17th parallel / DMZ
The Geneva line and its militarised belt.
The 17th parallel, the trail, and the Mekong Delta are the three maps a reader needs before any helicopter still.
Hanoi's museums and Ho Chi Minh City's War Remnants Museum tell a state story; the Wall in Washington tells a names story.
Maps
Ho Chi Minh trail
Laos and eastern Cambodia as a logistic state.
I-II-III-IV Corps
US/ARVN administrative map of the south.
Tet attack points
Cities hit in January 1968 -- a political map.
1975 offensive arrows
Ban Me Thuot to Saigon -- the last campaign.
Portrayals
Apocalypse Now
Mythic US descent; Vietnamese politics nearly absent.
The Vietnam War (Burns/Novick)
A later English-language attempt at a fuller chorus.
The Sorrow of War (Ninh)
A northern novel that complicated victory prose.
ROK Vietnam memoirs
A Korean corpus English readers rarely meet.
The Wall
Names as the US public artwork of the war.
War Remnants Museum
HCMC state narrative with graphic US-atrocity rooms -- a pilgrimage and an argument.
Rituals
Memorial Day / Veterans Day additions
Vietnam names on older US/Commonwealth calendars.
30 April commemorations
Opposite meanings in Hanoi and in diaspora halls.
Returning-veteran "welcome home"
A later US ritual invented because 1968-75 did not provide one.
Sayings
Film has more power than monographs in English. That is a fact about memory, not about truth.
30 April is liberation in one city and mourning in another -- sometimes on the same street in Orange County.