Next stop, Vietnam

Very short List - FEBRUARY 3, 2012

NONFICTION A Pocket Guide to Vietnam, 1962

A Pocket Guide to Vietnam, 1962 was published by the Department of Defense and meant for soldiers in the field. Written in simple, declarative sentences—“South Vietnam has a typically tropical climate of two seasons: hot and dry and hot and rainy”—the book is deeply respectful of Vietnam’s culture and people. (“Don’t think Americans know everything,” it instructs.) This makes it a fascinating distillation of the things we knew (or thought we knew) about a very old country we never did come to understand—and fills it with all sorts of dramatic ironies. Oxford’s Bodleian Library published a cheap and elegant reprint last year; it carries a new foreword by U.S. Army veteran Bruns Grayson. (“I must have received this handbook sometime in the spring of 1968, before heading off to Vietnam that summer,” Grayson writes.) And the book’s also available as a (free) PDF, which we’ve linked you to below. A Pocket Guide to Vietnam, 1962 (Bodleian Library; hardcover; 88 pages) the book as a PDF the VeryShortList.com archive