A Combat Vet’s Reading List
Larry Gwin, former US Army captain, Silver Star, Purple Heart, XO of Alpha Co., 2/7 Cav, 1st Cav Division, veteran of the Ia Drang battles of 1965 and author of “Baptism: A Vietnam Memoir,” spent years trying to find some context for his own horrific combat experience by exploring war literature.
It’s useful exercise, a way for combat veterans to learn from each other, even across decades and centuries, find some commonality and ease the alienation. It’s an important part of the post-combat normalization process. Make that post-combat normality transcendence process. There’s the risk of obsession, but if that is an issue, take it up with your shrink.
Anyway, Larry got bored the other morning, drafted his quick combat reading list, and emailed it. A couple of his buddies, on an email list that runs from Guadalcanal through Korea and Vietnam to Petraeus’ Baghdad staff and the Afghan Counterinsurgency Academy, added to it:
The American Revolution:
1776, by David McCullough
The Winter Soldiers, Saratoga, and Decisive Day, by Richard M. Ketchum
Rabble in Arms, by Kenneth Roberts
The Civil War:
The Killer Angels, by Michael Shaara
The Last Full Measure, by Jeff Shaara
The Red Badge of Courage, by Stephen Crane
Army of the Potomac Trilogy, by Bruce Catton
Gettysburg, by Stephen W. Sears
World War I:
Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, by Siegfried Sassoon
Good-Bye to All That, by Robert Graves
All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque
The Great War and Modern Memory, by Paul Fussell
World War II:
The Forgotten Soldier, by Guy Sajer
The Cruel Sea, by Nicholas Monsarrat
The Thin Red Line, by James Jones
The Naked and the Dead, by Norman Mailer
D-Day, by Stephen E. Ambrose
Citizen Soldiers, by Stephen E. Ambrose
Goodbye Darkness, by William Manchester
With the Old Breed, by E.B. Sledge
A Bridge Too Far, by Cornelius Ryan
The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors, by James D. Hornfischer
Wings Of Morning, by Thomas Childers
Stalingrad, and The Fall of Berlin 1945, by Antony Beevor
Korea:
Chosin, by Eric Hammel
The Coldest War, by James Brady
The Coldest Winter, by David Halberstam
Vietnam:
Hell in a Very Small Place: The Siege of Dien Bien Phu, by Bernard B. Fall
A Bright Shining Lie, by Neil Sheehan
Dispatches, by Michael Herr
We were Soldiers Once…And Young, by Hal Moore and Joe Galloway
The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien
Other Wars/Classics:
The Iliad, by Homer
The Virtues of War: A Novel of Alexander the Great, by Steven Pressfield
The Year of the French, by Thomas Flanagan (Ireland, 1776)
War and Peace, by Count Leo Tolstoy
Moscow 1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March, by Adam Zamoyski
Black Hawk Down, by Mark Bowden
The Forever War, by Dexter Filkins
Another 7th Cav Ia Drang vet who hasn’t said whether I can use his name, so remains nameless, reached back into his unit’s history:
Son of the Morning Star, by Evan S. Connell
Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors, by Stephen Ambrose
Here’s another Nam combat vet’s addition:
Achilles in Vietnam, by Jonathan Shay
Two more Nam vets add:
King Philip’s War: The History and Legacy of America’s Forgotten Conflict, by Eric Schultz
Paul Revere’s Ride, by David Fischer
And
Dak To, by Edward F. Murphy
The Long Gray Line, by Rick Atkinson
A Vietnam Psyops vet adds:
WW II:
Alamo in the Ardennes: The Untold Story of the American Soldiers Who Made the Defense of Bastogne Possible, by John McManus
The Longest Winter: The Battle of the Bulge and the Epic Story of WWII’s Most Decorated Platoon, by Alex Kershaw
Ghost Soldiers: The Epic Account of World War II’s Greatest Rescue Mission, by Hampton Sides
Vietnam:
The Cat from Hue, by John Laurence
Chickenhawk, by Robert Mason
Iraq/Afghanistan:
Generation Kill, by Evan Wright
In the Company of Soldiers, by Rick Atkinson
House to House, by David Bellavia
OK. Ditto on a lot of that. Sadly the younger vets on Larry’s list are too busy to engage in these kinds of exercises like the old men do.
On my part, a big shout out re Herr, Filkins, Sajer, Fall, Beevor, Childers, among so many other good ones listed above. Just got Bellavia and looking forward to that. Here’s my own quick chronological list, omitting those already listed:
The Jewish War, by Flavius Josephus
Harold and William: The Battle for England, A.D. 1064-1066, by Benton Rain Patterson
The Crusades, by Jonathan Riley-Smith
The Shield and the Sword, by Ernle Bradford (Knights Hospitaller of St. John, from Jerusalem to Great Seige of Malta)
Henry V, by William Shakespeare
Every Man Will Do His Duty: An Anthology of Firsthand Accounts from the Age of Nelson, edited by Dean King
The Battle: A New History of Waterloo, by Alessandro Barbero (My review here, with a little about Gwin and company.)
Retreat from Kabul: The Catastrophic British Defeat in Afghanistan, 1842, Patrick Macrory (basis of the first Falshman novel)
Here Is Your War, by Ernie Pyle
The Face of War and Travels with Myself and Another, by Martha Gellhorn (Hemingway’s squeeze/major war correspondent)
Guadalcanal Diary, by Richard Tregaskis
Fighter Squadron at Guadalcanal, by Max Brand. (The product of interviews with 212th Marine fliers on leave in 1943, recovered and published 50 years later)
Behind Bamboo, by Rohan Rivett (An Australian war correspondent/POW’s account of captivity on the Death Railway)
Band of Brothers, by Stephen Ambrose
Five Years to Freedom, by James N. Rowe
Thunder Run, by David Zucchino
Martyr’s Day, by Michael Kelly. Also, not exactly a war book, Things Worth Fighting For, edited by Max Kelly, his widow. (Help support a fallen war correspondent’s family. Buy his books.)
One Bullet Away, by Nate Fick
Blood Stripes, by David Danelo
Imperial Grunts, and anything else by Robert Kaplan, a great American war correspondent
A Terrible Love of War, by James Hillman (A Jungian shrink recognizes that the human animal is wired for war)
It’s impossible to list them all. Add your favorites in comments.
And after all that, you’ll need a vacation, or therapy. For a good time, read:
Holidays in Hell, by P.J. O’Rourke
All of the Flashman novels, by George MacDonald Fraser, starting with this one.
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 12:44 am on Sunday, December 7, 2008
13 Responses to “A Combat Vet’s Reading List”
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December 7th, 2008 at 12:26 pm
As a Viet vet I have had a similar search for understanding.
I suggest the following books on Vietnam and others as essential reading:
Vietnam: A Necessary War by Michael Lind
The Last Valley: The Battle That Doomed the French Empire and Led America into Vietnam by Martin Windrow
A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam by Lewis Sorley
Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War 1954-195 by Mark Moyar (Vol II to follow) and will save having to read Bright Shining Lie
Derelection of Duty … Johnson/McNamara/JCS and The Lies That Led to Vietnam
by H.R. McMaster
All of Victor Davis Hanson’s books, particularly The Soul of Battle, Carnage and Culture and The Ripples of Battle.
December 7th, 2008 at 2:11 pm
Civil War: “Landscape Turned Red” by Stephen Sears; “I Rode With Stonewall” by henry Kidd Douglas; “The Second Manassas” by Hennessey; Chancellorsville,1863:Home of the Brave” by Ernest Fergussen; “The Civil War: A Narrative” by Shelby Foote…
No disrespect intended to any American Veteran of the Ia Drang, LZ X-Ray, 1965.
December 7th, 2008 at 2:22 pm
How about a quickie: Roosevelt at the Sorbonne.
In the realm of inspiring fiction, Pressfield’s Gates of Fire and Anton Myer’s Once an Eagle.
And (having read it) I’d add Baptism to the list too, as its author is obviously too humble.
December 7th, 2008 at 8:57 pm
I’m by no means a combat vet, but a voracious reader. On the lighter side of this discourse, how about Up Front, by Bill Mauldin? Or, for that matter, his more complete Willie and Joe: The WWII Years…
December 7th, 2008 at 10:01 pm
Not to lower the academic standard of the reading list, but I must admit that I really enjoyed James Brady’s second book “Flyboys.” Written from the leftover notes from “Flags of Our Fathers”, I found it to be just profound.
December 8th, 2008 at 12:20 pm
I’m not a vet, but I am always looking out for books on “The Bulge”. Two that stood out for me were Charles B. MacDonald’s “Company Commander” and Gerald Astor’s “A Blood-Dimmed Tide” - the first a memoir and the second an oral-history based on interviews long after the fact.
December 8th, 2008 at 3:06 pm
I would like to add Ernie Pyle’s “Brave Men”
How does the Vietnam War book “The 13th Valley” hold up to this list?
December 8th, 2008 at 7:29 pm
If folks want to track the books that they’ve read off the official service reading lists, they can use the little site I put up:
http://militaryprofessionalreadinglists.com/
It’s got the reading lists from the five services there… next up, I need to add a search feature since there are over 150 books listed.
Also, an interesting factoid - Bernard Lewis’ “Crisis of Islam” is featured on 4 of the 5 lists!
December 8th, 2008 at 7:46 pm
As a postscript to my earlier post, I would also add Gerald Astor’s book, Operation Iceberg, about the Okinawa campaign - surely a “special” part of hell for a lot of Americans. Here’s Stephen Ambrose’s review of the book: a href=”http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3651/is_/ai_n8728657″>Operation Iceberg by Gerald Astor
December 8th, 2008 at 7:48 pm
OK - trying again with that link:
Stephen Ambrose’s review of Gerald Astor’s Operation Iceberg
December 10th, 2008 at 1:04 am
[...] Jules Crittenden » A Combat Vet’s Reading List… 1st Cav Division, veteran of the Ia Drang battles of 1965 and author of “Baptism: A Vietnam Memoir,” spent many years trying to understand war and find some context for his own horrific combat experience by exploring war literature. … [...]
December 10th, 2008 at 8:42 am
I am not a vet but I think that “On Combat” by LTC Dave Grossman is a must read for all sheepdogs and those who love them.
December 19th, 2008 at 11:29 pm
One can’t go wrong with anything by Joseph Alexander, John Keegan or Victor David Hanson.