Voices from the Vietnam War

Few oral histories of the Vietnam War allow civilians or Communist supporters to tell their stories, resulting in scholarship that is often one-sided. Xiaobing Li, a former soldier for the People's Liberation Army and a Chinese native, spent seven years gathering hundreds of accounts from survivors of the war, filling gaps in the war narrative, and providing new insights into the events of the war. Voices from the Vietnam War offers the narratives of twenty-two individuals, spanning three continents and representing multiple perspectives-American, Chinese, Russian, North and South Korean, Vietnamese, and Viet Cong. Among the collection of personal stories are several Communist accounts-including interviews with a former KGB spy and a captain in the Chinese army-that humanize and contextualize the war's events while shedding light on aspects of the war previously unknown to Western scholars. Book jacket.

Xiaobing Li, professor of history and director of the Western Pacific Institute at the University of Central Oklahoma, is the author of A History of the Modern Chinese Army and coauthor of Voices from the Korean War: Personal Stories of American, Korean, and Chinese Soldiers. He served in the People's Liberation Army in China.