The main premise "The Vietnam Wars" is that Vietnam experienced not one but several over-lapping and often inter-dependent wars. This lively new source book chronicles the history of one of the bloodiest and most controversial conflicts of the twentieth century, beginning with the birth of the Vietnamese communist party in 1930 and ending with the triumph of the Vietnamese revolution in 1975. Through a series of short essays, but most especially through the documents themselves, the book illustrates and illuminates both the conflict and the main historical debates about its origins, course and consequences.

Finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist, National Book Award in Nonfiction A New York Times Book Review "The Year in Reading" Selection All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory. From the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Sympathizer comes a searching exploration of the conflict Americans call the Vietnam War and Vietnamese call the American War-a conflict that lives on in the collective memory of both nations. "[A] gorgeous, multifaceted examination of the war Americans call the Vietnam War-and which Vietnamese call the American War...As a writer, [Nguyen] brings every conceivable gift-wisdom, wit, compassion, curiosity-to the impossible yet crucial work of arriving at what he calls 'a just memory' of this war." -Kate Tuttle, Los Angeles Times "In Nothing Ever Dies, his unusually thoughtful consideration of war, self-deception and forgiveness, Viet Thanh Nguyen penetrates deeply into memories of the Vietnamese war...[An] important book, which hits hard at self-serving myths." -Jonathan Mirsky, Literary Review "Ultimately, Nguyen's lucid, arresting, and richly sourced inquiry, in the mode of Susan Sontag and W. G. Sebald, is a call for true and just stories of war and its perpetual legacy." -Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)

The Vietnam War was one of America's longest, bloodiest, and most controversial wars. This volume examines the complexities of this protracted conflict and explains why the lessons learned in Vietnam are still highly relevant today. Vietnam War: The Essential Reference Guide provides a compendium of the key people, places, organizations, treaties, and events that make up the history of the war, explaining its causes, how it was conducted, and its far-reaching consequences. Written by recognized authorities, this ready-reference volume provides essential information all in one place and includes a comprehensive list of additional sources for further study. The work presents a detailed chronology that outlines the numerous battles and campaigns throughout the war, such as the Tet Offensive, the Battle of Hamburger Hill, Operation Rolling Thunder, and the Battle of Hue. Biographies on Lyndon Johnson, William Westmoreland, Robert McNamara, Ngo Dinh Diem, and other major political figures and military leaders provide insight into the individuals who played key roles in the conflict, while primary source documents such as President Nixon's speech on Vietnamization provide invaluable historical context. More than 45 contributors, including Robert K. Brigham, Cecil B. Currey, Arnold R. Isaacs, Lewis Sorley, Spencer C. Tucker, and David T. Zabecki Introductory essays provide a broad overview of the Vietnam War and help readers understand the causes and consequences of the conflict Maps depicting South Vietnam, infiltration routes, and key battles

For some, it was a movement for peace. For others, it was a war against the war. In the eyes of certain participants, the movement was cultural and social at its core, a matter of changing society. Still others defined their protests as political and sought out the economic root causes of the war. What many would agree upon was that it was a time when a remarkable generation came of age and a great nation was shaken to its very foundations. The protest movement in opposition to the Vietnam War was a complex amalgam of political, social, economic, and cultural motivations, factors, and events. Against the Vietnam War brings together the different facets of that movement and its various shades of opinion. Here the participants themselves offer statements and reflections on their activism, the era, and the consequences of a war that spanned three decades and changed the United States of America. The keynote is on individual experience in a time when almost every event had national and international significance. A foreword by Staughton Lynd considers the events of the Vietnam War in the context of the present war in Iraq.

In An American Brothel, Amanda Boczar considers sexual encounters between American servicemen and civilians throughout the Vietnam War, and she places those fraught and sometimes violent meetings in the context of the US military and diplomatic campaigns. In 1966, US Senator J. William Fulbright declared that "Saigon has become an American brothel." Concerned that, as US military involvement in Vietnam increased so, too, had prostitution, black market economies, and a drug trade fueled by American dollars, Fulbright decried an arrogance of power on the part of Americans and the corrosive effects unchecked immorality could have on Vietnam as well as on the war effort. The symbol, at home and abroad, of the sweeping social and cultural changes was often the so-called South Vietnamese bar girl. As the war progressed, peaking in 1968 with more than half a million troops engaged, the behavior of soldiers off the battlefield started to impact affect the conflict more broadly. Beyond the brothel, shocking revelations of rapes and the increase in marriage applications complicated how the South Vietnamese and American allies cooperated and managed social behavior. Strictures on how soldiers conducted themselves during rest and relaxation time away from battle further eroded morale of disaffected servicemen. The South Vietnamese were loath to loosen moral restrictions and feared deleterious influence of a permissive wWestern culture on their society. From the consensual to the coerced, sexual encounters shaped the Vietnam War. Boczar shows that these encounters-sometimes facilitated and sometimes banned by the US military command-restructured the South Vietnamese economy, captivated international attention, dictated military policies, and hung over diplomatic relations during and after the war.

Martin Bowman's revealing narrative of the aerial conflict in South-East Asia, 1965-1972, which had its beginnings in 1 November 1955, engulfed Vi tnam, Laos, and Cambodia and only ended with the fall of S ig n on 30 April 1975 has resulted from decades of painstaking fact-finding as well as detailed correspondence with surviving aircrew incorporating a wealth of first-hand accounts, some never told before, supported by dozens of rare and unusual photographs. Together they describe in adrenalin-pumping accuracy the furious aerial battles of a long suffering and bitter war in South-East Asia and in particular the frontline action in the skies over Vietnam that will keep readers on the edge of their seats. They too will find a new and useful perspective on a conflict that cost the Americans 58,022 dead and brought the USA worldwide condemnation for its role in Southeast Asia. Nearly 2,500 Americans remained missing'. This work serves as a tribute to the courageous pilots who flew the F-104 Starfighter in the Widowmakers' war and B-52 bomber crews on Arc Light' Linebacker II' strikes and the eleven days of Christmas which ultimately ended the aerial campaign against North Vi tnam. And as well, strike aircraft such as the USAF F-4 Phantom and the F-105 Thud' and the US Navy carrier-borne jet and propeller-driven strike aircraft and the Americans' sworn enemy, the North Vi?tnamese MiG fighters, feature large, from Rolling Thunder' onwards. Equally, the Hueys and Chinooks and other notable work horses that participated on combat assaults or Ash & Trash missions and transports like the C-130 Herky-Bird', C-123 Provider, Caribou and Vi tnamese C-47 - the Haulers On Call' - that performed sterling service during the gruelling air campaign are not forgotten either. Here, at first hand, are their stories which also include some of the less publicised American forces like the pilots and crewmen who flew the Bird Dogs and all manner of helicopters as well as the largely forgotten Australian and New Zealand Air Force units and the Anzac Battalions whose valuable contributions are too often overlooked. So too is the cost in human misery, death and destruction.

A history of the Armenian massacres of the 1890s and the genocide of 1915 also traces America's effort to assist the Armenian people, citing the contributions of such figures as Julia Ward Howe, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Mark Twain, and Clara Barton.

Playing trumpet in the 9th Infantry Division Band should have been a safe assignment but the Viet Cong swarmed throughout the Mekong Delta, and safety was nonexistent. The band's twofold mission-boosting morale and helping win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese-required them to leave their Dong Tam (a.k.a. Mortar City) base camp and travel through a vast area of rice paddies, dense jungle and numerous villages. By 1969, home-front support for the war had dwindled and the U.S. Army in Vietnam was on the brink of mutiny. No one wanted to die under the command of career minded officers in a war lost to misguided politics. This memoir of a conscripted musician in Vietnam provides a personal account of the lunacy surrounding combat support service in the 9th Infantry Division during the months prior to its withdrawal.

Australia's involvement in the Vietnam War presented moral dilemmas that divided the nation. The changing ways that Australian newspapers covered the conflict both reflected these dilemmas and inflamed them. Trish Payne's insightful analysis of Australian reporting of the Vietnam War traces the shifts in emphasis of the coverage, the influence of government on the news that reached the public, the extent of our allegiance to the American viewpoint and the lack of a balancing Vietnamese perspective. ""War and Words"" presents clearly the influences that shaped the media agenda of the time and identifies patterns of press coverage that continue to be discernable in the reporting of current military conflicts.

Pham Xuan An was one of the twentieth century's greatest spies. While working as a correspondent for Time during the Vietnam War, he sent intelligence reports - written in invisible ink or hidden inside spring rolls in film canisters - to Ho Chi Minh and his generals in North Vietnam. Only after Saigon fell in 1975 did An's colleagues learn that the affable raconteur in their midst, acclaimed as ""dean of the Vietnamese press corps,"" was actually a general in the North Vietnamese Army. In recognition of his tradecraft and his ability to spin military losses - such as the Tet Offensive of 1968 - into psychological gains, An was awarded sixteen military medals. After the book's original publication, WikiLeaks revealed that Thomas A. Bass's account of An's career was distributed to CIA agents as a primer in espionage. Now available in paper with a new preface, An's story remains one of the most gripping to emerge from the era.

This international and interdisciplinary volume examines the Vietnam War from new perspectives including those of the Vietnamese diaspora, and explores the ways in which perceptions of the war have altered in recent years. It differs from other titles on the Vietnam War in that it acknowledges the South Vietnamese experience of the war, and encompasses the perspectives of the Vietnamese diaspora in the US, Australia and France, as well as the work of American, Australian and French historians. The war is reinterpreted and reassessed through the lens of history, politics, biography and literature. The effects of the Vietnam War outside the boundaries of the Vietnamese state are ongoing. The presence of substantial Vietnamese communities in countries that participated in the conflict is contributing to changing interpretations of the war. This volume provides new insights into the reconstruction and memorialization of the war by Vietnamese, American, Australian and French scholars, and contains twelve chapters grouped under "War and Politics", "Memorials and Commemoration", "War and Women's Writing", and "Identities and Legacies", covering South Vietnamese leadership and policies, women and civilians, veterans overseas, the involvement of smaller allies in the war such as Australia, accounts by US, Australian and South Vietnamese servicemen as well as those of Indigenous soldiers in the US and Australia, memorials and commemoration, and the legacy of war on individual lives, contemporary memories, and government policy.

When the U.S. Army went to war in South Vietnam in 1965, the general consensus was that counterinsurgency was an infantryman's war; if there was any role at all for armored forces, it would be strictly to support the infantry. However, from the time the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment arrived in country in September 1966, troopers of the Blackhorse Regiment demonstrated the fallacy of this assumption. By the time of Tet '68, the Army's leadership began to understand that the Regiment's mobility, firepower, flexibility, and leadership made a difference on the battlefield well beyond its numbers. Over the course of the 11th Cavalry's five-and-a-half years in combat in South Vietnam and Cambodia, over 25,000 young men served in the Regiment. Their stories - and those of their families - represent the Vietnam generation in graphic, sometimes humorous, often heart-wrenching detail. Collected by the author through hundreds of in-person, telephone, and electronic interviews over a period of 25-plus years, these "war stories" provide context for the companion volume, The Blackhorse in Vietnam. Amongst the stories of the Blackhorse troopers and their families are the tales of the wide variety of animals they encountered during their time in combat, as well as the variable landscape, from jungle to rice paddies, and weather. Blackhorse Tales concludes with a look at how the troopers have dealt with their combat experiences since returning from Vietnam. Between the chapters are combat narratives, one from each year of the Regiment's five-and-a-half years in Southeast Asia. These combat vignettes begin on 2 December 1966, when a small column of 1st Squadron vehicles and troopers were ambushed on Highway 1 and emerged victorious despite being outnumbered. They go on to describe the one-of-a-kind crossing of the Dong Nai River on 25 April 1968, as the Blackhorse Regiment rode to the rescue during Mini-Tet 1968, and the 2nd Squadron's fight to clear the Boi Loi Woods in late April 1971.

The southernmost region of the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) encompassed the vast Mekong River Delta, and area covering 10,190 square miles. Three major rivers run through the Delta, the Song Hou Giang (aka Bassac) and the Song Mekong, which broke into three large rivers (Song My Tho, Ham Luong, and Go Chien). The Nhon Trach delineated the Delta's eastern edge. In all there were some 1,500 miles of natural navigable waterways and 2,500 miles of man-made canals and channels. The canal system was begun in 800 AD and its expansion continued up to World War II. The nation's capital, Saigon, lies on the Delta's northern edge. Few roads and highways served the region with sampans and other small watercraft via the canals being the main means of transportation.
At least 70,000 Viet Cong (VC) were scattered over the area controlling up to a quarter of the population. Three Army of the Republic Vietnam (ARVN) divisions as well as various paramilitary forces battled the VC in the marshes, forests, and paddies. In 1965 the military situation in the Delta had deteriorated and the decision was taken to shore things up by committing a joint Army and Navy Mobile Riverine Force. This force was unique in its composition, mission, and the special craft in which it operated. The Army component was the 2d Brigade, 9th Infantry Division; the Navy component was River Assault Flotilla One. The various watercraft assigned to the Mobile Riverine Force are the subject of this book. These included much-modified landing craft, purpose-built patrol boats including Swift Boats and Monitors, and a variety of auxiliary and support vessels. Task Force CLEARWATER, a much smaller operation in the extremenorthern portion of South Vietnam, also used these craft.

When Bob Greene went home to central Ohio to be with his dying father, it set off a chain of events that led him to knowing his dad in a way he never had before -- thanks to a quiet man who lived just a few miles away, a man who had changed the history of the world.

Greene's father -- a soldier with an infantry division in World War II -- often spoke of seeing the man around town. All but anonymous even in his own city, carefully maintaining his privacy, this man, Greene's father would point out to him, had "won the war." He was Paul Tibbets. At the age of twenty-nine, at the request of his country, Tibbets assembled a secret team of 1,800 American soldiers to carry out the single most violent act in the history of mankind. In 1945 Tibbets piloted a plane -- which he called Enola Gay, after his mother -- to the Japanese city of Hiroshima, where he dropped the atomic bomb.

On the morning after the last meal he ever ate with his father, Greene went to meet Tibbets. What developed was an unlikely friendship that allowed Greene to discover things about his father, and his father's generation of soldiers, that he never fully understood before.

Duty is the story of three lives connected by history, proximity, and blood; indeed, it is many stories, intimate and achingly personal as well as deeply historic. In one soldier's memory of a mission that transformed the world -- and in a son's last attempt to grasp his father's ingrained sense of honor and duty -- lies a powerful tribute to the ordinary heroes of an extraordinary time in American life.

What Greene came away with is found history and found poetry -- a profoundly moving work that offers a vividly new perspective on responsibility, empathy, and love. It is an exploration of and response to the concept of duty as it once was and always should be: quiet and from the heart. On every page you can hear the whisper of a generation and its children bidding each other farewell.

Using archival photographs sourced directly from Vietnam, specially commissioned diagrams and combat accounts from veterans, István Toperczer reveals how the MiG-21 defended Vietnam between 1966 and 1968. One of the most successful communist jet fighters ever built, the MiG-21 "Fishbed" was involved in a series of deadly duels with American fighters over North Vietnam as the USAF and US Navy ramped up strike missions during Operation Rolling Thunder, culminating in the destruction of over 70 US aircraft for the loss of 35 "Fishbeds." Having honed their skills on the subsonic MiG-17, pilots of the Vietnam People's Air Force received their first examples of the legendary MiG-21 supersonic fighter in 1966. Soon thrown into combat over North Vietnam, the guided-missile-equipped MiG-21 proved a deadly opponent for the American crews striking at targets deep into communist territory. Although the communist pilots initially struggled to come to terms with the fighter’s air search radar and weapons systems, the ceaseless cycle of combat operations quickly honed their skills. The best fighter then available to the VPAF, more than 200 MiG-21s (of various sub-types) were supplied to the North Vietnamese. In this study, leading VPAF authority István Toperczer analyzes the tactics used by the MiG-21 pilots over the bitter fighting in North Vietnam during Rolling Thunder. The highspeed ‘hit and run’ attacks employed by the communist pilots proved to be very successful, with both R-3S air-to-air missiles and heavy-caliber cannon inflicting a rising toll on American jets. Using first-hand accounts from MiG-21 pilots, battlescene artwork, combat ribbon diagrams, and armament views, the author details the important role played by the "Fishbed" in the defense of North Vietnam.

This study explains how the armies of North and South Vietnam, newly equipped with the most modern Soviet and US tanks and weaponry, fought the decisive armored battles of the Easter Offensive. Wearied by years of fighting against Viet Cong guerillas and North Vietnamese regulars, the United States had almost completely withdrawn its forces from Vietnam by early 1972. Determined to halt the expansion and improvement of South Vietnamese forces under the U.S. "Vietnamization" program, North Vietnam launched a major fourteen-division attack in March 1972 against the South that became known as the "Easter Offensive." Hanoi's assault was spearheaded by 1,200 tanks and was counteracted on the opposite side by Saigon's newly equipped armored force using U.S. medium tanks. The result was ferocious fighting between major Cold War-era U.S. and Soviet tanks and mechanized equipment, pitting M-48 medium and M-41 light tanks against their T- 54 and PT-76 rivals in a variety of combat environments ranging from dense jungle to urban terrain. Both sides employed cutting-edge weaponry for the first time, including the U.S. TOW and Soviet 9M14 Malyutk wire-guided anti-tank missiles. This volume examines the tanks, armored forces and weapons that clashed in this little-known campaign in detail, using after-action reports from the battlefield and other primary sources to analyze the technical and organizational factors that shaped the outcome. Despite the ARVN's defensive success in October 1972, North Vietnam massively expanded its armor forces over the next two years while U.S. support waned. This imbalance with key strategic misjudgments by the South Vietnamese President led to the stunning defeat of the South in 1975 when T54 tanks crashed through the fence surrounding the Presidential palace and took Saigon on 30 April 1975.

When Saigon fell to North Vietnamese forces on April 30, 1975, the communist victory sent shockwaves around the world. Using ingenious strategy and tactics, Ho Chi Minh had shown it was possible for a tiny nation to defeat a mighty Western power. The same tactics have been studied and replicated by revolutionary forces and terrorist organizations across the globe. Drawing on recently declassified documents and rare interviews with Ho Chi Minh's strategists and couriers, this book offers fresh perspective on his military blueprint and the reasons behind the American failure in Vietnam.

In late January 1968, some 84,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops launched a country-wide general offensive in South Vietnam, mounting simultaneous assaults on 36 of 44 provincial capitals, and five of the six autonomous cities (including the capital city of Saigon). The longest and bloodiest battle occurred in Hue, the most venerated place in Vietnam. The bitter fighting that raged there for more than three weeks drew the attention of the world. Hue was the ancient capital of Vietnam, and as such, had been previously avoided by both sides; it had not seen any serious fighting prior to 1968. All that changed on the night of January 31 that year when four North Vietnamese battalions and supporting Viet Cong units simultaneously attacked and occupied both parts of the city straddling the Perfume River. The Communist forces dug in and prepared to defend their hold on the city. US Marines and South Vietnamese soldiers were ordered to clear the city, supported by US Army artillery and troops. A brutal urban battle ensued as combat raged from house to house and door to door. It was a bloody fight and resulted in large-scale destruction of Hue. Eventually, the Marines and the South Vietnamese forces retook Hue, but it turned out to be one of the longest and bloodiest battles of the Tet Offensive, and led to a sea change in US policy in Vietnam.

Vietnam veteran Don Yost explores the pain and rage of his experience as a correspondent near Mai Laid in 1968, transforming it through writing to a elegaic and powerful memoir, imbued with a significant message for our time.

The true story of the fierce band of women who battled Washington - and Hanoi - to bring their husbands home from the jungles of Vietnam. On 12 February, 1973, one hundred and sixteen men who, just six years earlier, had been high flying Navy and Air Force pilots, shuffled, limped, or were carried off a huge military transport plane at Clark Air Base in the Philippines. These American servicemen had endured years of brutal torture, kept shackled and starving in solitary confinement, in rat-infested, mosquito-laden prisons, the worst of which was The Hanoi Hilton. Months later, the first Vietnam POWs to return home would learn that their rescuers were their wives, a group of women that included Jane Denton, Sybil Stockdale, Louise Mulligan, Andrea Rander, Phyllis Galanti, and Helene Knapp. These women, who formed The National League of Families, would never have called themselves 'feminists', but they had become the POW and MIAs most fervent advocates, going to extraordinary lengths to facilitate their husbands' freedom - and to account for missing military men - by relentlessly lobbying government leaders, conducting a savvy media campaign, conducting covert meetings with antiwar activists, and most astonishingly, helping to code secret letters to their imprisoned husbands. In a page-turning work of narrative non-fiction, Heath Hardage Lee tells the story of these remarkable women for the first time. The League of Wives is certain to be on everyone's must-read list.

From the International Booker Prize shortlisted author of The Order of the Day and The War of the Poor comes a searing account of a conflict that dealt a fatal blow to French colonialism 'Absolutely spectacular' - France Info 'Scathing and clever' - Le Temps 19 October 1950. The war is not going to plan. In Paris, politicians gather to discuss what to do about Indochina. The conflict is unpopular back home in France: too expensive, and too far away for the public to care. Withdrawal is not an option - a global power cannot surrender to an army of peasants - but victory is impossible without more soldiers and more money. The soldiers can be sourced from the colonies, but the money is out of the question. A solution needs to be found. In this gripping and shocking novel, Eric Vuillard exposes the tangled web of politicians, bankers and titans of industry who all had a vested interest in France's prolonged presence in lands far from Paris. Skilfully skewering the guilty, Vuillard shows us how key players in conflicts throughout history often have a motivation even deeper and darker than nationalism and political ideology-greed. As well as bringing scenes from the battlefields to life, Vuillard looks beyond this visceral reality on the ground to the cold calculations of the boardroom elite with the power to turn a military win or loss into their financial gain. Short, sharp and brutal, An Honourable Exit is a journey behind closed doors to witness how history is really made.

Fifty-five years in the writing, these collected poems trace the development of a committed poet from an early age. Many deal with the author's encounter with the Vietnam War and its endless consequences. Others range from family and friends to nature and the environment to the blessings and absurdities of the human condition. Ehrhart's poems are contemplative yet accessible, with no special gears required.

Cold War Friendships explores the plight of the Asian ally of the American wars in Korea and Vietnam. Enlisted into proxy warfare, this figure is not a friend but a "friendly," a wartime convenience enlisted to serve a superpower. It is through this deeply unequal relation, however, that the Cold War friendly secures her own integrity and insists upon her place in the neocolonial imperium. This study reads a set of highly enterprising wartime subjects who make their way to the US via difficult attachments. American forces ventured into newly postcolonial Korea and Vietnam, both plunged into civil wars, to draw the dividing line of the Cold War. The strange success of containment and militarization in Korea unraveled in Vietnam, but the friendly marks the significant continuity between these hot wars. In both cases, the friendly justified the fight: she was also a political necessity who redeployed cold war alliances, and, remarkably, made her way to America. As subjects in process-and indeed, proto-Americans-these figures are prime literary subjects, whose processes of becoming are on full display in Asian American novels and testimonies of these wars. Literary writings on both of these conflicts are presently burgeoning, and Cold War Friendships performs close analyses of key texts whose stylistic constraints and contradictions-shot through with political and historical nuance-present complex gestures of alliance.