On a related issue, I don’t think enough is made of the impact of the ongoing draft in the 50′s & 60′s combined with the GI Bill. Effect: many educated young men with military experience clustered on college campuses. Jim Dunnigan and David Weseley were part of this phenomenon (more or less, I don’t recall their exact personal histories).

About the “AH” game I think you’re referring to the one by Victory Games, Vietnam: 1965-1975, published in 1984.

I remember Recon well – I owned and played it. I also played the big Avalon Hill (I think?) wargame of Vietnam. As I find counterexamples I’m already backing away from my original idea about there being a “silence” around Vietnam, but what I meant was not that there were no games about Vietnam, but rather that the history of gaming almost never talks about the war. Which I think is a little odd for a hobby populated so much by U.S. military, college students, and draft-age young men during the Vietnam years.

Not to mention the importance of gaming and simulation techniques to the conduct of the war itself. In the halls of power, Vietnam was likely the most “gamed” war ever.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to your next piece but your phrase ” silence in the history of roleplaying games around the war in Vietnam” has me wondering what this will be. Have you heard of Palladium’s Recon? The original, pre-Palladium version was published in 1982–around the close of the period when RPGs, wargames, and other “unconventional brainy games” (such as Cosmic Encounter) were all pretty much a single hobby–and games could straddle what would later be fairly fixed boundaries. Wargames did deal with Vietnam, and even earlier I might add. A quick search of boardgamegeek turns up a Gamescience game published in 1965 (!), and two early SPI games, Grunt and Year of the Rat, in the early ’70s.