"Intense and absorbing... If you buy only one book on the Vietnam War, this is the one you want." -Chicago Tribune

Christian G. Appy's monumental oral history of the Vietnam War is the first work to probe the war's path through both the United States and Vietnam. These vivid testimonies of 135 men and women span the entire history of the Vietnam conflict, from its murky origins in the 1940s to the chaotic fall of Saigon in 1975. Sometimes detached and reflective, often raw and emotional, they allow us to see and feel what this war meant to people literally on all sides: Americans and Vietnamese, generals and grunts, policymakers and protesters, guerrillas and CIA operatives, pilots and doctors, artists and journalists, and a variety of ordinary citizens whose lives were swept up in a cataclysm that killed three million people. By turns harrowing, inspiring, and revelatory, Patriots is not a chronicle of facts and figures but a vivid human history of the war.

"A gem of a book, as informative and compulsively readable as it is timely." -The Washington Post Book World

Christian G. Appy is a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and the author of two previous books on the Vietnam War. His oral history of the war, Patriots, was a main selection of Book of the Month Club and won the Massachusetts Book Award for nonfiction. His most recent book is American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity. He lives in Amherst.

PatriotsPreface

Part One: Introductions

Commanders

Bernard Trainor: It turned out the major of Danang was a double agent

Dang Vu Hiep: With all those choppers they seemed terribly strong

War Heroes Roger Donlon: We were babes in arms in every way

Tran Thi Gung: I was stuck in a tunnel for seven days

Paying the Price Ta Quang Thinh: They carried me the whole way back to the North

George Watkins: That sand was probably the only thing that saved me

Phan Xuan Sinh: Ail my ancestors are buried here

Where is Vietnam? Jo Collins: I just thought I was going to Europe

Deirdre English: How can my country be at war and I don't know about it?

Part Two: Beginnings (1945-64)

History Is Not Made with IFS

Henry Prunier: These were not ragtag farmers

Yo Nguyen Giap: The most atrocious conflict in human history

Deliver Us From Evil Daniel Redmond: The doctor who won the war in Indochina

Rufus Phillips: Tell 'em I'm not French before they lynch me

Ngo Vinh Long: If they're making maps, they're preparing for war

Kick the Tires and Light the Fires

Richard Olsen: It was like 'Terry and the Pirates'

Malcolm Browne: You could smell the burning flech

Le Leiu Browne: There was one coup after another

Paul Hare: My cock lost the fight

The Emporor Has No Clothes Paul Kattenburg: What's good for Peru is good for Vietnam

Evelyn Colbert: Dissent which contradicted the public optimism was ignored

Chester Cooper: Boy, you speak just like an American

Sergei Khruchchev: The Vietnamese had their own ideas

Paradise Island John Singlaub: We sent them all back with a generous gift package

Luyen Nguyen: She divorces her second husband and waited for me

Part Three: Escalations

Trails to War

Vu Thi Vinh: The Truong Son jungle gave us life

Nguyen Thi Kim Chuy: We came home hairless with ghostly white eyes

Helen Tennant

Hegelhimer: I was their wife, their sister, their girlfriend

You Want Me to Start World War III? James Thompson: This was crazy and deceitful policy making

Seth Tillman: We could stop this war tommorrow

Charles Cooper (I): He used the f-word more freely than a marine in boot camp

Walt Whitman Rostow: Take the North Vietnamese of Vinh hostage

Central Highlands Dennis Deal: Man, if we're up against this, it's gonna be a long-ass year

Ward Just: It approached the vicinity of the spiritual

Le Cao Dai: Sometimes I operated all night while the staff took turns pedaling the bicycle

From Civil Rights to Antiwar Julian Bond: They said I was guilty of treason and sedition

General Baker Jr.: When the call is made to free the Mississippi Delta...I'll be the first one in line

The Ultimate Protest Anne Morrison Welsh: It was like an arrow was shot from Norman's heart

Free-Fire Zone Jim Soular: A goddamn chopper was worth three times more than David

Triage James Lafferty: No draft board ever failed to meet its quotas

David M. Smith: The knife man

Sylvia Lutz Holland: We saved their lives, but what life?

Chi Nguyen: Being wounded was not considered the worst thing that could happen

Morale Boosters Bobbie Keith: I got a butterfly right on the butt. So that's my war story

James Brown: After they got the funk they went back and reloaded

Quach Van Phong: An artist ca be as important in war as a soldier

Nancy Smoyer: I can't believe the Donut Dollies got us to do that

Vu Hy Thieu: Nothing was more essential than our sandals

Joe McDonald: I was president of my high school marching band

Air War Jopnathan Schell: I had my notebook right there in the plane

Harlan S.

Pinkerton Jr.: Good luck and good hunting

Luu Huy Chao: Before I trained as a pilot I had never been in an airplane

Nguyen Quang Sang: That was the first time I ever saw an American

Fred Branfman: What would it be like to hide in a cave all for five years?

Prisoners of War (I) Porter Halyburton: I don't see how you've got a worse place than this

Troung My Hoa: They tried to make us say, 'Down with President Ho!'

Randy Kehler: Friction against the wheel

Cameras, Books, and Guns Philip Jones Griffiths (I): Go see what they did to those people with your money

Larry Heinemann: We had this idea that we were king of the fucking hill

Doung Thanh Phong: We didn't need a darkroom

Joan Holden: The counterculture was visible everywhere

Oliver Stone: He lived to kill. He was like a real Arab

Nguyen Duy: Whoever won, the people always lost

Yusef Komunyakaa: Soul Brothers, what you dying for?

H.D.S. Greenway: We would write something ans the magazine would ignore it if it wasn't upbeat

Antiwar Escalations Todd Gitlin: A rather grandoise sense that we were the stars and spear-carriers of history

Tom Englehardt: It was like Vietnam had somehow come all the way into our living rooms

Vivian Rothstein: What? Meet separately with women?

They Slept At Our House Paul Warnke: We fought for a separate South Vietnam, but there wasn't any South

Part Four: The Turning Point (1968-70)

Tet

Tran Van Tan: He asked me for directions to the police sensations

Barry Zorthian: Then-boom!-Tet comes along

Philip Jones Griffiths (II): You're not safe in those cities

Nguyen Qui Duc: I was living a double life

Bob Gabriel: We buried our own men right there

Tuan Van Ban: Attack! Attack! Attack!

Memorial Day 1968 Clark Dougan: He Was Only 19-Did You Know Him?

From Johnson to Nixon John Gilligan: Our only shot was to help Humphrey break away from Johnson

Peter Kuznick: Political conversion was the greatest ahprodisiac

J. Shaeffer: The Palace Guard

Samuel Huntington: You had to be pretty stupid to stay out in the countryside

Douglas Kinnard: While we had the power, it turned out they had the will

A Three-Square-Mile Piece of the United States Tom O'Hara: It was like being in a minimum-security prison

Familes At War John Douglas Marshal: You will not be welcome here again

Huynh Phuong Dong: Recieving a letter was a mixed blessing

Richard Houser: They told me I needed to choose between my country and my brother

Nathan Houser: A sign this country has grown up will be when there is a memorial erected to the war resisters

Suzie Scott: This nice young man from the FBI was here

Lam Van Lich: I was …