Arts of War on the Web

Tim O’Brien, the much-honored novelist whose work is strongly influenced by his Vietnam War service has an interesting essay called “Telling Tails” that deals with what he calls “the centrality of imagination in enduring fiction” in the current, 2009 fiction issue of The Atlantic.

He begins with the tail story, a lighthearted on centering on his two young children (Timmy and Tad), which may or may not be true,and probably isn’t. Then he goes on to discuss his subject.

“In general,” O’Brien says, fictional topics are “born out of writing workshops, in which I’ve noticed, almost always to my alarm, that classroom discussion seems to revolve almost exclusively around issues of verisimilitude. Declarations such as these abound: I didn’t believe in that character. I need to know more about that character’s background. I can’t see that character’s face. I don’t understand why that character would behave so insipidly (or violently, or whatever).

“These are legitimate questions. But for me, as a reader, the more dangerous problem with unsuccessful stories is usually much less complex: I am bored. And I would remain bored even if the story were packed with pages of detail aimed at establishing verisimilitude. I would believe in the story, perhaps, but I would still hate it. To provide background and physical description and all the rest is of course vital to fiction, but vital only insofar as such detail is in the service of a richly imagined story, rather than in the service of good botany or good philosophy or good geography.”

If you’re in the San Antonio, Texas, area, you can hear Tim O’Brien in person. He’ll be doing a reading on Monday, Sept. 21, at 10:00 a.m. at St. Philip’s College’s Watson Fine Arts Center in The President’s Lecture Series. O’Brien (that’s him above in Vietnam) will be reading from his critically and popularly acclaimed 1990 book of linked-short stories (featuring main character Tim O’Brien) The Things They Carried.

For additional information, call 210-486-2376, or go to http://www.alamo.edu/spc/main/pls.aspx

The September issue of Armchair General magazine contains an article, “10 Essential Vietnam War Books” by James H. Willbanks, a retired Army colonel, who has written widely about the war, in which the author recommends ten “essential books that should be on every historian’s bookshelf.”

Here’s the list, in the order that Col. Willbanks has them in his article:

America’s Last Vietnam Battle: Halting Hanoi’s 1972 Easter Offensive by Dale Andrade

The Long Gray Line: The American Journey of West Point’s Class of 1966 by Rick Atkinson

The Big Story by Peter Braestrup

Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam by Bernard Edelman

America’s Longest War by George Herring

McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam by H.R. McMaster

We Were Soldiers Once …and Young by Hal Moore and Joe Galloway

Tet! Turning Point in the War by Don Oberdorfer

A Viet Cong Memoir by Truong Nhu Tang

The Last Valley: Dien Bien Phu and the French Defeat in Vietnam by Martin Windrow

Not a bad list at all. Mine, would include, several others, though. To wit:

A Bright, Shining Lie by Neil Sheehan

Vietnam: A History by Stanley Karnow

Bloods by Wallace Terry

Winners and Losers by Gloria Emerson

The Marched Into Sunlight: War and Peace in Vietnam by David Maraniss

Street Without Joy by Bernard Fall

And the following memoirs:

If I Die in a Combat Zone by Tim O’Brien

Fortunate Son by Lew Puller

A Rumor of War by Philip Caputo

Brothers in Arms by William Broyles

Home Before Morning by Lynda Van Devanter

Patches of Fire by Albert French

Keep Your Head Down by Doug Anderson

You can read Le Ho Lan’s autobiographical Stories of a North Vietnamese Childhood—which deal with a girl growing up in North Vietnam and her family, neighbors, and friends before and during the American war—on the free website Scribd.com

Some of the stories are set in Hanoi; others are set in the village where the narrator
goes to live with her grandmother after the bombing of Hanoi starts.

Michael Norman is a journalist, author, and Marine Vietnam War veteran, and the author of the excellent 1991 Vietnam War memoir, These Good Men. His latest book, written with his wife Elizabeth M. Norman, Tears in Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and Its Aftermath (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) has just been published to excellent reviews.

Dwight Garner, writing in The New York Times, for instance, called it “calm, stirring and humane” and a “narrative achievement” that “seamlessly blends a wide-angle view wit the stories of many individual participants.”

William Keith Nolan, one of the most prolific and most accomplished military historians of the Vietnam War, died February 9 of lung cancer. He was 44 years old and was not a smoker; the disease was hereditary.

Nolan, known to his friends as Keith, pioneered and excelled at his own special brand of military history: the excellent combining of in-depth interviews with those who took part in the fighting and deep research into the official records.  That, along with a fluid writing style, added up to ten (eleven, counting one he co-authored) of the best books on Vietnam War military history.

We reviewed nearly all of his books in our “Books in Review” column in The VVA Veteran, including what turned out to be his last one, House to House:Playing the Enemy’s Game in Saigon. Here’’s what I wrote in the May-June issue:

Keith Nolan is one of the most accomplished chroniclers of Vietnam War military history. In his ten previous books—including Battle for Hue, Death Valley, and Operation Buffalo–Nolan used a deft combination of interviews with participants and in-depth research into official records to come up with incisive, readable battle narratives. Nolan continues to use his excellent M.O. to good effect in his latest book. This time Nolan recreates the fighting that took place between the Army’s 9th Infantry Division and several VC regiments who were holed up in Saigon three months after Tet ‘68.”

Other reviewers had similar thoughts about Nolan’s work. “I’ve never read a better account of a battle, and I’ve never been prouder of the American fighting man, nor more scornful of his political and high-ranking military leaders,” the historian Stephen Ambrose wrote about Nolan’s Ripcord: Screaming Eagles Under Siege, Vietnam 1970 “To those who want to know what it was like to be a grunt in Vietnam, I recommend Ripcord without stint or reservation.”

Kieth Nolan’s other books are Battle for Saigon: Tet 1968, Sappers In The Wire , A Hundred Miles of Bad Road (with Dwight Birdwell),The Magnificent Bastards: The Joint Army-Marine Defense of Dong Ha, 1968, Into Laos: The Story of Dewey Canyon Ii/Lam Son 719, Vietnam 1971.

Keith Nolan left a nine-year-old daughter, Anna Britt Nolan. A trust fund has been set up in her name.

Anna Britt Nolan Trust
c/o First Bank
6211 Midriver Mall Drive
St. Charles, MO 63304

The U.S. Army’s Center of Military History’s Web catalog of its publications has recently been redone with big changes in design and content. The new electronic catalog now includes all 600-plus Center publications. The user-friendly site includes cover images, descriptions of the books, and short author bios. Plus, there’s a search feature (”Browse all”) that allows you to find publications by title, by author, and by publication number.

There’s also a link to sign up in order to become a member of a listserv, which includes receiving receive timely alerts of new Center publications. Plus, there’s a link to get to the current and past copies of the Center’s bulletin, Army History.