In my novel In Country (1985), Samantha Hughes is preoccupied with Vietnam. Her father had been killed in the war just before she was born. Now 17, she is filled with questions about what it was like over there. Her eccentric...

After the Viet Nam War physically ended, it carried on as a presence and influence in every facet of U.S. society and culture. Now, half a century later, I’m at an age where I feel its aftershocks unexpectedly, almost more than...

For a population as large and diverse as ours, separated by oceans from most wars, war often seems a distant threat. War is something that happens over there. Our American insularity, however, may be a danger in itself. Our...

“The French and the Americans tried to stop the revolution, and in doing so they created an interregnum of violence unparalleled in Vietnamese history.”—Frances FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake I understand that the lessons that any...

The Bamboo Grove Ninh Bình, Việt Nam. Several years after the war’s end. A group of children ran barefoot across a garden filled with banana plants and Vietnamese mints, passing the rows of lettuce, sweet potatoes, and flowers...