Hi everyone at AskHistorians! I am a Vietnamese American college student. It is my dream to become a filmmaker and tell the story of my parents, about how my dad fought in the war as a young South Vietnamese man and how both my father and my mother came to America as refugees. The thing is I don't really know much about the Vietnam war and I am worried that some of the history books we get here in America are really biased towards the American side. So I would also like to get a bunch of resources on the Vietnamese perspective as well as the American side. I also don't know too much about Vietnamese culture so maybe someone could offer some resources about that. Just anything that you would think a filmmaker would need to know, not just history, but photos, interviews, etc. But I think most of all what would help are interviews on what it felt like emotionally for the Vietnamese people during that time since I will be writing a drama. Thank you so much.
I highly recommend Andrew Weist's book, Vietnam's Forgotten Army: Heroism and Betrayal in the ARVN; he uses the careers of two South Vietnamese officers, Pham Van Dinh and Tran Ngoc Hue as a lens through which to look at South Vietnam's war for its independence. It's really incredible storytelling, and a great introduction to the war from a perspective we don't get a whole lot of. You can get a sense of it watching Wiest's lectures on Youtube.
A great launching point is Christian Appy's book Patriots: Vietnam Remembered From All Sides. The entire book is a collection of oral histories from all sides and from every level - everyone from high level policy makers, to the soldiers who spent their youth fighting in the jungles. It does an excellent job of showing the big picture, as well as the results those decisions had on the people fighting the war.
Also worth a watch is the PBS Documentary series Vietnam: A Television History. While it is angled from the American experience, there is much detail on the how and why of events and gives you a good understanding of chronology.
And finally, while it isn't the easiest read (at least to me), the novel The Sorrow of War by Bao Ninh is often considered the N. Vietnamese equivalent of Tim O'Brien's popular book The Things They Carried