Vietnam Women

What is the price of honor? It took 10 years for Vietnam War Nurse Diane Carlson Evans to answer that question - and the answer was a heavy one.

Reciprocity is a high-voltage action thriller jam-packed with action, intrigue, and morally complex characters. When a gang of human traffickers kidnap two young ladies who are leaving their troubled past in Vietnam to start new lives in America, their dreams suddenly become a nightmare. JD Cordell, a retired US Navy SEAL, and relative of one of the young ladies, races to the Philippines to lead a rescue team through the dangerous streets of Manila's infamous Tondo district, searching for a former American Special Forces sniper lost in its dark and violent underbelly of cheap alcohol, fast ...

During the Vietnam war American women were recruited to be part of a secret mission to disguise themselves as Vietnamese and act as close range snipers on warlords and generals. Successful missions reduced the flow of guns and drugs saving the lives of countless American troops. This is their story.

A 2025 Audie Award winner for Best Fiction Narrator! "Kristin Hannah’s potent storytelling skills are brilliantly served by narrator Julia Whelan, whose limber, low-pitched voice moves nimbly from person to person, capturing personality and mood, her empathy palpable." —The Washington Post...

The long-buried story of three extraordinary female journalists who permanently shattered the barriers to women covering war Kate Webb, an Australian iconoclast, Catherine Leroy, a French daredevil photographer, and Frances FitzGerald, a blue-blood American intellectual, arrived in Vietnam with...

Nineteen-year-old Jesse McGowan kills to stay alive. As a Marine gunner in Vietnam, he knows the gun team is the heart of every battle. Meet the gun team. They serve in a place called Con Thien, “The Hill of Angels”. Learn what gives them the courage to fight another day. Will Jesse prove worthy? Will the gun team? Will they survive their 13-month tour? In her war-torn country, Tweet, a Vietnamese nurse who believes in democracy, works to save American soldiers. With war’s end, there is no one to protect her or her young daughter.

American women—American wives—have been mostly minor characters in the literature of the Vietnam War, but in Absolution they take center stage. Tricia is a shy newlywed, married to a rising attorney on loan to navy intelligence. Charlene is a practiced corporate spouse and mother of three, a beauty and a bully. In Saigon in 1963, the two women form a wary alliance as they balance the era’s mandate to be “helpmeets” to their ambitious husbands with their own, inchoate impulse to “do good” for the people of Vietnam.

It’s 1943. The war rages. The newly launched WASP program is recruiting. And barnstormer fan Georgeanne “George” Ector’s dream is to take to the skies. Grit is what she inherited from her mother, an Oklahoma farm girl at the turn of the century who preferred taking apart an engine to stitching linens for a hope chest. She taught her daughter well. George isn’t the only woman about to follow her calling.

On his second combat tour, Nick Brokhausen served in Recon Team Habu, CCN. This unit was part of MACV-SOG (Military Assistance Command Vietnam Studies and Observations Group), or Studies and Observations Group as it was innocuously called. The small recon companies that were the center of its activities conducted some of the most dangerous missions of the war, infiltrating areas controlled by the North Vietnamese in Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia. The companies never exceeded more than 30 Americans, yet they were the best source for the enemy's disposition.

When she was 18, she joined the army to finance her nursing education. With less than six months of nursing experience, she was assigned to the 24th Evacuation Hospital in South Vietnam. True tales of the war that are by turns horrifying and humorous, told with an eye for detail, by a woman who was in the thick of it.

Courage in Camouflage II is a follow-up to the first set of soldier stories published two years ago in the original Courage in Camouflage. Both collections are based on individual interviews with military veterans young and old from all across the United States. Most of these brave men and women served considerable time in combat during sometimes historic battles in World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Operation Desert Storm, Desert Shield, and the protracted fight against terrorism in the Middle East. Most all have gone on to successful lives outside the military, but things they saw and did ...

Conflict on the battlefield and in the newsroom. A feisty female journalist and a stoic hero. Can their love survive the tragedy of the Vietnam War? Journalist Chris McKenna would do anything to cover the Vietnam War. If there’s one thing she knows, it’s that she was born to tell this story. Chris rolls into South Vietnam intent on sniffing out the overlooked stories of America’s most unpopular war. Much to the dismay of the military establishment, she hops a Huey to a remote base in the Mekong Delta and hits the motherlode. A mission both tactically and strategically questionable. ...

In 1960s Kentucky, Susanna Braden’s caught between protecting her younger siblings from her mother’s perniciousness and other lurking dangers, and battling the growing love she feels for her best friend, Calvin. But when family secrets emerge that threaten to destroy her carefully cultivated illusion of safety and Calvin is deployed to Vietnam, Susanna is forced to reexamine the concepts of love, honor, and forgiveness — and it just may be the key to redemption for them all. Four-time award winner A WHISPER OF SMOKE delivers a coming-of-age love story that is rich and deeply sensitive...

The story of the indomitable American POWs who endured "Alcatraz," the Hanoi prison camp where North Vietnam locked up its most dangerous and subversive prisoners, and the wives who fought to bring them home. As these men suffered in Hanoi, their wives launched an extraordinary campaign that would ultimately spark the POW/MIA movement. When the survivors finally returned, one would receive the Medal of Honor, another became a U.S. Senator, and a third still serves in Congress.

This haunting memoir tells the brutal story of the Vietnam War from the perspective of an innocent victim whose childhood was dominated by violence, devastation, and conflicts between the teachings of her culture and the realities of war. Le Ly Hayslip—the youngest in a close-knit Buddhist family—was 12 years old when U.S. helicopters landed in her village. She was raped and "ruined" for marriage by Viet Cong soldiers, imprisoned and tortured by the South Vietnamese, and sentenced to death by the Viet Cong.

Sometimes the greatest step forward is the one guided by love. I'm a Starbucks barista from Boulder, Colorado, I fly to Saigon with my savings. My father’s heritage was the quest. His best friend’s son, however, is the surprise. Hung Ly is my translator, my guide, and unexpectedly, my favorite distraction. He speaks impeccable English, has a smile that undermines my better judgment, and knows Saigon like the back of his hand. He was a practical solution. He is becoming an emotional complication. Between bustling markets and quiet conversations, I’m collecting more than stories about ...

As a journalist, Paxton Andrews would experience Vietnam firsthand. We follow her from high school in Savannah to college in Berkeley and then to work in Saigon. For the soldiers she knew and met there, Viet Nam would change their lives in ways they could never have imagined. For the...

For this mission, they’ll risk their lives. For each other, they’ll risk their hearts. Buddy Rider's little Cessna spotter aircraft was shot down twice over the jungles of Vietnam, and ten years later he’s flying crop dusters for a living while tinkering with an old WWII transport aircraft. He avoids the painful memories of the war, the bad times, and the loss of friends, until a young woman comes to his aircraft hangar in search of him. Elizabeth Anderson is a lay nun dedicated to aiding the helpless, and her immediate task is to rescue fellow missionaries and orphans trapped in war-...

Donut Dolly puts you in the Vietnam War face down in the dirt under a sniper attack, inside a helicopter being struck by lightning, at dinner next to a commanding general, and slogging through the mud along a line of foxholes. You see the war through the eyes of one of the first women officially allowed in the combat zone.

From award-winning journalist and children’s book author Mary Cronk Farrell comes the inspiring and fascinating story of the woman who gave a human face to the Vietnam War. Close-Up on War tells the story of French-born Catherine Leroy, one of the war’s few woman photographers, who documented some of the fiercest fighting in the 20-year conflict. Although she had no formal photographic training and had never before traveled more than a few hundred miles from Paris, Leroy left home at age 21 to travel to Vietnam and document the faces of war.