Showing results for "vietnam" in Literary Fiction

Imagine that there are American MIAs who chose to remain missing after the Vietnam War. Imagine that there is a family in which four generations of strong, alluring women have shared a mysterious connection to an outlandish figure from Japanese folklore. Imagine just those things (don’t even try to imagine the love story) and you’ll have a foretaste of Tom Robbins’s eighth and perhaps most beautifully crafted novel--a work as timeless as myth yet as topical as the latest international threat.

Vietnam, 1966. A US Airborne platoon is pinned down in Phuc Tuy Province. A deadly ambush leaves multiple casualties, forcing a desperate withdrawal. With bullets slamming into the Hueys, one is forced down only for the soldiers salvation to be a convoy of Australian APCs. As the dust clears from the battlefield, the ruthless Viet Cong local officer, Lieutenant Vu Van Thinh hunts for intelligence on his enemies. Amidst the debris of war is one man, a mortally wounded soldier desperate for help.

19 October 1950. The war is not going to plan. In Paris, politicians gather to discuss what to do about Indochina. The conflict is unpopular back home in France: too expensive, and too far away for the public to care. Withdrawal is not an option – a global power cannot surrender to an army of peasants – but victory is impossible without more soldiers and more money. The soldiers can be sourced from the colonies, but the money is out of the question. A solution needs to be found.

Thommo returns from Vietnam to an Australia that regards him as a mercenary guilty of war crimes. He begins to develop all kinds of physical and mental problems, and thinks it must only be him until he finds he is not alone. Ten mates, all who remain of his platoon who fought and died in the Battle of Long Tan, are affected the same way.

Unlike other branches of the armed services, the Navy draws its police force from the ranks as temporary duty - Shore Patrol. In this funny, bawdy, moving audiobook set during the height of the Vietnam War, two career sailors in transit in Norfolk, Virginia - Billy "Bad-Ass" Buddusky and Mule Mulhall - are assigned to escort 18-year-old Larry Meadows from Norfolk to the brig in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where he is to serve an eight-year sentence for petty theft. It's good duty, until the two old salts realize the injustice of the sentence and are oddly affected by the naive innocence of their young prisoner.

Girl is spending the spring at an artist's residency in Scotland. Far from her home in Australia and her tight-knight Malaysian family, she is meant to be writing a postcolonial novel and working on a PhD on the poetry of Sylvia Plath. But she can't stop thinking about her upbringing and the stories of her parents and grandmother who raised her. How can she reconcile their dreams for her with her lived reality? And what if the story of becoming yourself is not about carving out a new identity but learning to understand the people who shaped you?

Avril 1975, Saïgon est en plein chaos. À l'abri d'une villa, entre deux whiskies, un général de l'armée du Sud Vietnam et son capitaine dressent la liste de ceux qui pourront quitter le pays par les derniers avions. Mais ce que le général ignore, c'est que son capitaine est un agent double au service des communistes. Arrivé en Californie, tandis que le général et ses compatriotes exilés tentent de recréer un petit bout de Vietnam sous le soleil de L.A., notre homme observe et rend des comptes dans des lettres codées à son meilleur ami resté au pays.

As the rest of the world lies sleeping, Eleanor straps her infant daughter, Amy, into the back of her car. This is the moment she knew must come, when they will walk out on her husband, Leon, and a marriage in ruins since his return from Vietnam. Together, she and Amy will journey to blue mountain, a place of enchantment and refuge that lit up Eleanor's childhood. As the car eats up the miles, so Eleanor's mind dives back into her fractured relationship with her mother, Kitty. Kitty who asked for so much from life, from love, from family.

Leaving the safety of America, Teera returns to Cambodia for the first time since her harrowing escape as a child refugee. She carries a letter from a man who mysteriously signs himself as "the Old Musician" and claims to have known her father in the Khmer Rouge prison where he disappeared 25 years ago. In Phnom Penh, Teera finds a society still in turmoil, where perpetrators and survivors of unfathomable violence live side by side, striving to mend their still beloved country.

This gripping novel is not only one of the best books written about Vietnam; it is also one of the most powerful anti-war novels in American literature. Walter James has no face. Braiden Chaney has no arms or legs. They lost them 22 years ago, in Vietnam. Now, in the course of one long night in a V.A. hospital, these two soldiers, one black, the other white, reveal how they came to be where they are and what they can only hope to become.

A fisherman's murder in Mississippi unwinds the dark truth from Vietnam and exposes unfathomable guilt.

"Mission à Paris 1990" raconte comment un magnat américain des médias, Robert Samberg, lié dans sa jeunesse à l'avenir du Vietnam en 1968, est recruté pour servir son pays, sans se douter un instant que sa mission d'évaluation des possibilités de réconciliation politique le conduira sur la voie d'une réconciliation personnelle. À la veille de son plus grand triomphe professionnel, il retrouve My Hanh, une Vietnamienne qu'il a passionnément aimée puis perdue de vue depuis longtemps, et apprend qu'ils ont un fils.

Girl by the Road at Night is a spare and poetic narrative about a young soldier embarking on a tour of duty and the Vietnamese prostitute he meets in country. Private Joseph Whitaker, with Vietnam deployment papers in hand, spends his last free weekend in Washington, DC, drinking, attending a peace rally, and visiting an old girlfriend, now married. When he arrives in Vietnam, he happens upon Lan, a local girl who submits nightly to the American GIs with a heartbreaking combination of decency and guile....

These 12 stories reflect the combat infantry experience of the Vietnam War--in the gritty “Tanks,” “Called of God,” and “Incubation Period.” There’s also the woman’s perspective of Arlene, a naive Red Cross volunteer or “Doughnut Dolly,” in “A Man’s World.”

It is the summer of 1967. Leo Suther is about to turn 18. This is the summer that everyone has something to teach Leo. His father warns him that "life can turn on a dime." Allie, his girlfriend, wants to teach him about love. Her father, the local communist and civil rights organizer, lectures him on politics and carpentry. And Ryder, a family friend, wants to show Leo the magic of the harmonica, harp of the blues. However, when Leo's life threatens to come unglued, it's his mother's wisdom he turns to. Though she died before Leo was five, her voice lives on in her diaries and poems.

For decades, Della Brown has tried to forget her service as a US Army nurse in Vietnam. But when she receives a letter from a fellow combat nurse, once her closest friend, all the memories come flooding back: Della's nightmarish introduction to the Twelfth Evacuation Hospital, where every bed held a patient hideously wounded in ways never mentioned in nursing school. The day she learned how to tell young men they were about to die. The night her chopper pilot boyfriend failed to return from his mission.