West Point graduate lieutenant Jeff Knight meets cynicism when taking command of sergeant Michael McNamara's tour veterans platoon in a Vietnamese trench camp. Unlike his predecessor, who hid till the end of his tour, Jeff takes charge, experiences the manual doesn't allow coping with all realities and gets wounded. He returns, now fully respect by men and superiors. Besides the Vietcong, the platoon wrestles with the inscrutable villagers, which the G.I.'s officially protect, but also fear as some collaborate with them, other covertly with the Cong, either way subject to bloody reprisals.
1950s Saigon through the eyes of Mui, a Vietnamese servant girl. At 10 years-old, Mui leaves her village to work for an affluent, troubled family. As she comes of age, Mui finds work in the household of a pianist she has admired since childhood, and finds their relationship growing in complexity.
The Herlihys are a working class family from Chicago whose three children take wildly divergent paths: Brian joins the Marines right out of High School and goes to Vietnam, Michael becomes involved in the civil rights movement and after campaigning for Bobby Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy becomes involved in radical politics, and Katie gets pregnant, moves to San Francisco and joins a hippie commune. Meanwhile, the Taylors are an African-American family living in the deep South. When Willie Taylor, a minister and civil rights organizer, is shot to death, his son Emmet moves to the city and eventually joins the Black Panthers, serving as a bodyguard for Fred Hampton.
Living by a river, a father and son make their living by fishing every day. The little boy, Ca, contracts a serious illness. The treatment is very expensive. Will the father be able to catch enough fish to pay for it?
Two rebellious youths, Ralph and Scott, find themselves struggling with adulthood as the Vietnam War rages. Feeling trapped in their small town, Scott battles with his conservative veteran father, Cliff, and Ralph deals with his desperately sexual mother, Ev. When tragic news arrives from overseas, the entire town, inspired by Ralph and Scott's antiwar efforts, reevaluates its attitude toward the war.
A young wife journeys to North Vietnam in an effort to find her husband, an American flier reported missing in action, and is joined by a cynical Canadian correspondent on the trail of a human interest story.
A poor French teenage girl engages in an illicit affair with a wealthy Chinese heir in 1920s Saigon. For the first time in her young life she has control, and she wields it deftly over her besotted lover throughout a series of clandestine meetings and torrid encounters.
A mentally challenged man spends his days working as an artist's model and visiting the now-occupied house of his childhood, where his beloved guava tree sits.
Thirteen years after the end of the Vietnam War, a family who was tragically affected by the war are forced to emigrate to America.
After returning home from the war, Vietnam veteran Julius Vrooder resides in a veteran's hospital, where he has been vaguely diagnosed as "psychiatrically impaired." Taking the news with an air of initially lighthearted defiance, Vrooder escapes and sets up camp under a highway, where he builds a paranoia-driven booby-trapped bunker for himself. Falling in love with not-so-bright nurse Zanni, Vrooder soon plans to elope with her to a remote Canadian outpost.
After World War II Larry learns that his flying buddy Mike will only live a short time despite the efforts of the doctors. He takes on a profitable flying job for profiteers Maris to finance a good time for his buddy. As the plane takes off he shoves Maris' secretary Susan on board. When Mike falls for her, Larry tells her to play along for Mike's sake. She, of course, falls for Larry.
A dangerously disturbed Vietnam veteran struggles with life 15 years after his return home, and slowly falls into insanity from his gritty urban lifestyle.
Defectors from Hitler's army join the French Foreign Legion and end up in Vietnam in the late '40s.
A man goes on a journey finding the literal Paradise in hope of resurrecting his late wife, only to face with a horrifying truth about the reality he's living in.
When a man's best friend is killed on the streets of New York, he transforms into a violent killer, turning New York into a war zone.
A reporter interviews a former prostitute from South Vietnam about her sheltering of an injured Vietcong leader during the war.
John, a disillusioned Vietnam War journalist, turns to heroin smuggling. He cons Ray, an equally burnt out veteran into delivering the drugs stateside to his wife. Everything soon falls apart and Ray ends up on the run with John's wife trying to evade crooked narcotics agents.
Follows a young cyclo driver on his poverty-driven descent into criminality in modern-day Ho Chi Minh City. The boy's struggles to scratch out a living for his two sisters and grandfather in the mean streets of the city lead to petty crime on behalf of a mysterious Madame from whom he rents his cyclo.
A Korean writer travels to Vietnam to do research for her story about a cursed portrait of a Vietnamese girl named Muoi.
A Japanese photojournalist revisits Vietnam after the liberation to document the nation, and begins following and documenting the young children from a poor Vietnamese family.