US author Tim O'Brien has been awarded the Pritzker Military Library Literature Award.
O'Brien is best known for his 1990 story collection The Things They Carried about a platoon of US soldiers in the Vietnam War.
"O'Brien's fiction about Vietnam, which derives from his own experience as a soldier, is haunting, evocative and wonderfully inventive," historian Rick Atkinson said in a statement on Tuesday.
"Yet his writing transcends that particular war in that particular era to illuminate our sense of war universally," he added.
O'Brien, 66, also won the National Book Award for Fiction for his 1978 war novel, Going After Cacciato.
The award is worth $US100,000 annually.
Past winners include US Civil War historian James McPherson and British historian Max Hastings.
