Before 9-11 and Desert Storm, Vietnam was an infinite topic for books, articles, and films. Yet now as the US gets more involved in Afghanistan and is apparently ‘fed up' with Iraq, it seems the lessons "learned" or "not learned" in Vietnam still apply. And like any other major war, battles, plans, strategies, tactics, and everything directly or indirectly related to war normallyinspires not only professional writers and talented novelists but also journalists,publishers, servicemen, veterans, prisoners of war and the widows and children ofsoldiers who had fallen in action to tell and portray, analyse and scrutinise what they have done, thought or felt during the war and in post-war times. The flood of books on the Vietnam War is amazing in magnitude as in variety and purpose. Some of the books so far produced are purely historical; some are dated to the application of the ‘art of war' while other concentrate on the ‘war machine'. Some are resource guides that have been produced to help both graduate and undergraduate students along with other researchers find all types of information on Vietnam. The Colorado State University at Fort Collins, for instance, has a Vietnam War Literature Collection, a major resource in the world of imaginative literature of the Vietnam War. There are some four thousand items including fiction, plays, artists' sketches and miscellaneous works. At the University of Pennsylvania Van Pelt Library, there is a reference section which contains Those Who Were There: eyewitness accounts of the war in Southeast Asia 1956-1975 and aftermath (published in 1984). It is an annotated bibliography of books, articles and topic-related magazines covering writings both factual and imaginative. Besides books there are many other types and sources for information on Vietnam. Also available in Van Pelt are movies and journals. Most of the books can be found in online catalogs. Searching "Vietnam" by "subject", one will get hundreds of subjects to choose from, covering all aspects of the war. Under "Vietnam: Dictionaries and Encyclopedias", for example, browsing leads to historical and cultural dictionaries of Asia. Books may also be found under Vietnamese Conflict, 1961-1975 where the search leads to historical aspects covering mostly policies, assumptions and decisions made. Examples of such books are: *America's Longest War: the United States and Vietnam by George C. Herring. This is a balanced history of the Vietnam War which, though essentially from the military side, seeks to integrate military, political and diplomatic factors. *America in Vietnam by Genter Lewy, and encompassing study that reveals how one side's human, ideological and organisational resources led it to victory despite vast material inferiority. It opens with the rise of Vietnamese communism and ends with the fall of Saigon. *Anatomy of a War by Gabriele Kolko, an American revisionist historian (1994) *Backfire by Loren Baritz. This book emphasis the underlying assumptions that motivated American policy makers to make the Vietnam War. Commenting on the book, Los Angeles Times said: ”The vigor and unconcealed emotion with which he writes give these pages an impact they would not otherwise have... It reminds us with eloquence, power and passion that war is a form of intercourse with other peoples that unveils the deepest assumptions that a nation makes about itself and its relationship to the outside world." Dear Egyptian Mail readers, Your comments and/or contributions are welcome. We promise to publish whatever is deemed publishable at the end of each series of articles. [email protected]
