In the fall of 1969, my nineteen-year-old brother, Doug Johnson, who was serving as a 4^th Infantry grunt in Vietnam wrote to me about being “scared shitless.”  His letter has vanished, but I quoted Doug in a long, pleading letter that I wrote to our dad on October 20^th 1969.  That letter survived.  I found it, still in its neat University of Delaware envelope, among the papers, the documents I unearthed from the basement safe in February 2024.  These found-files form the basis of my book Undesirable: The Vietnam War and a Father’s Battle for Justice (University of New Mexico Press, July 2026).

Doug returned from Vietnam tarred with an Undesirable Discharge, a shame that affected his whole life and the lives of those nearest to him, his family, his friends, his wives and lovers.  In August, 1970, when he returned home at twenty (not yet old enough to vote or buy beer) he was physically, psychologically and socially wracked by trauma and addiction.  The parents immediately put him in a hospital and under the care of a private psychiatrist. That doctor opined that Doug had been “living in combat experiences. . . on patrol with his platoon in situations of very great hazard and terror.”  Which sounds very much like “scared shitless.”

Instances of “great hazard and terror” are everywhere in the pages of The Vietnam Reader: The Definitive Collection of American Fiction and Nonfiction on the War, edited by Stewart O’Nan (Anchor Books, 1998). This book is essential reading for anyone who wants a sense of the heroism, the hype, the outrage, the inertia, the despair, the waste, mud and blood and rain and heat, the good, the bad and the assuredly ugly in that war.

What I know of my brother’s actual wartime experience, I learned from the files I brought up from the basement, among them twenty-one pages of single-spaced transcript of his testimony in front of the Inspector General’s Office in December 1970, about three months after Doug’s return. (This hearing was my father’s first attempt to get the Undesirable changed to an Honorable.) As I made my way through the pages of The Vietnam Reader I kept seeing little flickers, random semi-sightings of what I’d read of Doug’s experience. I ran across descriptions of conditions, places, actions, fears, perils that echoed his. I felt somehow as if Doug were nodding to me from the pages of The Vietnam Reader. Many of these selections might be said to constitute the Norton Anthology of Scared Shitless.

The Vietnam Reader requires slow intake (quite apart from the seven hundred pages). Much of the fiction and nonfiction left me so shaken that I had to close the book, walk away, do something else before I was able to return. There are pieces that shimmer with consummate artistry as well as artless letters home to parents and wives and sweethearts, and poignant, simply stated oral histories, published memoirs, fiction of many stripes and varieties, poetry, lyrics, detailed discussion of films about Vietnam. The contents are not merely genre-specific (prose, poetry, film etc.). The book is arranged to reflect material across decades, First Wave and Second Wave as Mr. O’Nan has styled them.

The distinction is useful.  Attitudes change.  Indeed, attitudes can change quickly.  Take for instance, The Green Berets by Robin Moore, an early (1965) Vietnam book that could be described as gung-ho on behalf of the war.  In hardcover it was a Book-of-the-Month-Club selection and in paperback, a best seller. The author and a co-writer created the song, “The Ballad of the Green Berets” that rose on the pop charts in 1966.  None other than the Great Gung-Ho himself, John Wayne brought the film rights. But by the time the film appeared in theatres,  The Green Berets flopped because by 1968 (that tense and turbulent year) noisy, insistent opposition to the war was fueled by the passionate conviction that American and Vietnamese lives were being lost to a lie.

The editorial challenges Mr. O’Nan faced in compiling this volume are truly monumental.  Not only does the anthology place material in some kind of chronological fashion, but also lays out soldiers’ experience as it was actually endured.  Early pieces recount the confusion of newly minted GIs just out of basic training. Subsequent selections are set deep in the throes of combat and on to those who returned to an ungrateful nation. And of course, those who went to Washington D. C. and laid their hands on the names of the dead engraved on the granite wall there, the memorial to more than 58,000 dead.

The book does not aspire to an all-encompassing history; it doesn’t probe the long gestation of the conflict with the French, or the experience of the Vietnamese. The Vietnam Reader offers the voices of the American soldiers and journalists who were there, present, from about 1965 to 1975. Inspiration for creating this book came from Mr. O’Nan’s teaching, working with students for whom this era was history and for whom resources were scattered.  The useful questions at the end ask students (and readers) to respond, think, articulate.

And for those of us for whom this was a formative era in our lives, the book sparks new questions and revives old passions. I will be having more to say in the coming weeks and months about The Vietnam Reader as I address some of the context around Undesirable. Stewart O’Nan’s anthology was published in 1998 and now, nearly thirty years later, I can’t help but wonder if there are new questions to be asked if not answered. After all, as they say, the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.