The VVA Veteran, a publication of Vietnam Veterans of America

Vietnam Veterans of America

March/April 2026

The War Within the War and Wandering Souls: New, Top-Quality Vietnam War History and Fiction

BY MARC LEEPSON

The journalist and author Wil Haygood is best known for his bestselling 2013 biography, The Butler, the story of Eugene Allen, a longtime White House butler who was also the subject of a popular Hollywood movie starring Forrest Whittaker.

Haygood’s new book, The War Within a War: The Black Struggle in Vietnam and At Home (Knopf, 384 pp. $35, hardcover; $14.99, Kindle), tells a much broader story: how Black Americans experienced the Vietnam War and its aftermath during the waning days of Jim Crow in the South and the burgeoning Civil Rights movement throughout the nation in the mid- and late 1960s and into the 1970s.

Taking part in the Vietnam War was a monumental life experience for every American who served in-country. For many Black Americans, as Haywood shows very well, the fact that race relations at home— especially, but not solely, in the South—were in upheaval upped the ante considerably.

“If you were in America and Black,” Haygood says in the book’s on-point introduction, the Vietnam War “seemed like something out of a jittery and dangerous newsreel being shown around the globe,” and “right beside that picture were inner cities burning, the streets filled with cries for Black freedom.”

Haygood, a former top-tier journalist who worked for the Boston Globe and Washington Post, is a compelling writer. The War Within a War is a well-mixed combination of extensive interviews with nine African Americans who took part in the war; a recounting of the history of American involvement in Vietnam; and a look at African Americans’ experiences during and after previous American conflicts, especially World War II. Haygood’s illuminating profiles of the men and women he interviewed are the soul of the book.

Several of Haygood’s subjects are relatively well-known. There’s former Hanoi Hilton POW USAF pilot Fred Cherry, for example; U.S. Army Capt. Joe Anderson, the center of the acclaimed 1967 in-the-trenches Vietnam War documentary, The Anderson Platoon; and the pioneering journalist Wallace Terry, the author of Bloods, the first in-depth chronicle of African Americans’ experiences in the war and afterward.

Haygood tells their war and pre- and post-war stories fully and well. He also does a great job illuminating the lives of less-well-known people who served in the war. That includes Dr. Elbert Nelson, a battalion surgeon in the First Cavalry Division in Vietnam who went on to a long, distinguished career as an OB/GYN (and who received the VVA Excellence in the Sciences Award in 2019); VVA member Dorothy Harris, who served a 1967–68 tour of duty as a U.S. Army nurse at the 12th Evac Hospital in Cu Chi; and Phillippa Schuyler, a musician and journalist who did not come home from the war.

Haygood accurately conveys the underwhelming reception that all Vietnam War veterans received after coming home from Vietnam and highlights the singular readjustment problems that too many Black Vietnam War veterans faced. To his credit, he also reminds us that the majority of returning veterans overcame their readjustment problems and went on to live productive lives.

“Not everyone had nightmares,” Haygood writes. “Not everyone woke up in cold sweats, wondering about Agent Orange and psychological wounds” from the war. He goes on to highlight stories of Black veterans who adjusted well after coming home. The list includes Elbert Nelson and the late Art Gregg. After joining the Army in 1946, two years before it was integrated, Gregg served in the Korean War and in Vietnam in 1966–67. After the war, he became the first Black Lieutenant General in the U.S. Army.

Two nitpicks: The POWs in Hanoi communicated by the tap code by rapping their knuckles on cell walls, not by “banging” their heads on the walls. And it’s the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., not the “Vietnam Memorial.”

But those are minor miscues in a revealing, powerful account of the African American experience in the Vietnam War.

SOULS

Philip Caputo is one of the most prolific and accomplished American writers who served in the Vietnam War. The publication of Wandering Souls and Other Stories (Arcade, 192 pp. $27.99) in January marked the Marine Corps veteran’s 17th literary effort, a sterling mix of novels, books of narrative nonfiction, and memoirs. The Vietnam War has been one of the main themes in Caputo’s work, but certainly not the only one.

Caputo’s first book, A Rumor of War is a brilliant Vietnam War memoir that came out in 1977 and has since become part of the American Vietnam War literary canon. A Rumor of War has sold more than 1.5 million copies, has been published in 15 languages, and is still in print today nearly 50 years after its publication. It was adapted as a two-part CBS-TV miniseries that aired in 1980.

Caputo joined the U.S. Marine Corps after finishing college in 1964 and was part of the first Marine Corps landing in Danang on March 9, 1965. He went on to serve a 16-month tour of duty in Vietnam as a young officer, seeing his share of combat commanding a rifle company. Not long after his discharge, in 1968, Caputo went to work as a reporter (and later a foreign correspondent) for The Chicago Tribune, winning a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting in 1973. Among other foreign assignments, he covered the end of the Vietnam War in April 1975, which he touches on in A Rumor of War. The short stories in Caputo’s Wandering Souls are set in varied locales, including in the wilds of Kenya and aboard a not-very-seaworthy vessel in the Atlantic. Two of these stories deal with the aftereffects of the Vietnam War and contain flashbacks to wartime action. The 50-page title story, which opens the book, is a taut, evocative tale of a Vietnam War veteran going on a one-of-a-kind MIA recovery mission, replete with flashbacks to his time as an Army combat medic exposed to the worst the war had to offer.

“Coils of the Past” also is set in Vietnam after the war and also involves an American Army veteran on a mission. It’s a “pilgrimage,” as the former grunt puts it, to a remote village where he took part in a deadly fight during the war. As he does in all the stories in the book, Caputo crafts vivid physical and emotional scenes in “Coils.” One powerful example lies in this depiction of the veteran’s thoughts traveling in Vietnam forty years after the war: “All his memories of the war were in black and white, but everywhere around him were colors—the emerald rice paddies, the brightly painted houses and pagodas, the brilliant birds. He shut his eyes, and images played in his mind like footage from an old newsreel.”

Caputo’s website is https://www.pjilipcaputo.com.

Jungle Ghosts
by Ed Mann

REVIEW BY HARVEY WEINER

Ed Mann’s Jungle Ghosts: Walking Point in Vietnam (Pen and Sword/Casemate, 320 pp. $34.95, hardcover; $16.99, Kindle) is a beautifully written, exquisitely detailed Vietnam War memoir published 55 years after the actual events. Mann was a college dropout, yet this book is almost a literary work of art.

A 20-year-old grunt when he went to Vietnam in June 1969 with a chip on his shoulder, Mann was constantly in trouble during his time in military and had little respect for authority. Yet, as the point man for a First Cavalry Division infantry platoon, he excelled to the extent that he received a Silver Star, a Bronze Star, and two Purple Hearts for his exploits under fire.

He vividly portrays his ability to walk point. In doing so, he became almost one with the “magnificent” jungle. He used all of his senses to excel at his job, which he relished and which earned him the respect of everyone in his unit. He frequently describes the beauty of the jungle and his love and appreciation of it.

He writes that the dangers were exhilarating, almost intoxicating. In fact, each time he was given rear duty, he rejected it and returned to the field.

Mann is also frank and brutally honest. He hated incompetence and, on many occasions, disobeyed orders he considered wrong. He was willing to criticize his superiors and even had a hand in having a few of the more incompetent ones removed.

He says he fought in a war he did not believe in against an enemy he did not hate. He also had no love for rear-echelon troops, lifers, and “powerful men” in Washington who sent him and others off to fight and die in South Vietnam.

Mann begins the book with a few paragraphs about why he wrote it. He wanted it to be cathartic, he says, and he needed to confront and exorcise demons and experiences stemming from his year in combat. He had to answer many questions for himself and the only person he could talk to was himself. I hope he learned some of the answers.

Read this book and you will feel as if you almost experienced Ed Mann’s war alongside him; you may even agree with me that it is one of the best Vietnam War memoirs you have ever read.

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