Vietnam War Fiction

Buddha's Child will flood the shadowy corners of South Vietnam's Byzantine political world with the bright light of truth. Ky will describe the Americans and their activities from the perspective of the Vietnamese patriot.

Condemned by US Defense Secretary Robert McNamara as "the absolute bottom of the barrel," Ky was not expected to survive a week in the office into which he was thrust. Instead, he lasted three years, until he wrote himself out of office by penning the country's first constitution.

The cover of darkness was pulled back by the NODS scopes in their hands. The enemy had no idea what was about to befall them. With the rush of wings of dragons, the sounds of M-14s, M-870 shotguns, M-16s, and grenades spoke the finality of death. This gave the human pack mules a taste of what would continue to reign upon them in the House of the Dragon. North and South Vietnam were at war. Indeed, all of Southeast Asia was at war. Due to national commitments, the US military was drawn into the fray.

Nineteen-year-old Jesse McGowan kills to stay alive. As a Marine gunner in Vietnam, he knows the gun team is the heart of every battle. Meet the gun team. They serve in a place called Con Thien, “The Hill of Angels”. Learn what gives them the courage to fight another day. Will Jesse prove worthy? Will the gun team? Will they survive their 13-month tour? In her war-torn country, Tweet, a Vietnamese nurse who believes in democracy, works to save American soldiers. With war’s end, there is no one to protect her or her young daughter.

I invite the listener to enter the lives of two young men with completely opposite views of the Vietnam War. One was a helicopter pilot, flying gunship in Hueys. The other enlisted in the navy to keep from being drafted by the US Army. Slightly fictionalized to provide a coherent narrative and to protect their identities and the identities of several supporting characters, the story line is amazing in revealing details that are true, almost beyond belief.

US Army Warrant Officer Carl Yeager, on his second tour of Vietnam, reaches Khe Sanh in late January 1968. His mission is to arrest an ARVN officer, guilty of murder and selling stolen weapons to the Vietcong. Things start to go wrong when the aircraft on which is due to fly back with the prisoner to Tan Son Nhut, outside Saigon, is destroyed by enemy shellfire. The shells do more than damage the aircraft. They uncover the body of an American officer in a hastily dug grave.

John Ryan never killed anyone; never even fired a gun in Vietnam. He worked in an air-conditioned building in the safest city in Vietnam. If you had to fight a war, this was the way to do it. Friends, parties, weed, and rock n' roll filled their nights. Laughter and comradery were plentiful. They thought they would serve their tour and escape back to the real world without wounds. War leaves no one untouched. No one escapes. All wounds are not from bullets.

A young girl, caught up in an inner-city gang war, crosses the line from victim to avenger.... An innocent man is hunted by government agents for an unspecified crime....

An inspiring and astounding look at the extraordinary courage and contribution of Australian nurses and medics during the Vietnam War. From the best-selling author of Bush Nurses and Nurses of the Outback comes this collection of compelling and moving stories of our heroic nurses in the Vietnam War. Being a nurse always requires a cool head, a steady hand and an open heart. But if you're working in a war zone, the challenges are much harder.

Jorge Salazar is an initiated member of the Latin Kings street gang. When he finds his heroin-addicted mother dead on the bathroom floor, he begins to question everything about his life. Visualizing a high probability of an early death as a gang member, Salazar decides that escaping New York is his only alternative. He enlists in the United States Army, and after basic training, he is deployed to Vietnam where he faces the life and death challenges he thought he left behind.

A team of special force ops, led by hunter turned soldier Sergeant Joel “Bwana” Sutton, and CIA Special Agent Ray Kreipe, on a rescue mission along the Cambodia Border at the height of the Vietnam War, encounter an unknown species of ape unlike anything known to science. The discovery quickly turns the rescue mission into a desperate battle of survival of which not all will survive.

There are dozens of unforgettable characters, and scores of authentic scenes in Brandywine's War. From behind the headlines and the front-line dispatches has come this Rabelaisian novel. Chief Warrant Officer Vaughan completed Brandywine's War while serving his second of three tours of duty in Vietnam.

Timely and timeless. This is a soldier's story and war is war, whether it's Bull Run, Ban Me Thuot, or Fallujah. Sent to Vietnam after being drafted, Carl Melcher makes friends with both the black and white members of his company in spite of racial tensions of the times. Naive and young for his nineteen years, he learns harrowing truths about life and death when his optimism proves false.

Gerald "Jerry" Keyser and I became friends in 1966, when we were both in USAF Pilot Training. In 1970 I got out of the Air Force and Jerry stayed in. We remained friends and I followed along in awe as he went on to have the most amazing flying career I have ever seen. He flew 100 different types of airplanes, helicopters, and gliders during his 20 years in the Air Force, including a stint with NASA, and his 17 years as a test pilot for Hughes-McDonell Douglas-Boeing Helicopter Company in Arizona.

American aircraft are going down, victim to missile batteries hidden deep in the jungles of South Vietnam, and they bring in an Air Force expert, Colonel Dan Carter, to analyze the defenses and devise a strategy to destroy them. Yet, the Vietcong gets wind of the colonel’s arrival, and plan to murder him. Joe Cooper, Air Cav, returns from an abortive mission to grab an important and high-ranking North Vietnamese. A mission gives MACV an idea to protect their expert.

The war is heating up, and they have no time for R&R before the Hueys take off and carry them to their next mission. A Vietcong fortified town in the Mekong Delta, a stronghold heavily defended by troops and heavy weapons. The Cav’s job is to go in, take the town and locate and destroy the enemy. To give the VC a hard, brutal lesson they will never forget.

Joe runs into a hidden punji trap, and the poisoned stakes deal him a hammer blow. A dustoff back to Da Nang and a long stay in the hospital puts him out of action, and the only consolation is the pretty nurse who attends to his wounds. When he is released, his platoon is in the field, and they give him a temporary posting to another platoon about to fly out to the Laotian border to check out a rumored convoy of vital supplies, weapons, and ammo for the VC.

Private Joe Walker and Third Platoon run into an ambush, and this is no ordinary ambush. Waiting for them is a North Vietnamese armored unit. This is a place where no armor should exist for a long, long way. And Third Platoon has no way to engage enemy tanks. Yet they have a radio, and all it needs is a quick call to Da Nang to call in a squadron of fighter bombers. Until the radio is damaged, and the tanks are coming on fast.

It is 1965, and America is putting more boots on the ground to fight the communists who have sent their powerful People’s Army of Vietnam, the PAVN, south. Their aim is to defeat the South Vietnamese Army, the ARVN, and impose the iron fist of communist rule on the democratic South. Walker knows nothing of politics or military strategy and tactics. A single obsession rules his life: to become a major league baseball pitcher.

Robert Peterson arrived in Vietnam in the fall of 1966, a young American ready to serve his country and seize his destiny. What happened in that jungle war would change his life forever. Peterson vividly relives the tense patrols in the Viet Cong-infested Central Highlands, the fierce firefights along the Cambodian border, the ambushes and enemy charges.

Authors Robert Toto and Richard Geschke have expanded their horizons of their original book, In Our Duffel Bags, Surviving the Vietnam Era, with a poetic interpretation of life in the army. Tracking their adventures in Germany, Panama and Vietnam, the authors wax the poetic version of what they found in their duffel bags looking deeper into the fast changing times of the Vietnam era. With Shadows of Combat the listener will sense the history of what took place in this crucial time in American history.