Voices from the Vietnam War: Stories from American, Asian, and Russian Veterans

Xiaobing Li's Voices from the Vietnam War is an oral-history collection of 22 personal stories of U.S., Vietnamese, Chinese, Soviet, and South Korean soldiers and officers who served in the Vietnam Wars, covering the period from 1946, when the French-Indochina War started, to 1975, when the North Vietnamese took over the whole of Vietnam. In their own words, the veterans recount their war experiences in Vietnam as well as details about their family lives before and after the war. Li's book testifies to the well-established notion that oral history, despite certain methodological problems, can be a very productive tool of historical inquiry. Those 22 stories allow the reader to approach the Vietnam War from the bottom up, as most of Li's interviewees were rank-and-file soldiers and midlevel officers during the war. The stories humanize and contextualize the wars in Vietnam, as they are told from different perspectives. Overall, Li's interviews...