From the moment his first novel was published, Larry Heinemann joined the ranks of the great chroniclers of the Vietnam conflict--Philip Caputo, Tim O’Brien, and Gustav Hasford.In the stripped-down, unsullied patois of an ordinary soldier, draftee Philip Dosier tells the story of his war. Straight from high school, too young to vote or buy himself a drink, he enters a world of mud and heat, blood and body counts, ambushes and firefights. It is here that he embarks on the brutal downward path to wisdom that awaits every soldier. In the tradition of Naked and the Dead and The Thin Red Line, Close Quarters is the harrowing story of how a decent kid from Chicago endures an extraordinary trial-- and returns profoundly altered to a world on the threshold of change.

Close Quarters

Literature & Fiction

Heinemann, Larry

Literary

Penguin??Books

This novel focuses on Paco Sullivan, the lone survivor of a massacre in Vietnam, who travels back to the United States, becomes a dishwasher in a short-order restaurant, and is haunted by the ghosts of the men killed in battle

Paco's Story (Contemporary American Fiction)

Petty hustler Maximilian Nutmeg's life changes when he happens upon the wallet of Loretta Spokeshave and, against his baser instincts, decides to return it

Cooler by the Lake

Contemporary

CLOSE QUARTERS

Like many other high school graduates in the 1960s, Philip Dosier found that if he didn't have plans for himself, his country certainly did. Shipped off to fight in a war he knew nothing about, he found himself in a world of violence, fear, heat, and squalor unlike anything that he ever dreamed could exist. 
Told in the unflinchingly accurate language of the field soldier--fast, rough slang that becomes a kind of surreal poetry--CLOSE QUARTERS is the story of Dosier's year in Vietnam. 
"An unremittingly honest look into the black pit of war...[Larry Heinemann's] voice is clear and true." (The New York Times)

Genre Fiction

Farrar. Straus & Giroux

Petty hustler Maximilian Nutmeg's life changes when he happens upon the wallet of Loretta Spokeshave and, against his baser instincts, decides to return it

Paco's Story

United States

From the author of the classic National Book Award–winning novel Paco's Story, an equally classic and haunting memoir of the Vietnam War. In 1966 Larry Heinemann, a working-class twenty-two-year-old from Chicago, was drafted into the Army just as the American military buildup in Vietnam was going into overdrive. He served one year of combat duty with the 25th Infantry Division, from March 1967 to March 1968, most of it in the vicinity of Cu Chi (of tunnels fame). It was the most horrific and consequential year of his life and served as the raw material for his two subsequent classic war novels, Close Quarters and Paco's Story. The war also devastated his family. Both of his brothers served in the military, and one of them killed himself, while the other has been missing for many years. Truly, the Vietnam War altered Heinemann's life utterly and forever. Black Virgin Mountain is structured along a railway journey Larry Heinemann took in 1992 from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City as the guest of the Vietnam Writers Association and ends with a crawl through the Tunnels of Cu Chi and a climb up the sacred mountain that provides the title's namesake. From there, he can view the entire compass of his combat experience in-country (including the horrific battle in which Oliver Stone also fought and used as the bloody climax of Platoon). Along the way, the author encounters Vietnamese veterans of the war and views sites that trigger powerful memories. This memoir is an unforgettable threnody and a moving act of reconciliation.

Black Virgin Mountain: A Return to Vietnam

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

DOUBLEDAY

Philip Dosier views and participates in the skirmishes, battles, noise, obscenities, marijuana highs, battlefield racism, spirit of atrocity, and other ingredients of the war in Vietnam and returns home to make his own peace on the banks of the Wabash River

GRAND CENTRAL PUB.

Pacos Story

Faber Faber Inc

This is a Vietnam war novel from the award winning author of "Close Quarters", which describes the horrors of war. The author served in the US army in Vietnam as a combat infantryman.

Faber Inc

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Heinemann, Larry. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Heinemann, Larry

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Heinemann, Larry. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Close Quarters

Paco's Story (Contemporary American Fiction)

Cooler by the Lake

Close Quarters

Cooler by the Lake

Paco's Story

Black Virgin Mountain: A Return to Vietnam

Close Quarters

Pacos Story

Paco's Story