Vietnam War Fiction

Kent Anderson, Sympathy for the Devil.
A college student who heads off to war with a book of poetry in his pocket discovers the savagery within himself during two tours of duty as a Green Beret.

Mark Berent, Rolling Thunder.
An Air Force captain overshadowed by his famous father, a young intelligence officer, and a Special Forces colonel find their fates intertwined as the hostilities escalate. First in a series.

David Bergen, The Time Between.
A Vietnam veteran’s grown children follow him to Vietnam after he revisits the site of a traumatic wartime experience and then disappears.

Bao Ninh, The Sorrow of War.
A North Vietnamese infantryman haunted by his memories records his war experiences in an attempt to reconcile himself with what he’s seen.

Larry Brown, Dirty Work.
Two gravely disabled Vietnam vets, one black and one white, meet after the war in a VA hospital and tell their stories to one another.

Robert Olen Butler, On Distant Ground.
In 1975 Saigon, an Army Intelligence captain about to be court-martialed for freeing a Viet Cong officer races to discover whether he has a son by his missing Vietnamese mistress.

Philip Caputo, Indian Country.
A Vietnam veteran who returns home to a country that seems hostile and frightening retreats from his family and finds sanctuary in the wilderness.

Gerry Carroll, No Place to Hide.
During the fall of Saigon, two pilots trying to rescue a stranded SEAL team must outrace the advancing North Vietnamese.

Stephen Coonts, Flight of the Intruder.
Disturbed by the number of senseless orders that result in pointless deaths, an Intruder pilot decides to take matters into his own hands on a mission into North Vietnamese territory.

John Del Vecchio, The 13th Valley.
A semi-pacifist telephone installer finds himself immersed in jungle warfare as an infantryman trapped in Vietcong territory.

P. T. Deutermann, The Edge of Honor.
An officer on a missile frigate in the Gulf of Tonkin during the Vietnam War must deal with drug abuse among the crew and the strange behavior of the captain.

Richard Dickinson, The Silent Men.
The only two black snipers in a unit are partnered together, but when a mission to Cambodia goes wrong one is left alone behind enemy lines.

Randy Eickhoff, The Quick and the Dead.
A special ops leader is assigned by the CIA to kill a Vietnamese prostitute suspected of espionage but must clear his name when she’s brutally murdered by someone else.

Joseph Ferrandino, Firefight.
A platoon of young paratroopers deployed in the jungle highlands find their preconceived ideas about war were drastically wrong.

Richard Galli, Of Rice and Men.
A translator arrives in Vietnam to help farmers and realizes the language he learned in school is vastly different from spoken Vietnamese.

Graham Greene, The Quiet American.
As the French and the Vietminh struggle for control of Vietnam, an English journalist meets a newly arrived American with ideas of his own.

W. E. B. Griffin, The Majors.
In 1954, a group of American combat veterans are called to Vietnam to help the French wage war against the guerilla forces. Part of a series.

David Halberstam, One Very Hot Day.
A group of Americans leading Vietnamese troops on a long trek combat heat, thirst and fear of an ambush.

Joe Haldeman, 1968.
A combat engineer wounded on patrol is returned to the U.S. where he is diagnosed as a schizophrenic and spends a year in the hospital trying to come to terms with his experiences.

Marshall Harrison, Cadillac Flight.
Twenty years after the war, a vet returns to Vietnam to recover the remains of downed pilots and is flooded with memories of his own time as an F-105 ‘Thud’ pilot fighting MiGs.

Gustav Hasford, The Short-Timers.
The war has a dehumanizing effect on Private Joker and his fellow marines as they move from boot camp through the war.

Layne Heath, CW2.
A soldier who loves flying helicopters signs on for a second tour, but on a mission into North Vietnamese territory he is stalked by an unknown enemy.

Larry Heinemann, Paco’s Story.
Paco Sullivan, the only survivor of a vicious firefight, is so horribly wounded in the massacre that he is left for dead for two days, and when he returns to the U.S. he finds that he is an outsider and a curiosity.

William Huggett, Body Count.
A green Marine officer arrives in Vietnam and gradually learns to be a leader of men.

James Janko, Buffalo Boy and Geronimo.
The intertwined stories of a young Vietnamese buffalo herder and an American medic who becomes disillusioned by the destruction he witnesses.

Ward Just, A Dangerous Friend.
An idealistic man who goes to Vietnam to work for an aid group that is actually gathering information for the Pentagon unwittingly leaks information that results in death and betrayal.

Walt Kross, Splash One: Air Victory over Hanoi.
Forbidden to target North Vietnamese planes on the ground, the U.S. is losing the air war until a new colonel arrives to lead Operation Bolo.

Wm. Lederer & E. Burdick, The Ugly American.
Set in the fictional country of Sarkhan, this novel examines how communism succeeded in Southeast Asia.

Walter Dean Myers, Fallen Angels. Young Adult
A 17-year-old just out of Harlem High School enlists in the army in 1967 and spends a devastating year on active duty in Vietnam.

Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried.
The members of a platoon in Vietnam battle the enemy, loneliness, fear, and each other.

Donald Pfarrer, The Fearless Man.
A Marine Captain who leads an infantry company in Vietnam begins to see things differently when an inexperienced chaplain joins the unit on a dangerous search and destroy mission.

Thomas Richards, Zero Tolerance.
Twenty years after they worked on a failed project to build a dam on the Mekong that was intended to win the war, four men try to figure out what went wrong and why.

Susan Schaeffer, Buffalo Afternoon.
A young Brooklyn man desperate to get away from his father enlists in the army unaware of what awaits him in Vietnam.

Joanna Scott, Charlie and the Children.
A POW hallucinates about the son he had with the Vietnamese woman he married despite having a wife back home and is eventually freed by one of his young captors whom he mistakes for his child.

Charles Stella, Blue Lightning.
An American and a North Vietnamese pilot who are bitter adversaries do battle in the skies to gain control of a bridge.

Robert Stone, Dog Soldiers.
A journalist in Vietnam convinces a friend to smuggle a cache of heroin to his wife who’s back home in a country disillusioned by war.

Lucian Truscott, Army Blue.
A young lieutenant from an Army family is court-martialed for desertion in the face of the enemy but he maintains his innocence.

Donald Tate, Bravo Burning.
The officers and grunts of Bravo Company try to make sense of a war in a country they’d never heard of.