Included are fiction, plays, poetry, artists' sketches and miscellaneous works. Historical, political and autobiographical accounts as well as protest literature set outside the time or place of the Vietnam War are excluded.
Holdings now amount to some four thousand items, and the collection continues to grow.
Many works written during and after the war were issued by vanity presses, printed in short-lived journals or not published at all. Thus, identification and acquisition are challenging and still not complete. While searches for obscure items are always active, most sources for current additions to the collection are trade and mass market publishers. Scholarly and critical studies of Vietnam War literature enhance the core collection and reflect the growing interest of academic researchers and popular writers. There are numerous individual reviews, journal articles, theses, dissertations and books.