Why Vietnam: Reflections on the Effect of War, by Margaret Colbert Brown, is a very unique book, nothing like any book written on the Vietnam War in the past. At heart, I think the author is a poet. The book is filled with poetry written by soldiers, The US Army psychological Operations troops for the Vietnamese civilians and Viet Cong, and of course the Viet Cong themselves. She will often look at a subject, discuss it is some depth, and then add a poem that has some connection to the subject. This is not a poetry book; this is a history of the war mostly written by those who fought it. The poetry is used to show the tremendous emotion felt by those that were there and lived it. Maggie worked for several years with a lot of Vietnam vets at the Department of English and the Honors Program at Radford University, and that gave her opportunity to teach several honors sections of “Research and Reading” on the Vietnam War, and a good deal of the book is stories and anecdotes told by those veterans. She listened to them. She dug in and got to the core of their beliefs, fears and hopes. If you want to look at Vietnam from an entirely different viewpoint, that of a female academic professor with great feeling for the soldiers she taught and listened to, this could be your book.

Herb Friedman, Veteran and military historian