Voices from the Vietnam War: Stories from American, Asian, and Russian Veterans
May 2010 · University Press of Kentucky
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About this ebook
“Some of this book is heartrending; some of it is as gripping as a thriller; and all of it will add to our understanding of the war” (Booklist).
The Vietnam War’s influence on politics, foreign policy, and subsequent military campaigns is the center of much debate and analysis. But the impact on veterans across the globe, as well as the effects on individual lives and communities, is a largely neglected issue. As a consequence of cultural and legal barriers, the oral histories of the Vietnam War currently available in English are predictably one-sided, providing limited insight into the inner workings of the Communist nations that participated in the war. Furthermore, many of these accounts focus on combat experiences rather than the backgrounds, belief systems, and social experiences of interviewees, resulting in an incomplete historiography of the war.
Chinese native Xiaobing Li corrects this oversight in Voices from the Vietnam War: Stories from American, Asian, and Russian Veterans. Li spent seven years gathering hundreds of personal accounts from survivors, accounts that span continents, nationalities, and political affiliations. The twenty-two intimate stories in this book feature the experiences of American, Chinese, Russian, Korean, and North and South Vietnamese veterans, representing the views of both anti-Communist and Communist participants, including Chinese officers of the PLA, a Russian missile-training instructor, and a KGB spy. These narratives humanize and contextualize the war’s events while shedding light on aspects of the war previously unknown to Western scholars—providing fresh perspectives on a long-discussed topic.
“Li’s achievement is most remarkable for the window he opens onto the lives of Chinese and Russian veterans; their rare accounts appear here for the first time in English.” —Publishers Weekly
The Vietnam War’s influence on politics, foreign policy, and subsequent military campaigns is the center of much debate and analysis. But the impact on veterans across the globe, as well as the effects on individual lives and communities, is a largely neglected issue. As a consequence of cultural and legal barriers, the oral histories of the Vietnam War currently available in English are predictably one-sided, providing limited insight into the inner workings of the Communist nations that participated in the war. Furthermore, many of these accounts focus on combat experiences rather than the backgrounds, belief systems, and social experiences of interviewees, resulting in an incomplete historiography of the war.
Chinese native Xiaobing Li corrects this oversight in Voices from the Vietnam War: Stories from American, Asian, and Russian Veterans. Li spent seven years gathering hundreds of personal accounts from survivors, accounts that span continents, nationalities, and political affiliations. The twenty-two intimate stories in this book feature the experiences of American, Chinese, Russian, Korean, and North and South Vietnamese veterans, representing the views of both anti-Communist and Communist participants, including Chinese officers of the PLA, a Russian missile-training instructor, and a KGB spy. These narratives humanize and contextualize the war’s events while shedding light on aspects of the war previously unknown to Western scholars—providing fresh perspectives on a long-discussed topic.
“Li’s achievement is most remarkable for the window he opens onto the lives of Chinese and Russian veterans; their rare accounts appear here for the first time in English.” —Publishers Weekly
Ratings and reviews
3.5
2 reviews
About the author
Xiaobing Li, professor and chair of the Department of History and Geography and director of the Western Pacific Institute at the University of Central Oklahoma, is the author of China at War (2011), Civil Liberties in China (2010), A History of the Modern Chinese Army (2007), and coauthor of Voices from the Korean War (2004) and Mao's General Remember Korea (2002). He served in the People's Liberation Army in China.
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