Hi!

You sound like a really responsible parent and I can only imagine how difficult it might be to prepare yourself to discuss something so complex. I have a hard time explaining it to people much older than myself at times.

With that said, I'm going to assume that by "good", you mean something well-written and based in modern scholarship. Unfortunately, very few if any books out of modern Vietnam has any of that due to the strict control of the national narrative that the Vietnamese government still has. There are some works that have been translated into English, such as Victory in Vietnam: The Official History of the People's Army of Vietnam, 1954–1975 (Military History Institute of Vietnam, Lawrence 2002), but I'm not quite sure it would have much use to you. Furthermore, whose perspective are you looking for? There is no unifying Vietnamese perspective on the Vietnam War. At its most simplistic, there is a North Vietnamese perspective and a South Vietnamese perspective that sometimes overlap, sometimes it doesn't. The Vietnam War is a highly complex conflict with many local, translocal and transnational aspects which are often overlooked by western commentators.

With that said, there are a great deal of scholarship that might interest you. A good place to start is Mark Atwood Lawrence's The Vietnam War: A Concise International History which is part of a new wave of scholarship that looks beyond the Vietnam War as a simple US-"Vietnam" affair. In less than 250 pages, Lawrence is able to cover many different perspectives to paint a coherent picture of the Vietnam War that is a great place for a beginner looking to get into serious scholarship on the topic.