Short stories on Vietnam. See index of writers illustration for details.

Free Fire Zone: Short Stories by Vietnam Veterans

Karlin, Wayne

McGraw=Hill

Free fire zone;: Short stories by Vietnam veterans

Crossover

Harcourt, Brace. Jovanovich

Ezra Brenner, a Jew, and Maryam Halim, a Palestinian, childhood chums, reunite during a filming on the deserts of Israel, but their love affair is complicated by the political antagonism of their nationalities

The Extras

Literature & Fiction

United States

Henry Holt Co.

The legacy of the American experience in Vietnam is still unfolding, a matrix of barbed and irreconcilable issues and attitudes that we will carry, in spite of ourselves, into the next century. We are all haunted, no matter where we stood or what we did during those years, by the unappeasable ghosts of American conscience and commitment gone horribly wrong, and by the ambiguous fate of the thousands of Americans left behind - still missing in action, still unaccounted for - the ghostly ranks of the MIAs. In Us, his fourth novel, Wayne Karlin explores our national obsession with our MIAs in a drama that combines aspects of realistic adventure narrative with a more emblematic quest - sometimes hallucinatory, sometimes hilarious - for the deeper psychological significance these missing men and women hold in the American psyche. Loman, Karlin's protagonist, is a Vietnam vet with a checkered career. He has chosen to remain in Southeast Asia, and owns a bar in Bangkok, mecca for sex tours and cheap drugs, and port of entry for all those who come in search of the "missing." When a visiting congressman engages him to help establish contact with a group of MIAs the congressman alleges is operating as an independent force with one of the Golden Triangle opium armies, Loman accepts the job, not realizing at first that his search will quickly bring him up against a mind and force with which he is utterly unfamiliar. History, myth, and reality blur as Karlin then enters a world that turns our expectations upside down, a world of mountain spirits, montebanks, and strange rebels. By book's end, Loman has learned again some of the harshest lessons of the war, but also has achieved a measure of peace that had previously escaped him. Tim O'Brien has written that Wayne Karlin is "one of the most gifted writers to emerge from the Vietnam War." In Us, his best book to date, Karlin probes as deeply into the dark heart of the war and its aftermath as any writer of his generation.

Wandering Souls: Journeys with the Dead and the Living in Viet Nam

On March 19, 1969, First Lieutenant Homer R. Steedly, Jr., shot and killed a North Vietnamese soldier, Dam, when they met on a jungle trail. Steedly took a diaryfilled with beautiful line drawingsfrom the body of the dead soldier, which he subsequently sent to his mother for safekeeping. Thirty-five years later, Steedly rediscovers the forgotten dairy and begins to confront his suppressed memories of the war that defined his life, deciding to return to Viet Nam and meet the family of the man he killed to seek their forgiveness.
Fellow veteran and award-winning author Wayne Karlin accompanied Steedly on his remarkable journey. In Wandering Souls he recounts Homer's movement towards a recovery that could only come about through a confrontation with the ghosts of his pastand the need of Dam's family to bring their child's wandering soul” to his own peace.
Wandering Souls limns the terrible price of war on soldiers and their loved ones, and reveals that we heal not by forgetting war's hard lessons, but by remembering its costs.

Wandering Souls: Journeys With the Dead and the Living in Viet Nam

History

Asia

Nation Books

Biographies & Memoirs

Leaders & Notable People

Bold Type Books

<div>We have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. ?Thomas Jefferson During the War of 1812, thousands of enslaved people from plantations across the Tidewater rallied to the British side, turning against an American republic that had barred them from the promises of freedom and democracy. Set against the backdrop of rebellion and war, Wayne Karlin's A Wolf by the Ears follows the interconnected stories of Towerhill and Sarai, two African slaves, and their master, Jacob Hallam. Educated side-by-side and inseparable as children, the three come of age as they are forced to grapple with?and break free of?the fraught linkage of black and white Americans and how differently each defines what it means to fight for freedom. Sarai and Jacob are caught in the tension between the dream of equality, the reality of slavery, and their own hearts, while Towerhill sits at the head of a company of black marines that is part of the force that takes Washington and watches the White House burn.</div>

A Wolf by the Ears (Juniper Prize for Fiction)

University of Massachusetts Press

The conflict in Vietnam has been rewritten and reframed into many corners of American life and has long shadowed contemporary political science and foreign policy. The war and its aftermath have engendered award-winning films and books. It has held up a mirror to the twentieth century and to the wars of the twenty-first. 
Set in wartime Vietnam and contemporary Vietnam, in wartime America and in America today, the stories that comprise Memorial Days were written from 1973 to the present. As our continuing reappraisals of the war’s shadow have unspooled over the last half-decade, so too has Wayne Karlin returned to the subject in his fiction, collected and published together here for the first time. 
A girl in Maryland runs away from Civil War reenactors she imagines to be American soldiers in Vietnam, while a woman in Vietnam hides in the jungle from an American helicopter and another tries to bury the relics of the war. A man mourns a friend lost in Iraq while a helicopter crewman in Quang Tri loads the broken and dead into his aircraft. Extras playing soldiers in a war film in present-day Vietnam model themselves after other war films while a Marine in a war sees himself as a movie character. A snake coiled around the collective control of a helicopter in Vietnam uncoils in a soldier come home from Iraq. The chronology is the chronology of dreams or nightmares or triggered flashbacks: images and incidents triggering other images and incidents in a sequence that seems to make no sense—which is exactly the sense it makes. 
Some stories burn with the fresh experiences of a Marine witnessing war firsthand. Some stories radiate a long-abiding grief. All the stories reflect and reconfigure the Vietnam War as it echoes into the present century, under the light of retrospection.

Memorial Days: Vietnam Stories, 1973–2022 (Peace and Conflict)

Texas Tech University Press

These stories represent the "second wave" of fiction—works about the aftermath of the Vietnam conflict as it moved into both countries, touching and forever changing not only the veterans, but also their families and their societies. Contributors include John Edgar Wideman, Larry Brown, Robert Olen Butler, Philip Caputo, Bobbie Ann Mason, Ngo Tu Lap, Tim O'Brien, and others.

The Other Side of Heaven: Post-War Fiction by Vietnamese and American Writers

Curbstone Books

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Books by Karlin, Wayne