What We're Reading: The Mountains Sing and Waging Peace in Vietnam

I’m reading two books relating to the Vietnam War and Vietnamese history. The first is Nguyen Phan Que Mai’s The Mountains Sing, a novel that follows the Tran family as they experience three conflicts: the Second World War, the French War in Vietnam, and the American War in Vietnam, all taking place against the backdrop of waning foreign colonialism and a homegrown radical social revolution.  The second is Waging Peace in Vietnam: US Soldiers and Veterans who Opposed the War, edited by Ron Carver, David Cortright, and Barbara Doherty. This oral history tells the story of dissenting soldiers, in uniform and out, acting at great risk, to protest the American war in Vietnam. There is an accompanying museum display, at the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, that I saw in January 2020. I recently connected with the curator of the exhibit, and editor of this collection, Ron Carver, and had a long phone discussion about how this history has been erased and minimized, and how the participants are often misrepresented as unpatriotic, hateful, and cowardly.

Both are terrific reads.