“All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.” Thus opens Viet Thanh Nguyen’s 2016 nonfiction book Nothing Ever Dies, which surveys the quieter, later battlefield of the Vietnam War. Memories, unlike gunfights, do not have beginnings or endings. They repeat and layer and merge with one another, brewing new dreams for the survivor each night. Shimon Peres wrote almost an identical phrase about memory in David’s Sling, which goes to show that all wars have certain things in common.

THE REFUGEES by Viet Thanh Nguyen Grove Press, 224 pp., $25.00

Nguyen, 46, waited decades for his moment. In the last two years he has published three definitive books about the experiences of Vietnamese refugees who, like his family, fled their country after the war. In addition to Nothing Ever Dies, there is the novel The Sympathizer, which won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize, and a collection of short stories, The Refugees, which was released in February of this year.

“I had wanted to work on these projects when I was 21 years old,” Nguyen said when we spoke recently. Over Skype, he was direct and hyper-cogent, the kind of person who speaks in full paragraphs. He described a career guided by the kind of foresight that allows a writer to land all at once on the shores of the Pulitzer.

Nguyen had an aptitude for scholarship as a young man, so he went straight into a PhD program after college. There, his department chair told him that he’d never get a job if he focused on Vietnamese literature. “I became a conventional academic,” Nguyen said. He earned tenure in 2003, the natural result of a young life lived in a “very pragmatic, very strategic way,” an approach that “required a lot of repression.”

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s books are almost overwhelming in their capacious embrace of a war that was so very, very big.

It would be gauche and inappropriate to compare Nguyen’s patience to that of a sleeper agent, but the parallel practically draws itself. The Sympathizer is the caustic, hyper-verbal tale of a double agent embedded in California after the end of the war, sending information back to Vietnam about the activities of the men who are both his friends and enemies.