"This is the story of Abu Ghraib that you haven't heard, told by the soldier sent by the Army to restore order and ensure that the abuses that took place there never happen again." In April 2004, the world was shocked by the brutal pictures of beatings, dog attacks, sex acts, and the torture of prisoners held at Abu Ghraib in Iraq. As the story broke, and the world began to learn about the extent of the horrors that occurred there, the U.S. Army dispatched Colonel Larry James to Abu Ghraib with an overwhelming assignment: to dissect this catastrophe, fix it, and prevent it from being repeated.
A veteran of deployments to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and a nationally well-known and respected Army psychologist, Colonel James's expertise made him the one individual capable of taking on this enormous task. Through Colonel James's own experience on the ground, readers will see the tightrope military personnel must walk while fighting in the still new battlefield of the war on terror, the challenge of serving as both a doctor/healer and combatant soldier, and what can-and must-be done to ensure that interrogations are safe, moral, and effective.
At the same time, Colonel James also debunks many of the false stories and media myths surrounding the actions of American soldiers at both Abu Ghraib and GuantanamoBay, and he reveals shining examples of our men and women in uniform striving to serve with honor and integrity in the face of extreme hardship and danger.
An intense and insightful personal narrative, Fixing Hell shows us an essential perspective on Abu Ghraib that we've never seen before.

The Vietnam War's influence on politics, foreign policy, and subsequent military campaigns is the center of much debate and analysis. But the impact on veterans across the globe, as well as the war's effects on individual lives and communities, is a largely neglected issue. As a consequence of cultural and legal barriers, the oral histories of the Vietnam War currently available in English are predictably one-sided, providing limited insight into the inner workings of the Communist nations that participated in the war. Furthermore, many of these accounts focus on combat experiences rather than the backgrounds, belief systems, and social experiences of interviewees, resulting in an incomplete historiography of the war. Chinese native Xiaobing Li corrects this oversight in Voices from the Vietnam War: Stories from American, Asian, and Russian Veterans. Li spent seven years gathering hundreds of personal accounts from survivors of the war, accounts that span continents, nationalities, and political affiliations. The twenty-two intimate stories in the book feature the experiences of American, Chinese, Russian, Korean, and North and South Vietnamese veterans, representing the views of both anti-Communist and Communist participants, including Chinese officers of the PLA, a Russian missile-training instructor, and a KGB spy. These narratives humanize and contextualize the war's events while shedding light on aspects of the war previously unknown to Western scholars. Providing fresh perspectives on a long-discussed topic, Voices from the Vietnam War offers a thorough and unique understanding of America's longest war.

This book assesses the emergence and transformation of global protest movements during the Vietnam War era. It explores the relationship between protest focused on the war and other emancipatory and revolutionary struggles, moving beyond existing scholarship to examine the myriad interlinked protest issues and mobilisations around the globe during the Indochina Wars. Bringing together scholars working from a range of geographical, historiographical and methodological perspectives, the volume offers a new framework for understanding the history of wartime protest. The chapters are organised around the social movements from the three main geopolitical regions of the world during the 1960s and early 1970s: the core capitalist countries of the so-called first world, the socialist bloc and the Global South. The final section of the book then focuses on international organisations that explicitly sought to bridge and unite solidarity and protest around the world. In an era of persistent military conflict, the book provides timely contributions to the question of what war does to protest movements and what protest movements do to war.

Reverberations of the Vietnam War can still be felt in American culture. The post-9/11 United States forays into the Middle East, the invasion and occupation of Iraq especially, have evoked comparisons to the nearly two decades of American presence in Viet Nam (1954-1973). That evocation has renewed interest in the Vietnam War, resulting in the re-printing of older War narratives and the publication of new ones. This volume tracks those echoes as they appear in American, Vietnamese American, and Vietnamese war literature, much of which has joined the American literary canon. Using a wide range of theoretical approaches, these essays analyze works by Michael Herr, Bao Ninh, Duong Thu Huong, Bobbie Ann Mason, le thi diem thuy, Tim O'Brien, Larry Heinemann, and newcomers Denis Johnson, Karl Marlantes, and Tatjana Solis. Including an historical timeline of the conflict and annotated guides to further reading, this is an essential guide for students and readers of contemporary American fiction

Afghan women were at the forefront of global agendas in late 2001, fueled by a mix of media coverage, humanitarian intervention and military operations. Calls for "liberating" Afghan women were widespread. Women's roles in Afghanistan have long been politically divisive, marked by struggles between modernization and tradition. Women, politics, and the state have always been intertwined in Afghanistan, and conflicts have been fueled by attempts to challenge or change women's status. It may appear that we have come full circle twenty years later, in late 2021, when Afghanistan fell to the Taliban once more. Women's rights in Afghanistan have been stripped away, and any gains-however tenuous-now appear lost. Today, the country navigates both a humanitarian and a human rights crisis. This book measures the rhetoric of liberation and the physical and ideological occupations of Afghanistan over the twenty-year period from 2001 through 2021 through the voices, perspectives, and experiences of those who are implicated in this reality-Afghan women.

The unimagined community proposes a reexamination of the Vietnam War from a perspective that has been largely excluded from historical accounts of the conflict, that of the South Vietnamese. Challenging the conventional view that the war was a struggle between the Vietnamese people and US imperialism, the study presents a wide-ranging investigation of South Vietnamese culture, from political philosophy and psychological warfare to popular culture and film. Beginning with a genealogy of the concept of a Vietnamese "culture," as the latter emerged during the colonial period, the book concludes with a reflection on the rise of popular culture during the American intervention. Reexamining the war from the South Vietnamese perspective, The unimagined community pursues the provocative thesis that the conflict, in this early stage, was not an anti-communist crusade, but a struggle between two competing versions of anticolonial communism. -- .

Southeast Asian Affairs, of which there are now thirty-one in the series, is an annual review of significant developments and trends in the region. Though the emphasis is on ASEAN countries, developments in the broader Asia-Pacific region are not ignored. Readable and easily understood analyses are offered of major political, economic, social, and strategic developments within Southeast Asia. The contributions can be divided into two broad categories. There are those which provide an analysis of major developments during 2004 in individual Southeast Asian countries and in the region generally. Then there are the theme articles of a more specialized nature which deal with topical problems of concern. The volume contains twenty-one articles dealing with such major themes as international conflict and cooperation, political stability, and economic growth and development.

The first comprehensive treatment of the air wars in Vietnam. Filling a substantial void in our understanding of the history of airpower in Vietnam, this book provides the first comprehensive treatment of the air wars in Vietnam. Brian Laslie traces the complete history of these air wars from the beginning of American involvement until final withdrawal. Detailing the competing roles and actions of the air elements of the United States Army, Navy, and Air Force, the author considers the strategic, operational, and tactical levels of war. He also looks at the air war from the perspective of the North Vietnamese Air Force. Most important for understanding the US defeat, Laslie illustrates the perils of a nation building a one-dimensional fighting force capable of supporting only one type of war.

Zhang Shenfu, a founder of the Chinese Communist party, participated in all the major political events in China for four decades following the Revolution of 1919. Yet Zhang had become a forgotten figure in China and the West--a victim of Mao's determined efforts to place himself at the center of China's revolution--until Vera Schwarcz began to meet with him in his home on Wang Fu Cang Lane in Beijing. Now Schwarcz brings Zhang to life through her poignant account of five years of conversations with him, a narrative that is interwoven with translations of his writings and testimony of his friends. Moving circuitously, Schwarcz reveals fragments of the often contradictory layers of Zhang's character: at once a champion of feminism and an ardent womanizer, a follower of Bertrand Russell who also admired Confucius, and a philosophically inclined political pragmatist. Schwarcz also meditates on the tension between historical events and personal memory, on the public amnesia enforced by governments and the "forgetfulness" of those who find rememberance too painful. Her book is not only a portrait of a remarkable personality but a corrective to received accounts and to the silences that abound in the official annals of the Chinese revolution.

British foreign policy towards Vietnam illustrates the evolution of Britain's position within world geopolitics 1943-1950. It reflects the change of the Anglo-US relationship from equaltiy to dependence, and demonstrates Britain's changing association with its colonies and with the other European imperial spheres within southeast Asia. This book shows that Britain pursued a more involved policy towards Vietnam than has previously been stated, and clarifies Britain's role in the origins of the Vietnam War and the nature of subsequent US involvement.

This book examines the critical role of desertion in the international Vietnam War debate. Paul Benedikt Glatz traces American deserters' odyssey of exile and activism in Europe, Japan, and North America to demonstrate how unprecedented levels of desertion in the US military changed the traditional image of the deserter.

This second volume of accounts by nurses who served with U.S. forces in Vietnam presents recollections of 17 women who cared for American casualties during a controversial war. They faced overwhelming trauma, conflicting emotions and isolation while caring for wounded at frontline hospitals, aboard ships and in medical centers. Representing the army and navy, their experiences of struggle, friendship and love formed their professional and personal lives.

Military cemeteries are one of the most prominent cultural landscapes of Israel. Their story reflects largely the main social processes that Israeli society has been undergoing since the War of Independence (1948) until today. Until the end of the 1970s, the military tombstones and their surroundings were uniform and equal, according to rules set by the State. However, since the 1980s families of the fallen soldiers started to add on the tombstone personal expressions, as well as personal objects, photographs, military artifacts etc. Thus the military tombstone and the Israeli military cemetery became one of the expressions of the dramatic transformation, from a society which emphasized the importance of the collective, to a society which intensifies the significance of the individual. The book is based on many archival documents, as well as interviews and photographs, all of which shed light on one of the most sensitive issues in Israeli society and express its importance as a central component of Israeli identity.

The rough-and-tumble life of Special Forces vet and Sixties pop star Barry Sadler The top Billboard Hot 100 single of 1966 wasn't The Rolling Stones' "Paint It Black" or the Beatles' "Yellow Submarine"--it was "The Ballad of the Green Berets," a hyper-patriotic tribute to the men of the Special Forces by Vietnam veteran, U.S. Army Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler. But Sadler's clean-cut, all-American image hid a darker side, a Hunter Thompson-esque life of booze, girls, and guns. Unable to score another hit song, he wrote a string of popular pulp fiction paperbacks that made "Rambo look like a stroll through Disneyland." He killed a lover's ex-boyfriend in Tennessee. Settling in Central America, Sadler ran guns, allegedly trained guerrillas, provided medical care to residents, and caroused at his villa. In 1988 he was shot in the head in Guatemala and died a year later. This life-and-times biography of an American pop culture phenomenon recounts the sensational details of Sadler's life vividly but soberly, setting his meteoric rise and tragic fall against the big picture of American society and culture during and after the Vietnam War.

This collection of essays, inspired by the author s experience teaching ethics to Marine and Navy chaplains during the Iraq War, examines the moral and psychological dilemmas posed by war. The first section deals directly with Dr. Peter A. French s teaching experience and the specific challenges posed by teaching applied and theoretical ethics to men and women wrestling with the immediate and personal moral conflicts occasioned by the dissonance of their duties as military officers with their religious convictions. The following chapters grew out of philosophical discussions with these chaplains regarding specific ethical issues surrounding the Iraq War, including the nature of moral evil, forgiveness, mercy, retributive punishment, honor, torture, responsibility, and just war theory. This book represents a unique viewpoint on the philosophical problems of war, illuminating the devastating toll combat experiences take on both an individual s sense of identity and a society s professed moral code.

This book explores the important role that the Korean War played in Turkish culture and society in the 1950s. Despite the fact that fewer than 15,000 Turkish soldiers served in Korea, this study shows that the Turkish public was exposed to the war in an unprecedented manner, considering the relatively small size of the country's military contribution. It examines how the Turkish people understood the war and its causes, how propaganda was used to 'sell' the war to the public, and the impact of these messages on the Turkish public. Drawing on literary and visual sources, including archival documents, newspapers, protocols of parliamentary sessions, books, poems, plays, memoirs, cartoons and films, the book shows how the propaganda employed by the state and other influential civic groups in Turkey aimed to shape public opinion regarding the Korean War. It explores why this mattered to Turkish politicians, viewing this as instrumental in achieving the country's admission to NATO, and why it mattered to Turkish people more widely, seeing instead a war in the name of universal ideas of freedom, humanity and justice, and comparing the Turkish case to other states that participated in the war.

Like the widely praised original, this new edition is compact, clearly written, and accessible to the nonspecialist. First, the book chronicles and analyzes the twenty-year struggle to maintain South Vietnamese independence. Joes tells the story with a sympathetic focus on South Viet Nam and is highly critical of U.S. military strategy and tactics in fighting this war. He claims that the fall of South Viet Nam was not inevitable, that an abrupt and public termination of U.S. aid provoked a crisis of confidence inside South Viet Nam that led to the debacle. Students and scholars of military studies, South East Asia, U.S. foreign policy, or the general reader interested in this fascinating period in 20th century history, will find this new edition to be invaluable reading. After discussing the principal American mistakes in the conflict, Joes outlines a workable alternative strategy that would have saved South Viet Nam while minimizing U.S. involvement and casualties. He documents the enormous sacrifices made by the South Vietnamese allies, who in proportion to population suffered forty times the casualties the Americans did. He concludes by linking the final conquest of South Viet Nam to an increased level of Soviet adventurism which resulted in the invasion of Afghanistan, the U.S. military build-up under Presidents Carter and Reagan, and the eventual collapse of the USSR. The complicated factors involved in the war are here offered in a consolidated, objective form, enabling the reader to consider the implications of U.S. experiences in South Viet Nam for future policy in other world areas.

In a new and updated second edition, this book--first published in 1983--provides a detailed review of the end of the Vietnam War. Drawing on the author's eyewitness reporting and extensive research, the book relies on carefully reported facts, not partisan myths, to reconstruct the war's last years and harrowing final months. The catastrophic suffering those events brought to ordinary Vietnamese civilians and soldiers is vividly portrayed. The largely unremembered wars in Cambodia and Laos are examined as well, while new material in an updated final chapter points out troubling parallels between the Vietnam War and America's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In February 1968, the U.S. Army's 82nd Airborne Division was understrength, with only enough paratroopers to deploy a single brigade. The 3rd Brigade was flown 9000 miles to reinforce American units fighting the North Vietnamese Army around Hue--received a Valorous Unit Award for their actions there. James Dorn was on Brigade staff. He later led a rifle platoon with the 3rd in the rice paddies west of Saigon. In his second year with the 173rd Airborne Brigade in the Central Highlands. he again led a platoon until promoted to captain. His frank and detailed memoir recounts their diverse combat missions, inhumanity for civilians and the day-to-day life of Infantrymen in the field.