C.L. Hoang accentuates the positive in his new memoir, Land of Dreams: An Immigrant’s Journey from War-Torn Vietnam to America (University of Tennessee Press, 197 pp. $19.95, paper; $14.95, Kindle). Although he experienced significant setbacks along the way, which he covers in the book, Hoang emphasizes the good things that happened after arriving in the USA, particularly memories of “kind folks lending a helping hand when I most needed it.”

That included kindness and compassion from fellow high school and college students, college administrators, and professors, as well as a Vietnam War veteran he worked for in the summer of 1976. The veteran “had not let the war experience embitter him,” Hoang writes, “and was eager to share fond memories of the people he had met in country.”

Hoang tells his tale in 21 short chronological chapters, using a lot of reconstructed dialogue. He starts with growing up in Vietnam during the war, but ultimately focuses on what happened after his family arranged to send him to the U.S. to attend Ohio University in 1974. Hoang overcame loneliness, language barriers, his parents’ suffering under the Vietnamese communists, financial difficulties, and other roadblocks to excel in school, attend graduate school, and find gainful employment with the electronics manufacturer, General Instrument, as an engineer.

The book ends in 1989 on a decidedly positive note, when Houng’s elderly parents managed to flee their native land and fly to San Franciso. As the family reunited at the S.F. Airport, Hoang writes, “My heart burst with the love pent up all these years.”

W.D. Ehrhart’s new book, Getting Shot At: Essays on War, Conflict and Culture Clash (McFarland, 293 pp. $39.95, paper; $25.99, Kindle), is a collection of 81 pithy, strongly opinionated essays he published from October, 2022 to September, 2025 on present-day political issues. A handful deal directly with the Vietnam War and Ehrhart’s 1967-68 tour of duty in the 1st Marine Division. In tone and substance all the essays are infused with Ehrhart’s bluntly stated progressive political views.

Bill Ehrhart, who was wounded during the 1968 Tet Offensive in Hue, received VVA’s Excellence in the Arts Award in 2008 in recognition of his prolific literary work as a poet, essayist, memoirist, and teacher. His service in Vietnam “profoundly and permanently impacted the trajectory of my life,” he writes in the new book’s Preface, but Ehrhart’s post-war life, he points out, “always has been much more than that experience.”

This collection reflects that sentiment, as only three essays deal exclusively with the Vietnam War, although a bunch of others contain his thoughts about the war, his service in it, and its impact of his life since. In “The Myth of the Spat-Upon Veteran” from 2023, for example, Ehrhart tells the story of a high school student he taught who stridently objected to him saying that Vietnam War veterans were not spat upon and derided in other ways by antiwar demonstrators.

“Waging Peace” from 2025 is an analytical review of Vietnam War veteran Jan Barry’s book of the same title, a mash-up of a memoir, poetry, journalism, and political commentary centering on his decades-long activism. Barry, a VVA member, Ehrhart writes, is “a monumental figure in the pantheon of true American heroes and patriots… a fundamental fixture of the antiwar movement over the past sixty years. Or, as he would insist on calling it, not the antiwar movement, but the Peace Movement.”