Product Description

Even now something is missing from the history of Vietnam. Behind the burning sense of horror and betrayal the personal stories remain untold. No one has bothered to talk to the men and women who went to Vietnam and fought the war. What happened to boys and girls straight out of school who were plunged from the basketball park into the napalm jungle? Who were they fighting for? How did conscripts and volunteers live through the war and how can they live with the scars? Mark Baker recorded conversations with dozens of Vietnam veterans. NAM is a unique and harrowing collection of those interviews, as raw and shocking as an open wound. This is the story of the human cost of a war that had no survivors, only veterans.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #124112 in Books
• Published on: 1992-05-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Review
'The war in the words of dozens of its veterans easily stands with the best descriptive accounts' New York Times Book Review 'Voices we should listen to powerful' Washington Post 'Convincing ... horrifying' Newsweek

With Everything We Had, edited by A1 Santoli (below), this is one of the first two books composed entirely of the words of Vietnam vets - the one that confronts the reader with every type of American atrocity, every form of brutalization, once alleged or reported. Baker purportedly interviewed 150 veterans, including several nurses, none of whom are identified; one passed him along to another, he says, but it is impossible to gauge the range or representativeness of his sampling. Their responses have been chopped up into brief segments, some as short as a couple of paragraphs, and apparently scattered through the book's four major sections: Initiation, Operations, War Stories, The World (i.e., Homecoming and Casualties). There is thus a very rough sequential structure; but except in the first section, when we learn something of the veterans' backgrounds and how or why they got into the service (usually, some snafu or other), there is very little to distinguish one person, or even one snippet of experience, from another. So the book is in many ways indefensible: a collage of horror stories without context or documentation. No one, of course, would have wanted to put his (or her) name to much of what is said here: "Next I had to start kicking a dead body in the side of the head until part of his brain started coming out of the other side". . . "I used to fight with a couple of guys just to get an ear. . . It was encouraged to cut ears off, to cut the nose off, to cut the guy's penis off. A female, you cut her breast off". . . As excerpted, very few of the men express so much as a misgiving (only in the last section does some unease surface); as excerpted, indeed, very few of them appear to think. Baker's remarks, introducting each section, are banal (and not infrequently self-serving). There is a truth, obviously, in the very sameness of the experiences and the attitudes; but there is a much fuller and deeper view of Vietnam in the Santoli collection. (Kirkus Reviews)

WASHINGTON POST
'Voices we should listen to powerful'

NEWSWEEK
'Convincing ... horrifying'

Customer Reviews

Honest, unedited accounts of the Vietnam War. A must read.
This is one of my favourite books on the subject of Vietnam, which is a strange thing to say considering much of the content. The book is made up of accounts from many different people who served in many different roles during the Vietnam war. The accounts range from a couple pages in length to a couple of sentences, but in each there is enough emotion and sentiment to allow the reader to at least appreciate the experiences of the story teller. I think Mark Baker does an excellent job in relaying these stories, and he does so in a way that makes you judge not the person involved but more so the situation in which many of them have been conscripted into. One question I find myself asking is, would I act any different to the GI's who tell tales of murder, rape and torture if I was placed in the same position? This isn't the be all and end all of Vietnam books, just a very important part of the syllabus.

one of the most compelling books i've ever read!!
i have read lots of military history books over the years and this is definately one of the best... shocking and harrowing at times but sometimes found myself deeply moved by the sheer honesty of some of the transcripts. what those poor men and women went through should be acknowledged and appreciated by us all!!!

the best nam book ive read so far
unputdownable.i read it over a decade ago and some of the accounts are so disturbing they have never left me.go ahead and buy-just make sure youve eaten your tea before reading, cos you sure as hell wont want it later.