The Mountains Sing by Nguyen Phan Que Mai

I read this while I was on a recent trip to Vietnam, and while it is fiction, it is based on the author's family story, and I suspect it is not a unique situation, where in a civil war, people have no choice but to choose sides, and that relatives inevitably end up on opposite sides of the conflict. This is a multigenerational family saga set in war-torn Vietnam and told through the eyes of Hương and her grandmother, Trần Diệu Lan. Hương grows up in a country traumatized by the long war, and together with her grandmother, desperately waits for the return of those who have set out to fight: her parents, her uncles and an aunt. As Trần Diệu Lan fights for survival - while at the same time trying to protect her grandchild as best as she can - she remembers her own story more than three decades ago, when she and her six children had to flee from her village to escape certain death. This gives a human face and a story to the 3 million Vietnamese who were killed in the war, half of them civilians. The Americans chose bombing civilian targets over ground offensives almost every time, and by the end of the war were no longer protecting their own soldiers either. This story helps to better conceptualize what those choices meant for people on the ground, as well as the lasting effect of those traumas.