Peter Steinhauer is obviously one of the great photographers of our time. Buy this book, you won't be sorry.

"Vietnam, the heartland remembers" is absolutly riviting. It is one of the most accurate accounts of the war that I have read. I highly reccomend it to anyone of the so called "gen X" crowd, (I am personally part of that crowd). It may offer some reason to why we are the way we are. Remember,"those who forget their history are doomed to repeat it". To anyone who served in that war it will be a touching and personnal experience. As a verteran of the Persian Gulf War it made me proud and humbled at the same time. Let us not forget our fallen warriors or the those who survived to teach us.

I read this book several years ago. A friend suggested I read it...he knew I was a Vietnam Vet and thought it might be good for me. This is one of the most moving and inspiring books I've ever read. It gave accounts of different people who served in Vietnam and how their experiences affected their relationship with God. Tremendous (but somewhat difficult~I had to stop reading several times...couldn't see the print for the tears) reading! I'd recommend it to anyone-but especially to Vietnam Veterans and anyone currently serving in our armed forces.

I don't understand why this book and this author's other book, The Grunts, are not more highly acclaimed. I've read a fair number of books about Vietnam and, in my opinion, these are two of the very best. Anderson's writing style is straightforward and highly engaging. He knows how to tell a true story in a very interesting way. He also has a sharp wit. I wish he had written more books - about Vietnam or anything. I hated to finish this book because it's so good.

I'd recommend reading this book first, as it covers the author's first 6 months of duty "in the rear with the beer", and then reading "The Grunts" which covers his next duty in a field combat role. The two combined will give a wonderfully written perspective on the Vietnam war from a highly literate Marine officer. You can learn a lot and be well entertained in the process.

Although I am in the process of preparing a more formal review for publication elsewhere, I would like to note here that Nicholas Nugent's book _Vietnam: The Second Revolution_ is a fine work. I learned a great deal reading it and would recommend it highly!

Steven A. Leibo Ph.D. The Sage Colleges and Suny-Albany Co-Founder of H-ASIA

Those who intend to read only one book about Vietnam should read this one. The author covers this disaster with a unique insight into the flawed decision-making processes of otherwise intelligent bureaucrats who failed to understand the complexity of the situation. War games prior to our massive air campaign had predicted the eventual tragic outcome, yet the results were completely ignored. A combat commander (which I was) usually sees a war from an entirely different perspective than that of government-employed theorists. The theorists may dismiss their mistakes as an investment in the learning process about a problem. The commander is left to count his dead, and write the letters to their families.

Professor Robert F. Turner's book, Vietnamese Communism: Its Origins and Development is the complete account of the rise of the Communist Party in Vietnam from an obscure and unpopular political group, to its current status as the ruling elite of Vietnam. In it, he chronicles Ho Chi Minh's career, highlighting his left-wing political activities in France, his appointment as a Comintern agent, and his ruthless tactics in seizing power by eleminating all potential opposition. His ingenious use of French reward money to both eleminate his opposition and finance his communist revolution would have made his heros, Lenin and Stalin proud!

Professor Turner also describes Ho Chi Minh's involvement in "fighting" the Japanese in WWII. The popular misconception that he actively and effectively fought the Japanese is exposed as a myth.

Communist tactics are described in detail. In short, they followed the Marxist-Leninist line to make any compromise to gain advantage. Appeal to religion, patriotism, nationalism, or desire for land-reform. The end justifies the means by which it is obtained! Later, if and when these groups have outlived their usefulness, they can, and were, denounced as, "enemies of the revolution," and executed. Methods of population control and Communist Party organization sturctures down to villiage level are shown which effectively prevented a counter-revolution.

Professor Turner also describes the delicate dance Ho was compelled to perform, flirting with both Moscow and Peking to insure their continued support. It was here that the U.S. missed a golden opportunity to end the war before it assumed the monsterous proportions it finally achieved. Students of international relations should read this section carefully.

Finally, he describes the "victory" won by the Vietnamese over both France and the U.S. For their efforts the people have been given the "benefits" of collectivized industry and agriculture. Collectivization has produced the same results in Vietnam it has produced elsewhere: inadequate supplies of the most basic needs of society. The ruling class lives well while the masses remain impoverished.

German philosopher Carl von Clausewitz stated in his classic treatise, "On War," . . .intelligence . . .means every sort of information about the enemy and his country. . .forms the basis of our actions." The type of intelligence provided by Professor Turner was completely lacking during Vietnam. It is no wonder our plans and operations suffered accordingly.

Sun Tzu said: "War is of vital importance to the state; the province of life or death; the road to survival or ruin. It is mandatory that it be thoroughly studied." It was not studied before we entered Vietnam. 4 million people died needlessly as a result. The lesson to be learned it is, similar works should be consulted before ever commiting U.S. soldiers to war again.

In 1943, two years before his birth in Vietnam's Mekong Delta, Toai's father and older brother joined the Vietminh, the communist underground movement in Vietnam. Toai became a National Liberation Front (NLF, Viet Cong) supporter as a high school student and rose to be an important student leader in the Saigon University during the late 1960's. He published a student magazine Tu Quet, (Self Determinination) and unswervingly followed the Viet Cong's highly-attractive propaganda line, "Peace, Freedom, Independence, Neutrality, and Social Welfare."

Toai never formally joined the Viet Cong, but, for nationalistic and idealistic reasons, he served it superbly. He led takeovers of the Vietnamese National Assembly and the Cambodian Embassy in Saigon, and lectured at Berkley to American anti-war activists (who thought his views too tame). After the North Vietnamese Army imposed peace in 1975, he became a senior official of the Ministry of Finance under the Provisional Government. He soon disagreed on purely professional grounds with a superior official and was quickly and unceremoniously tossed into jail.

Toai had previously read Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago and dismissed its substance as propaganda. When arrested, he vividly recalled Gulag's chapter 2, entitled "Arrest," in which the freshly arrested victim invariably thinks, "Who me? What for? It's a mistake, they'll clear it up." Toai consoled himself that the Gulag was in "old" Russia, and that he was in the "new" Vietnam. It turned out that there was no significant difference. He lived through two and a half years of horrors that may seem unbelievable to those who have not read Solzhenitsyn's works.

Toai was never charged with any offense, and was thus jailed for no reason at all. His wife, a French citizen, managed to return to France and from there won his freedom. As he was being released, the fact that there was no official reason whatever for either his arrest or his release caused bureaucratic gyrations that would have been hilarious had the issue been less serious.

During much of his time in prison, Toai was befriended by Nguyen Van Hien, an old and often-jailed Vietminh cadre from before the time that Ho Chi Minh left the Soviet Comintern and returned to Vietnam. Hien asked Toai to recall the NLF's program, a shining beacon - promulgate all democratic freedoms, amnesty to all political detainees, abolish all concentration camps, and strictly ban all illegal arrests and imprisonments. "What do you make of all that now," asked Hien, and his expression suggested, "We've all been taken in...Look around you stupid, what do you see?"

Incredibly, despite his sufferings and disillusionment, Hien remained a loyal communist. Like uncountable thousands of other idealists before him, he still grasped his lifelong ideal although he probably understood that he had been purged purely because he knew too much. "I've never eaten chocolate," he said. "I'll probably never know what it tastes like."

Toai eventually spoke again to former anti-Vietnam war activists in the U.S., thinking that he had something important to tell them. He was wrong. Most of them didn't want to listen.

(Published in a local newsletter in 1987.)

David Elliott's magnum opus, "The Vietnamese War: Revolution and Social Change in the Mekong Delta 1930 - 1975," is quite simply the best book there is about the Vietnam War. It is also one of the longest, at 1547 pages, which may limit its appeal to non-specialists.

The principal strenths of this work are two:

1) Where most scholars of the Vietnam War have focused their efforts mainly on American sources, Elliott draws the majority of his evidence from Vietnamese who fought for the Viet Minh or the NLF. In particular, he uses 415 in-depth interviews of prisoners and defectors conducted as part of a major RAND project during the war (Elliott himself worked on this project). He also relies on about 100 Vietnamese-language post-war histories. Together with a judicious selection of English-language works and some US government data, the Vietnamese sources provide an evidentiary base that overlaps very little with existing studies in English.

2) Although he does not ignore the larger strategic currents of the war, Elliott focuses like a laser beam on the local revolutionary processes of a single Vietnamese province. Although he carefully synthesizes his evidence into an overall narrative, Elliott allows the full complexity of events to shine through at every turn, often in the first-person recollections of the revolutionaries themselves.

My reservations about the book mainly concern the theoretical context in which it is situated. Elliott's intended audience appears to be a narrow group of Southeast Asia and Vietnam War specialists. He shows little concern with the far more interesting and recent generalist literature about civil war processes by e.g., Elizabeth Wood, Stathis Kalyvas, or Roger Petersen. Debates about, e.g., whether or not the Vietnam War "could have been won" are extremely stale, and a scholar of Elliott's magnitude shouldn't be wasting his time on them.

This is not a book for the casual reader, and it is not a book for someone whose main concern is about what Americans did in the Vietnam War. However, for anyone who takes a serious scholarly interest 20th century Vietnamese history or the systematic study of political violence and civil war, Elliott's book is indispensable.

Many of us remember the 60s and 70s of bloody newscasts and emotion-filled protest to a war halfway across the world. Many of us have friends and family who were a part of the war and have remained a part of that distant war forever. Carl Voyles' book, Vignettes of Vietnam from Nine Rue Pasteur, bridges that chasm between the horrors of an empty war and the reason why we were there. Voyles gives the reader wonderful description - artistically created word pictures of the nurses, doctors, patients, and local characters of his DaNang community during the war. You are right with him as he removes a young girl's leg or delivers a baby. The horror, the kindness, the caring, the trust . . . this was the life of the people who deserved to live their lives in democracy. I learned a great deal about the Vietnamese culture and character through Dr. Voyles' experiences. This is not a political book or another Vietnam war story. This is a book about real people and experiences. Some of those are shocking - even revolting. Some of the experiences are beautiful and touching. This is the book to read for understanding and for healing. Now I can replace those old images of war with images of a real country.