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| Preface | |
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| Introductions | |
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| Commanders | |
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| "It turned out the mayor of Danang was a double agent" | |
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| "With all those choppers they seemed terribly strong" | |
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| War Heroes | |
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| "We were babes in arms in every way" | |
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| "I was stuck in a tunnel for seven day" | |
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| Paying the Price | |
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| "They carried me the whole way back to the North" | |
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| "That sand was probably the only thing that saved me" | |
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| "All my ancestors are buried here" | |
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| Where Is Vietnam? | |
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| "I just thought I was going to Europe" | |
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| "How can my country be at war and I don't know about it?" | |
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| Beginnings (1945-64) | |
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| "History Is Not Made with Ifs" | |
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| "These were not ragtag farmers" | |
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| "The most atrocious conflict in human history" | |
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| "Deliver Us from Evil" | |
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| "The doctor who won the war in Indochina" | |
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| "Tell 'em I'm not French before they lynch me" | |
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| "If they're making maps, they're preparing for war" | |
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| "Kick the Tires and Light the Fires" | |
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| "It was like 'Terry and the Pirates.'" | |
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| "You could smell the burning flesh" | |
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| "There was one coup after another" | |
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| "My cock lost the fight" | |
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| "The Emperor Has No Clothes" | |
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| "What's good for Peru is good for Vietnam" | |
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| "Dissent which contradicted the public optimism was ignored" | |
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| "Boy, you speak just like an American" | |
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| "The Vietnamese had their own ideas" | |
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| "Paradise Island" | |
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| "We sent them all back with a generous gift package" | |
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| "She divorced her second husband and waited for me" | |
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| Escalations (1964-67) | |
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| Trails To War | |
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| "The Truong Son jungle gave us life" | |
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| "We came home hairless with ghostly white eyes" | |
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| "I was their wife, their sister, their girlfriend" | |
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| "You Want Me To Start World War III?" | |
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| "This was crazy and deceitful policy making" | |
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| "We could stop this war tomorrow" | |
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| "He used the f-word more freely than a marine in boot camp" | |
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| "Take the North Vietnamese city of Vinh hostage" | |
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| Central Highlands | |
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| "Man, if we're up against this, it's gonna be a long-ass year" | |
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| "It approached the vicinity of the spiritual" | |
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| "Sometimes I operated all night while the staff took turns pedaling the bicycle" | |
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| From Civil Rights To Antiwar | |
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| "They said I was guilty of treason and sedition" | |
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| "When the call is made to free the Mississippi Delta ... I'll be the first one in line" | |
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| "The Ultimate Protest" | |
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| "It was like an arrow was shot from Norman's heart" | |
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| Free-Fire Zone | |
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| "A goddamn chopper was worth three times more than David" | |
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| Triage | |
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| "No draft board ever failed to meet its quotas" | |
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| "The knife man" | |
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| "We saved their lives, but what life?" | |
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| "Being wounded was not considered the worst thing that could happen" | |
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| Morale Boosters | |
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| "I got a butterfly right on the butt. So that's my war story" | |
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| "After they got the funk they went back and reloaded" | |
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| "An artist can be as important in war as a soldier" | |
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| "I can't believe the Donut Dollies got us to do that" | |
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| "Nothing was more essential than our sandals" | |
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| "I was president of my high school marching band" | |
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| Air War | |
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| "I had my notebook right there in the plane" | |
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| "Good luck and good hunting" | |
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| "Before I trained as a pilot I had never been in an airplane" | |
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| "That was the first time I ever saw an American" | |
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| "What would it be like to hide in a cave day after day for five years?" | |
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| Prisoners of War (I) | |
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| "I don't see how you've got a worse place than this" | |
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| "They tried to make us say, 'Down with President Ho!'" | |
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| "Friction against the wheel" | |
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| Cameras, Books, and Guns | |
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| "Go see what they did to those people with your money" | |
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| "We had this idea that we were king of the fucking hill" | |
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| "We didn't need a darkroom" | |
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| "The counterculture was visible everywhere" | |
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| "He lived to kill. He was like a real Ahab" | |
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| "Whoever won, the people always lost" | |
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| "Soul Brothers, what you dying for?" | |
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| "We would write something and the magazine would ignore it if it wasn't upbeat" | |
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| Antiwar Escalations | |
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| "A rather grandiose sense that we were the stars and spear-carriers of history" | |
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| "It was like Vietnam had somehow come all the way into our living rooms" | |
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| "What? Meet separately with women?" | |
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| "They Slept at Our House" | |
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| "We fought for a separate South Vietnam, but there wasn't any South" | |
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| The Turning Point (1968-70) | |
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| Tet | |
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| "He asked me for directions to the police station" | |
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| "Then--boom!--Tet comes along" | |
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| "You're not safe in those cities" | |
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| "I was living a double life" | |
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| "We buried our own men right there" | |
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| "Attack! Attack! Attack!" | |
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| Memorial Day 1968 | |
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| "He Was Only 19--Did You Know Him?" | |
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| From Johnson to Nixon | |
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| "Our only shot was to help Humphrey break away from Johnson" | |
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| "Political conversion was the greatest aphrodisiac" | |
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| "The palace guard" | |
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| "You had to be pretty stupid to stay out in the countryside" | |
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| "While we had the power, it turned out they had the will" | |
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| "A Three-Square-Mile Piece of the United States" | |
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| "It was like being in a minimum-security prison" | |
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| Families at War | |
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| "You will not be welcome here again" | |
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| "Receiving a letter was a mixed blessing" | |
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| "They told me I needed to choose between my country and my brother" | |
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| "A sign this country has grown up will be when there is a memorial erected to the war resisters" | |
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| "This nice young man from the FBI was here" | |
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| "I was away from home for twenty-nine years" | |
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| My Lai | |
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| "They were butchering people" | |
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| "The protable free-fire zone" | |
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| "You Look Like a Gook" | |
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| "Damn, I'm a gook" | |
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| "I was thanking God they didn't have air support" | |
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| "It sure as hell wasn't 'English Only' in Vietnam" | |
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| "An Acute Lack of Forgetfulness" | |
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| "Before the war, I was Miss Mary Poppins" | |
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| "To get their ID cards, the girls had to go to bed with the police" | |
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| From Cambodia to Kent State | |
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| "Quitting wasn't heroic" | |
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| "I think they pictured it as a kind of huge bamboo Pentagon" | |
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| "As much as we hated the war on April 29, we hated it more on April 30" | |
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| Endings (1970-75) | |
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| The End of the Tunnel | |
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| "Even the tough guys ... caved in" | |
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| "Kissinger did not trust anybody fully" | |
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| "Vietnamization wasn't working any better than Americanization" | |
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| "We Really Believed..." | |
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| "God forbid my boss finds out I'm here" | |
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| "Why should my son die for you country?" | |
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| "The campus was turning into a celebration of Maoism" | |
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| "Steve Sherlock, bronze star with a V" | |
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| Watergate | |
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| "We're eating our young" | |
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| "Let's circle the wagons" | |
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| "The World was Coming to an End" | |
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| "The whole attitude was, stand back little brother, I'll take care of it" | |
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| "All this area was Indian country" | |
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| "I didn't know there was a bad war" | |
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| "Everybody Thought We'd Won the War" | |
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| "Reporters just kept writing as if it were Tet '68" | |
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| Paris | |
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| "I wouldn't buy a used car from that man" | |
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| "The longest peace talks in history" | |
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| "It wasn't a mistake, it was an inexplicable crime" | |
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| Prisoners of War (II) | |
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| "I read Anthony Adverse about four times" | |
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| "The curriculum was designed to 'detoxicate' us" | |
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| "Americans like conspiracies" | |
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| "What mushroom do they think we were hatched under last week?" | |
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| "The government wanted to control the POW/MIA movement" | |
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| Collapse | |
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| "There was classified confetti all over the trees" | |
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| "We could either lose or tie, but not win" | |
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| "The Merriment was Short-Lived" | |
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| "The letters remain, but the senders are gone forever" | |
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| Legacies (1975-) | |
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| Missing in Action | |
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| "We saw so many parents crying for their lost children" | |
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| "Why do you hate the Vietnamese?" | |
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| War-Zone Childhoods | |
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| "I never got there in time to capture an American pilot" | |
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| "It's not worth my energy to lay blame on anybody" | |
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| "People just disappeared and you didn't say anything" | |
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| Silences | |
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| "I didn't want her to worry, so I lied" | |
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| "Your real self was only for you" | |
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| "I just want to know what happened" | |
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| Souvenirs | |
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| "They bought Zippos as a kind of birth certificate" | |
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| Taps | |
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| "Old geezers ... playing taps on a tape recorder" | |
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| "I was leading an unpopular war" | |
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| "The first time I ever encountered the Vietnam War was in Hollywood movies" | |
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| "You can't talk with people you demonize" | |
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| "We no longer hate the Americans" | |
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| "The roof that hasn't been built" | |
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| "Because love is stronger than enmity" | |
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| Acknowledgments | |
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| Index | |