FIC O’Brien, Tim — Going After Cacciato (C/BV) Going After Cacciato won the 1979 National Book Award., With a nod to Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, O’Brien narrates his story in a blend of ferocious comedy, hallucination, and bleak horror. Reality and fantasy merge in this fictional account of one private's FIC Stone, Robert — Dog Soldiers, a novel (ALL) sudden decision to lay down his rifle and begin a quixotic journey The National Book Award-winning novel Dog Soldiers from Indochina to Paris to attend the peace talks. Will Cacciato make trades on a hallucinatory vision of Vietnam as a place in which all Vietnam War it all the way? Or will he be yet another casualty of a conflict that honor and morality are ceded to the mere business of survival. In seems to have no end? This novel is a memorable evocation of men Saigon during the waning days of the Vietnam War, a small-time both fleeing and meeting the demands of battle. It is more than just a journalist named John Converse thinks he'll find action -and profit- great war novel. Ultimately it's about the forces of fear and heroism by getting involved in a big-time drug deal. But back in the States, Fiction that do battle in the hearts of us all. things go horribly wrong for him. Dog Soldiers perfectly captures the underground mood of America in the 1970s, when amateur drug An Annotated Reading List FIC O’Brien, Tim — The Things They Carried (ALL) dealers and hippies encountered profiteering cops and professional Considered perhaps the greatest work of fiction that has killers - and the price of survival was dangerously high. been written about the Vietnam War, The Things They Carried is neither a novel nor a short story collection; it is an arc of fictional FIC Webb, James — Fields of Fire (C/BV) episodes, taking place in the childhoods of its characters, in the The author, Jim Webb, served a term as U.S. Senator jungles of Vietnam and back home in America two decades later. from Virginia and is a much-decorated former Marine who fought and Each one of the twenty-two short pieces is written with such care, was wounded in Vietnam. Webb tells the story of a platoon of tough, emotional content, and prosaic precision that it could stand on its young Marines enduring the tropical hell of Southeast Asian jungles own. The Things They Carried depicts the men of Alpha Company: while facing an invisible enemy--in a war no one understands. Fields Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman of Fire has been called a powerful work that brilliantly expresses the Bowker, Kiowa, and of course, the character Tim O'Brien who has basic ambiguity of war: the repulsion of war's destruction contrasted survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the age with the grisly attraction of war as the ultimate test of survival. Critics of forty-three. They battle the enemy (or maybe more the idea of the have compared this bestselling first novel, written in 1978, to All enemy), and occasionally each other. In their relationships we see Quiet on the Western Front and The Naked and the Dead, among their isolation and loneliness, their rage and fear. They miss their other masterpieces, for authentically capturing the fury and agony of families, their girlfriends and buddies; they miss the lives they left combat. back home. Yet they find sympathy and kindness for strangers and love for each other, because in Vietnam they are the only family they have. Burbank Central Library (C) 110 N. Glenoaks Blvd. 818-238-5600 Buena Vista Branch Library (BV) 300 N. Buena Vista St. 818-238-5620 Northwest Branch Library (NW) 3323 W. Victory Blvd. FIC Soli, Tatjana — The Lotus Eaters (C/BV) 818-238-5640 A unique and sweeping debut novel about an American female combat photographer in the Vietnam War, as she captures the wrenching chaos and finds herself torn between the love of two men. On a stifling day in 1975, the North Vietnamese army is poised burbanklibrary.org to roll into Saigon. As the fall of the city begins, two lovers make their way through the streets to escape to a new life. Helen Adams, an American photojournalist, must take leave of a war she is addicted to September 2017 and a devastated country she has come to love. Linh, the Vietnamese man who loves her, must grapple with his own conflicted loyalties of heart and homeland. FIC Brown, Larry — Dirty Work (C/BV) FIC Huong, Duong Thu — Novel Without a Name (C/BV) FIC Marlantes, Karl — Matterhorn: A Novel (ALL) Dirty Work is the story of two men, strangers—one white, In a book that offers American readers a startlingly Matterhorn was written by a highly decorated Vietnam the other black. Both were born and raised in Mississippi. Both fought different perspective on the war, this book tells the story of veteran. It is the story of a young Marine lieutenant, Waino Mellas, in Vietnam. Both were gravely wounded. Now, twenty-two years twenty-eight-year-old Quan who has been fighting for the Communist and his comrades in Bravo Company, who are dropped into the later, the two men lie in adjacent beds in a VA hospital. Over the cause in North Vietnam for a decade. Filled with idealism and hope mountain jungle of Vietnam. They must confront not merely the course of a day and a night, Walter James and Braiden Chaney talk when he first left his village, he now spends his days and nights North Vietnamese but also monsoon rain and mud, leeches and of memories, of passions, and of fate, in this novel which critics have dodging stray bullets and bombs, foraging scraps of food to feed tigers, disease and malnutrition. Almost as daunting, it turns out, described as wrenching and devastating. With great vision, humor, himself and his men. Upon his return home, Quan seeks comfort in are the obstacles they discover between each other: racial tension, and courage, Brown writes mostly about love in a story about the childhood memories as he tries to sort out his conflicting feelings of competing ambitions, and duplicitous superior officers. But when the waste of war. patriotism and disillusionment, memories that bring him face to face company finds itself surrounded and outnumbered by a massive with the shattering reality that his innocence has been irretrievably enemy regiment, the Marines are thrust into the raw and FIC Butler, Robert Owen — A Good Scent From a lost in the wake of the war. all-consuming terror of combat. The experience will change them Strange Mountain (C/BV) forever. Robert Olen Butler's lyrical and poignant collection of FIC Johnson, Denis — Tree of Smoke (C/BV) stories about the aftermath of the Vietnam War and its impact on the Winner of the 2007 National Book Award for Fiction, FIC Mason, Bobbie Ann Mason — In Country (C/BV) Vietnamese was acclaimed by critics across the nation and won the critics have called this Denis Johnson’s most “gripping, beautiful, In Country is a coming-of-age novel in which the Vietnam Pulitzer Prize in 1993. In this collection of fifteen stories, narrated in and powerful work to date.” This is the story of Skip Sands— War is central to the life of young Sam Hughes whose father was the first person, the author captures the voice and the experiences of spy-in-training, engaged in Psychological Operations against the killed in Vietnam when she was a young girl. It explores the impact the Vietnamese themselves. These stories are set in the Vietnamese Vietcong—and the disasters that befall him thanks to his famous of Vietnam on both the generation that served and the generation refugee enclaves of New Orleans, as the characters remember war uncle, a war hero known in intelligence circles simply as the Colonel. that followed them. Sam is now living in rural Kentucky with her uncle and their homeland, and as they struggle to adapt to an alien culture. This is also the story of the Houston brothers, Bill and James, young Emmett who also served in Vietnam. Sam comes to feel that in order men who drift out of the Arizona desert into a war in which the line to understand her own life she must understand the experience of between disinformation and delusion has blurred away. The story is her father and of her uncle and his veteran friends. They are a central a vision of human folly, with gritty, sympathetic portraits of men and part of her life, but they remain silent about their experiences. women desperate for an end to their loneliness, whether in sex or death or by the grace of God. FIC Mailer, Norman — Armies of the Night (C/BV) Winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, Armies of the Night uniquely and unforgettably captures the Sixties’ tidal wave of love and rage. The setting is the anti-war march FIC Nguyen, Viet Thanh — The Sympathizer (C/BV) on Washington, October 21, 1967. Helicopters hover overhead and The Sympathizer, was the winner of the 2016 Pulitzer federal marshals and soldiers with fixed bayonets await marchers Prize for Fiction. The narrator is a communist double agent who is a FIC Groom, Winston — Better Times Than These (C) on the Pentagon steps. Among the marchers is a writer named captain in the South Vietnamese army. He escapes to America after Written in 1978, this is the first novel of Winston Groom, Norman Mailer.