The word “Vietnam” today connotes the longest and most divisive foreign war in our history.  It is a war that pitted two nations against each other, created enormous hostility within both, unleashed global alarm and proved to be the most costly and destructive conflict since World War II. 

Now, 25 years after the end of the Vietnam War, former MIT associate history professor and author, Christian G. Appy presents a definitive account from all sides.  His book PATRIOTS: The Vietnam War Remembered From All Sides is the first oral history to bring together a diversity of voices and viewpoints that dramatically reveal the war’s impact on millions of men, women and children; civilians and combatants; Americans and Vietnamese. 

In these gripping accounts we hear from generals, journalists, grunts, guerillas, peace activists, doctors, pilots, morale boosters, policymakers, draft resisters and a host of others.  Some of the most shattering testimony comes from those who had never even set foot in the war zone, like the widow of Norman Morrison, the Quaker who incinerated himself in front of the Pentagon to protest the war.  The North Vietnamese doctor who spent nine years treating patients in a jungle hospital, the South Vietnamese boy who saw his father captured during the Tet Offensive and the American door-gunner who helped rescue survivors of the My Lai massacre. Together these stories travel from the deafening jungle firefights to Oval Office policy debates, from POW torture chambers to peace negotiations in Paris and from press briefings in Saigon to dogfights in the skies over North Vietnam.