Vietnam left a deeper mark on the United States than most Americans want to fully acknowledge. Part of the proof is found in our commonly used vocabulary. Whenever someone opposes some type of military intervention, the first impulse still seems to be to say, “This is another Vietnam.” Congresspeople and critics of the war are beginning to call what we are doing in Iran a “quagmire,” which is close to saying it’s another Vietnam.

This means we are not talking about World War I or II, which were wars of aggression against us and wars that we won in a reasonable timeframe. When we say something is another Vietnam we speak in terms of conveying quagmire, hubris, going where we don’t belong and creating a moral catastrophe. We are talking about a war we cannot win and that we should not get suckered into. Vietnam is the consummate “avoidable war that became a quagmire,” so powerful in our memories that every conflict since has been measured against it.

I grew up reading about the Vietnam War largely through American accounts, yet even these were overwhelmingly negative and grim. They showed a pattern of flawed policy, strategic ineptitude, dishonesty to the American people and a willingness to inflict suffering long after leaders privately recognized the war was unwinnable. 

I learned about the atrocities committed in the name of counterinsurgency, the suffering endured by American troops who were asked to fight a war few believed in and the staggering human cost for our misunderstood “enemy”: three million Vietnamese dead, entire regions poisoned by dioxin, and generations of children born with deformities linked to Agent Orange. At home, the war crippled a generation of working-class youth, helped destroy the promise of the Great Society and left the country divided, distrustful, and exhausted.

As I learned about the Vietnam War, what affected me most was the bitter realization that the United States continued plowing forward in a hopeless, grinding cruelty – toward the Vietnamese and toward its own soldiers – while acting as if stopping was somehow impossible. I got the sense that nobody thought we could win, but we were not going to stop fighting regardless. And then, one day, we simply stopped.

The literature of the Vietnam War is vast, but a handful of books stand out for me for their honesty, depth and ability to illuminate the war from multiple angles: the policymakers who created it, the soldiers who fought it, the civilians who suffered under it, the prisoners who endured captivity and the Vietnamese voices of those who lived through the senseless horror of this war. These works form a mosaic of a conflict that reshaped our nation and continues to resonate through every debate about American military power in the modern world.

The first layer of this literature exposes the intellectual and moral failures at the top. David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest remains the definitive account of how a small circle of “brilliant,” Ivy-Educated (with advanced degrees), highly successful and powerful White men became insulated policymakers who plunged the country into a war they did not have the historical background nor moral depth to avoid. Instead, they had the rough and crude playground instincts of the rich that got them to top levels of power and prestige. Their self-confidence was only matched by their complete and total ignorance of Vietnam’s people, history, culture and political realities. These were guys who basically knew nothing about what they were facing but confidently made everything worse and nobody could question them because they seemed so smart, successful and powerful.

The Pentagon Papers, leaked by Daniel Ellsberg and reported by Neil Sheehan and The New York Times, revealed the history of US government deception: administration after administration privately acknowledged the war was unwinnable while publicly insisting victory was near.  A true American hero, Daniel Ellsberg, wrote a memoir called Secrets which adds his humanity and moral concern to this story, tracing his transformation from decorated combat Marine and hawkish war analyst to whistleblower as he realized the extent of the government’s dishonesty. H.R. McMaster’s Dereliction of Duty completes this picture by showing how the Joint Chiefs failed to challenge the political manipulation of the war, allowing escalation to proceed without showing or demanding strategic clarity or moral courage.

If these books reveal how the war was conceived and executed from the top, the next group shows how it was lived. Philip Caputo’s A Rumor of War is a young Marine officer’s journey from patriotic idealism to disillusionment. Caputo provides super realistic accounts of the “search and destroy” tactics required by the military in the war. Furthermore, Caputo’s memoir suggests the numerous atrocities in the war emerged from the expectations, logic and structure of the military’s prosecution of the war itself. 

Caputo was arrested because two Vietnamese, who were suspected of being enemy agents, were killed by Marines under his command. The Marine Corps tried to use him in what seemed to be a show trial to prove they would not tolerate atrocities. Once the hearings began, however, it became obvious the case was exposing how the military’s very structure and prosecution of the war made atrocities almost inevitable. Caputo was completely exonerated of all charges.

Michael Herr’s Dispatches shows how deeply American pop culture shaped the expectations of the young men who went to Vietnam. Herr describes soldiers who had grown up on John Wayne movies and who carried a set of cinematic fantasies into the jungle. Many of them wanted to be the movie hero who never hesitated, never doubted, never questioned the mission and who took the hill. 

Instead of the pristine moral vision of a Hollywood western or war film, they found fear, confusion and a war where the enemy was often invisible and inflicted horrific harm and terrible forms of death. Herr’s book is partly a study of how a generation’s mythology of manhood, based on tacky Hollywood films and TV shows, shattered under the weight of a real war.

Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried moves beyond reportage into the psychological afterlife of the conflict, showing how memory, guilt and fear become burdens soldiers carry long after the shooting stops. Karl Marlantes’ Matterhorn, drawn from his own combat experience and exposes the futility, racial tension, and bureaucratic madness that defined life in the field.

Yet the war cannot be understood solely through American eyes. Nick Turse’s Kill Anything That Moves documents the systemic violence inflicted on Vietnamese civilians, not as isolated incidents but as the predictable outcome of policies that rewarded body counts and treated villages as enemy territory by default. 

Jonathan Schell’s The Real War offers a stark, humane account of the destruction wrought by American firepower, while Frances FitzGerald’s Pulitzer-winning Fire in the Lake explains how the United States misunderstood Vietnam at every level: culturally, politically and historically. Her argument was that America fought a war it could never win because it never understood the society it sought to reshape. It remains one of the most important insights from Vietnam that was not applied to the subsequent wars we have fought.

The literature of captivity adds yet another dimension. Jeremiah Denton’s When Hell Was in Session recounts the brutal treatment endured by American POWs, men who took the blame and the rage of a nation under bombardment while they were merely trying to do their duty while trusting in the integrity of their leadership. Admiral James Stockdale’s In Love and War, written with his wife Sybil, offers a reflection on endurance, torture, and the moral resources required to survive years of imprisonment. 

Finally, no study of Vietnam is complete without Vietnamese voices. James G. Zumwalt’s Bare Feet, Iron Will is a book I only discovered while visiting Hanoi. It is essential reading, however, for any American who wants to understand the war better. James was the son of Admiral Zumwalt, head of the Navy in Vietnam, and Jame’s brother also fought and died of cancer from Agent Orange. He returned to Vietnam in the 90s in order to write this book. 

In it, he gathers testimonies from Vietnamese soldiers, doctors and civilians, revealing how they experienced the war not as an ideological chess match but as a fight for survival, dignity, and national identity. He spoke to many doctors who explained how they conducted outdoor battlefield operations during bombings and how they created their scalpels out of downed B-52s. Finally, also in Hanoi, I discovered Bao Ninh’s The Sorrow of War (it has been translated into English), written by a North Vietnamese veteran who began fighting at the age of 17 and who was also tasked with finding the dead bodies of Vietnamese soldiers throughout various jungles after the war. 

Taken together, these books show how the war was planned, how it was justified, how it was fought, how it was suffered, and how it was remembered. It’s like a syllabus for a course that might have been titled How to Avoid Another Vietnam that everybody should have taken as a prerequisite but nobody did. These works help us understand why Vietnam remains the conflict against which all others are now measured, why its lessons still matter and that we should really, finally learn from this conflict.

We owe it to the 58,000 of our guys who died, the hundreds of thousands who came back with unresolved and unresolvable problems and the millions of Vietnamese killed and maimed.

Daniel Gauss is a teacher who studied at Wisconsin and Columbia. He has been published in non-fiction and fiction magazines including 3 Quarks Daily, The Good Men Project, E – The Environmental Magazine, & Daily Philosophy.