This collection of letters, poems, and petitions from the front, written mostly by infantrymen to their families and friends, evokes the mingled emotions of an intense longing for home, fear, hope, grief, and anger aroused by the Vietnam War

“An overwhelmingly eloquent book of the purest and most simple writing on Vietnam.”–David Halberstam Nearly forty years after the official end of the Vietnam War, Dear America allows us to witness the war firsthand through the eyes of the men and women who served in Vietnam. In this collection of more than 200 letters, they share their first impressions of the rigors of life in the bush, their longing for home and family, their emotions over the conduct of the war, and their ache at the loss of a friend in battle. Poignant in their rare honesty, the letters from Vietnam are “riveting,… extraordinary by [their] very ordinariness… for the most part, neither deep nor philosophical, only very, very human” (Los Angeles Times). Revealing the complex emotions and daily realities of fighting in the war, these close accounts offer a powerful, uniquely personal portrait of the many faces of Vietnam’s veterans.