RELATED READINGS

The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
Considered by many critics to be the best work of fiction to come out of the Vietnam War. In an interview, O’Brien said this about the novel: “The Things They Carried is sort of half novel, half group of stories. It's part nonfiction, too: some of the stuff is commentary on the stories, talking about where a particular one came from. Speaking of Courage, for example, came from a letter I received from a guy named Norman Bowker, a real guy, who committed suicide after I received his letter. He was talking to me in his letter about how he just couldn't adjust to coming home. It wasn't bad memories; it was that he couldn't talk to anybody about it. He didn't know what to say; he felt inarticulate. All he could do was drive around and around in his hometown in Iowa, around this lake. In the letter he asked me to write a story about it, and I did.”

My Detachment by Tracy Kidder (2005)
Kidder spent a year in Vietnam, not as a combat soldier, but as commander of a detachment of eight soldiers whose mission was to interpret raw intelligence data to try and figure out enemy troop movements. In an interview on powells.com, Kidder said “It's a book, I think, about various lunacies of youth, or at least of my youth, especially the romanticism that accompanies wars, that seems indeed to help make wars possible.”

Shooter: The Autobiography of the Top-Ranked Marine Shooter by Jack Coughlin (2005)
With more than sixty confirmed kills, Jack Coughlin is the Marine Corps' top-ranked sniper. Shooter is his harrowing first-person account of a sniper's life on and off the modern battlefield. Coughlin has written a highly personal story about his deadly craft, taking readers deep inside an invisible society that is off-limits to outsiders. This is not a heroic battlefield memoir, but the careful study of an exceptional man who must keep his sanity while carrying forward one of the deadliest legacies in the U.S. military today. (from a powells.com review)