Inside Out and Back Again

Inside Out and Back Again by Thanhha Lai

The author fled Vietnam after the fall of Saigon and ended up as refugees in Alabama. In this book, she provides the tale of her experiences in a fictionalized form. This gives the opportunity to give the experiences without focusing on precise details. The girl of the story struggles to adapt to the new culture. She struggles to adapt to life in the US and misses war-torn Vietnam. She was smart in Vietnam, but doesn't know English so is treated as dumb in the US.  The narrative is told in a concise free-verse manner that quickly brings out the feelings.

Stealing Buddha's Dinner

When she was a small girl, her family made a harrowing escape out of Vietnam at the end of the war. With her father and sister (and some relatives) they made it on a boat that took them to the United States. They eventually settled in Grand Rapids, Michigan. There she adapted to the new life. Her father married a Mexican woman, giving then a multicultural family and an older step-sister. There were many cultural challenges. There were plenty of struggles and even a reunion with her mother. She became familiar with Western culture, especially literature. She wasn't fully American in America, nor fully Vietnamese when going back to Vietnam.

Lieutenant Dangerous: A Vietnam War Memoir

Lieutenant Dangerous is a late cycle Vietnam memoir. Being late to the game gives the author the advantage of greater retrospection from a distance. He begins with some of the absurdities. Some people could get drafter, while others had exemptions. Local draft boards had a huge say, and were biased towards local kids. The government would be provided equipment on "cost plus profit" basis. Troops were trained in the snow for deployment to the rainforest.

He was drafted after he was married. His primary goal was to avoid harm. Having experience with languages, he sought out an intelligence position that would require language training. He found this full of more absurdities. His training in romance languages helped him pass the test (even though Vietnamese was totally different.) The coursework was mostly rote memorization without real focus on understanding. The location ended up being in El Paso instead of Monterrey. 

He sought to further delay deployment by becoming an officer. Alas, he was first told he was too valuable with his language training. He went another route and was accepted - but ended up becoming an ordinance officer instead. Meanwhile, he also went to Columbia University to talk about enrolling there. He showed up at the peak of protests wearing complete military uniform. That did not go over well. While deployed to Vietnam, he wrote his Senator to complain he was not using his language skills. This eventually got him to more intelligence related operations.

The overall feeling and experience in Vietnam was similar to what we have heard elsewhere. The objective and actions were not clear. The military did not know how to fight in the jungle. He had speciaal criticism for the Air Force. Bombing didn't help the cause. It just made people mad at America. Communism ended up being defeated by communism, not by war.