Vietnam War
How to define the Vietnam War? U.S. involvement from 1955-1975, sometimes justly labeled as the Second Indochina War? French attempting to retain its colonial empire post-WWII, 1945-1954, sometimes called the First Indochina War? Japan had occupied Southeast Asia during World War II. The literature is vast and complex. For the purpose of highlighting what I have here in the store, however, you will find this page’s parameters include the end of the French, the twenty years of the U.S. presence, and some fiction and other retrospective literature to the present day.
Close Quarters
Close Quarters
From the moment his first novel was published, Larry Heinemann joined the ranks of the great chroniclers of the Vietnam conflict–Philip Caputo, Tim O’Brien, and Gustav Hasford.
In the stripped-down, unsullied patois of an ordinary soldier, draftee Philip Dosier tells the story of his war. Straight from high school, too young to vote or buy himself a drink, he enters a world of mud and heat, blood and body counts, ambushes and firefights. It is here that he embarks on the brutal downward path to wisdom that awaits every soldier. In the tradition of Naked and the Dead and The Thin Red Line, Close Quarters is the harrowing story of how a decent kid from Chicago endures an extraordinary trial– and returns profoundly altered to a world on the threshold of change.