these American veterans who wrote before me. In their work, they showed me a path in which to write and live. While I would love to list more books, these are the ones that I’ve been going back to most recently. Beyond simply capturing “war,” all of these writers reckon with mortality, loss, longing, and love.
I love these passionate and powerful poems by a former Navy SEAL who served in Vietnam.
Hood uses humor, wit, and an attention to the world—both in combat and back home—that’s unlike much “war” poetry out there. He takes us into what he calls “the dark of the word” and brings us out to the light.
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
As someone who served in Iraq with the Army in 2004, I have been inspired and—in many ways—saved by the work of these American veterans who wrote before me. In their work, they showed me a path in which to write and live. While I would love to list more books, these are the ones that I’ve been going back to most recently. Beyond simply capturing “war,” all of these writers reckon with mortality, loss, longing, and love.
Few books capture such a down-to-earth, colloquial, and plainspoken voice—Casey’s book won the Yale Younger Series, and one can see why.
These poems seem elusively simple on the surface, as if a young soldier is just speaking to you at a bar or on a street corner; however, they capture, overall, a cacophony of voices that probe the depths of war, soldiering, humanity, and memory.
As someone who served in Iraq with the Army in 2004, I have been inspired and—in many ways—saved by the work of these American veterans who wrote before me. In their work, they showed me a path in which to write and live. While I would love to list more books, these are the ones that I’ve been going back to most recently. Beyond simply capturing “war,” all of these writers reckon with mortality, loss, longing, and love.
I love this book because it’s a beautiful and honest reckoning with what it means to serve, particularly as an enlisted American soldier in Vietnam. Weigl focuses on combat, homecoming, the horror faced by civilians, and he does it with a subtle plainspoken language that draws in every reader.
The images are remarkably stark and fresh; each poem also carries an undercurrent of sonic attention, a musicality that limns the harsher moments of the book—hence, that “Song” of Napalm.
"Song of Napalm is more than a collection of beautifully wrought, heartwrenching, and often very funny poems. It's a narrative, the story of an American innocent's descent into hell and his excruciating return to life on the surface. Weigl may have written the best novel so far about the Vietnam War, and along the way a dozen truly memorable poems." Russell Banks
As someone who served in Iraq with the Army in 2004, I have been inspired and—in many ways—saved by the work of these American veterans who wrote before me. In their work, they showed me a path in which to write and live. While I would love to list more books, these are the ones that I’ve been going back to most recently. Beyond simply capturing “war,” all of these writers reckon with mortality, loss, longing, and love.
Micus’s poetry awed me with its beauty and precision of language. Because he published this book long after Vietnam, many of the poems confront that long “after” which comes with war: purpose, the search for community, PTSD and suicide, and moral injury.
I find myself going back to many of these poems to experience his remarkable voice.
“[Edward Micus's The Infirmary is] a rarity: a mature debut, a first book of poems with time-tested virtues. . . . Unlike many of the Vietnam poems written at the time of the war or shortly thereafter―poems of anger or protest―Edward Micus's poems are composed, in every sense of that word. They delineate and measure their subjects; they do not advocate or hector; they do not sentimentalize. Many of them, like ‘Ambush Moon' and ‘So We Shot,' will take their places among the very best war poems. . . .…
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
As I write this, I massage aching bits of shrapnel still embedded beneath silvered scars. I’ve read many Vietnam War stories—praising the war, glorifying combat, condemning the war. My stories are 1st person limited POV, voice of a twenty-year-old sailor. My title is a spin-off of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. By the time I wrote my memoir, I realized that our national goals in Vietnam had been Muddy from the beginning. I too, traveled Jungle Rivers. During my time on the riverboat, I witnessed Rivers of blood—rivers of life, trickle across our deck. And yes, Jungle is a fitting metaphor for our life at that time.
My river boat division (Mobile Riverine Force Division 112) patrolled the Cua Viet River just south of the DMZ between North and South Vietnam during the timeline of this book so I could very much relate to the events, though the Marines took much heavier casualties than our boats did. Keith Nolan does an excellent job documenting the battles—as I read, I relived the bomb and strafing runs done by the navy aircraft carrier F-4 Phantoms (which I also wrote about in my memoir) Nolan’s very detailed account of the Marine battles on the north side of the river answered many decades-old questions for me. His use of dialogue and insights into the Marines keep the reader engrossed.
On April 29, 1968, the North Vietnamese Army is spotted less than four miles from the U.S. Marines’ Dong Ha Combat Base. Intense fighting develops in nearby Dai Do as the 2d Battalion, 4th Marines, known as “the Magnificent Bastards,” struggles to eject NVA forces from this strategic position.
Yet the BLT 2/4Marines defy the brutal onslaught. Pressing forward, America’s finest warriors rout the NVA from their fortress-hamlets–often in deadly hand-to-hand combat.At the end of two weeks of desperate, grinding battles, the Marines and the infantry battalion supporting them are torn to shreds. But against all odds, they beat back…
