Where the Rivers Ran Backward captures the experience of the Vietnam War from the red line through the induction station to the muddy yellow swirl of the river that flows through the jungle, from the Vietcong tracers that pierce the darkness to the black wall that records the names of the missing and the dead. Bill Merritt writes of the wars strange, almost intoxicating beauty: of a yellow river, complicated inlays of green and silver shimmering on...