Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides Hardcover - 2003

by Christian G. Appy

A quarter century has passed since the last American helicopter flew off the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, and only now have we attained the perspective and access to make a book like Patriots possible. In this monumental oral history, Christian G. Appy has created the first work to probe the war's path through both the United States and Vietnam. Intellectually illuminating and emotionally overwhelming, Patriots allows us to see and feel what this war really meant to people on all sides-Americans and Vietnamese, generals and grunts, policy makers 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.

The vivid accounts 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. Their memories take us from deafening jungle firefights to Oval Office policy debates, from the underground tunnels of Cu Chi to Kent State, from press briefings in Saigon to dogfights in the skies over North Vietnam, from POW tiger cages to the Paris peace talks. Their voices, along with Appy's running text, make clear why this war generated some of the most bitterly divisive moral and political debates of the twentieth century.

Reflecting the experiences and passions of all who were touched by the war, Patriots will stand with the most important and influential books on the Vietnam era.