If you’re like me, and only have a fuzzy notion of the history of the Vietnam War and how it progressed, I’d like to point you to a terrific novel, Up Country, by Nelson DeMille.

It’s a terrific read (although my “read” was actually the unabridged audiobook).

The book itself is part detective story, part war story, part spy novel, part Vietnam history, and part travelogue. And it does all of that, really well.

It follows an army criminal investigator in 1999 as he goes to Vietnam to investigate a murder of an Army soldier that took place during the siege of Hue. As he investigates this murder, he travels by car and motorcycle from Saigon to Hanoi (and north), and as he does this DeMille describes the geography and the various cultures as well as the battles and the nature of the warfare.

It helped me piece together what I had seen in the various Vietnam war movies, the battles in the rice paddies of the delta, the jungle battles, and the urban battles.

It’s really a terrific book, and trying not to give anything away, now would be an exceptional time to read it.