Showing results for "vietnam" in Literature & 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.

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.

Spreading democracy takes more than cutting-edge military hardware. Winning the hearts and minds of a troubled nation is a special mission we give to bewildered young soldiers who can't speak the native language, don't know the customs, can't tell friends from enemies, and, in this wonderfully outrageous Iraq-era novel about Vietnam, wonder why they have to risk their lives spraying peanut plants, inoculating pigs, and hauling miracle rice seed for Ho Chi Minh.

The true test for surviving war lies in the mind, not on the battlefield. Inspired by the author’s own experiences of US military operations during the Vietnam War, Boot is a debut literary novel that charts the journey of marine George Orwell Hill, known affectionately as G.O. by his brothers-in-arms, as he comes to grips with the psychological impacts of war in the jungles and rice paddies of Southeast Asia.

There are dozens of unforgettable characters, and scores of authentic scenes in Brandywine's War. From behind the headlines and the front-line dispatches has come this Rabelaisian novel. Chief Warrant Officer Vaughan completed Brandywine's War while serving his second of three tours of duty in Vietnam.

During the Vietnam War, GIs who managed to survive their tour of duty in one piece - more or less - were flown home in chartered airliners. They called those planes "Freedom Birds". This is the story of three young men - from wildly different backgrounds - who meet on such a plane and make a pact to spend three days together in San Francisco. Their goal: to spend every cent of their mustering out money in a party of a lifetime.

Einstein boarded one of three Huey slick helicopters ready to leave base camp. Thirty minutes later, 15 soldiers landed in a Montagnards village. They secured the village perimeter setting claymore mines and tripwires attached to Star-lite flares, and dug fox holes. Laboring shirtless, minus helmet, Einstein's mohawk caught the villagers' attention. Montagnards approached him conversing in a foreign dialect. They smiled and carried on as if Private Einstein comprehended.

Another road trip in the Fun Loving Finn series, this one finds Finn and friends heading southeast from Missouri to Florida. Finn got a good number in the crazy Vietnam lottery and decides to learn something about life in the real world and drops out of college. When their car breaks down in Atlanta and they’re short on cash, they hole up at the Salvation Army and try to find a new ride while protecting the only possession anybody cares about: his friend Stan’s fish. Will these teenage hippies find a ride, get ripped off, or make it safely to Florida with the fish?