America and the Vietnam War: Re-examining the Culture and History of a Generation Book

In this intricate and involving oral history project, Weist tracks a bunch of soldiers beginning before they enlist or are drafted and interlaces interview excerpts with their families and loved ones, and then follows them through Vietnam and tracks those who survive through their often-rocky reentry into American society and the lasting impact of the war on their lives and the lives of their families.

I read this at the time time I was reading Tim O'Brien's "Going After Cacciato" and the two books actually strengthened each other. I found it helpful, because so many soldiers are interviewed for this book, to make a one-page list of their names with a couple of reminders -- where they came from, where and with whom they served. The book would probably have worked fine without the cheat-sheet, but I had the soldiers from "Cacciato" in my head, too.

I recommended this book to anyone who wants to do some in-depth reading on Vietnam. (You could do worse than to kick it off with Frances Fitzgerald's brilliant Pulitzer Prize-winning overview "The Fire in the Lake.") After reading Weist's compendium of interviews it's extremely difficult for me to maintain any respect whatsoever for the politicians who threw these men into this meat grinder of a war, or the ones in Iraq and Afghanistan.