Vietnam Short Stories

This gripping novel is not only one of the best books written about Vietnam; it is also one of the most powerful anti-war novels in American literature. Walter James has no face. Braiden Chaney has no arms or legs. They lost them 22 years ago, in Vietnam. Now, in the course of one long night in a V.A. hospital, these two soldiers, one black, the other white, reveal how they came to be where they are and what they can only hope to become.

Hearts in Atlantis is composed of five interconnected, sequential narratives, set in the years from 1960 to 1999. Each story is deeply rooted in the sixties, and each is haunted by the Vietnam War.

Maine Game Warden Mike Bowditch accompanies his old friend and mentor, retired bush pilot Charley Stevens, as he pays a visit to a mysterious woman, the widow of a Vietnam vet, living in isolation in the Maine wilderness. Many years earlier, she had called Charley, then a young game warden himself, for help. She claimed that her badly bleeding husband had been attacked by a rabid bat. But in the succeeding days, despite her husband's increasingly erratic and aggressive behavior, his wife resisted Charley's attempts to help, arousing his suspicions that more was going on than met the eye.

From cooks and correspondents to clerks and comptrollers, DEROS Vietnam distills the essence of life for soldiers in the rear during the war, and later, back home in a divided America.

Another road trip in the Fun Loving Finn series, this one finds Finn and friends heading southeast from Missouri to Florida. Finn got a good number in the crazy Vietnam lottery and decides to learn something about life in the real world and drops out of college. When their car breaks down in Atlanta and they’re short on cash, they hole up at the Salvation Army and try to find a new ride while protecting the only possession anybody cares about: his friend Stan’s fish. Will these teenage hippies find a ride, get ripped off, or make it safely to Florida with the fish?

These 12 stories reflect the combat infantry experience of the Vietnam War--in the gritty “Tanks,” “Called of God,” and “Incubation Period.” There’s also the woman’s perspective of Arlene, a naive Red Cross volunteer or “Doughnut Dolly,” in “A Man’s World.”

The short stories contained in The Many Deaths of Comrade Binh are fiction. This does not, however, mean they aren't true. Retired naval officer Kenneth Levin readily admits to some artistic license, but each tale is based on actual events that occurred during the Vietnam War.