Doug Dickey was an unlikely Marine hero. He was a gentle soul who sang in the school's chorus and struggled to make it through boot camp. However, in the terrible seconds that passed after a grenade landed in the middle of his platoon's command element, Doug chose to sacrifice his life to save his comrades. For this Final Valiant Act, Doug received the Medal of Honor. Doug grew up on a farm in Ohio and enlisted in the Marine Corps with four of his friends from high school. Arriving in Vietnam, he was assigned to "Blackjack" Westerman's 1st Battalion, 4th Marines - one of the few Marine units to make amphibious assaults during the Vietnam War. As part of 2nd Platoon, Company C, Doug took part in Operation Deckhouse VI, to rout the Viet Cong from Quang Ngai; and Operation Beacon Hill, which culminated in the desperate battle on March 26, 1967. That afternoon, the platoon became engaged with a much larger NVA unit just south of the DMZ. In the midst of that fierce battle, with casualties mounting rapidly, an enemy grenade landed in the middle of the platoon's command group. Doug dove on the grenade - saving his friends and comrades. Second Platoon was ultimately victorious, but at a high cost: more than 40 men had gone into battle that day; only 12 walked out the next morning. Doug's comrades in 2nd Platoon never forgot him. Easter Sunday 1967 was seared into their memories. In 1997, they began holding yearly reunions. They decided to honor Doug by holding their first reunion in his hometown. Harold and Leona Dickey were finally able to meet the men their son had saved 30 years earlier. A Final Valiant Act is the result of over 14 years of research - drawing on Doug's letters home, and more than 50 interviews. The personal stories are woven into a meticulously researched battle history, sourced from dozens of declassified combat reports - yielding the most detailed account of Operation Beacon Hill yet written.

The M551 Sheridan is often referred to as a light tank, but in actuality it was an armored reconnaissance/airborne assault vehicle. The M551 was designed to be a lightweight, amphibious, air-droppable vehicle armed with a massive 152 mm gun that doubled as a rocket launcher. The gun launcher was designed to fire the MGM-51 Shillelagh antitank missile, or 152 mm conventional rounds with a combustible cartridge case. The vehicles saw extensive use in Vietnam, Operation Just Cause in Panama (where they saw their only combat air drop), and Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm. The Sheridan ended its service with the US Army masquerading as Soviet Bloc vehicles at the National Training Center. Through dozens of archival as well as detailed photographs of some of the finest extant examples of these vehicles, the Sheridan is explored, and its history explained. Part of the Legends of Warfare series.

Historian and collector Michael Green shows in this fascinating and graphically illustrated book that the two wars that engulfed Indochina and North and South Vietnam over 30 years were far more armoured in nature than typically thought of. By skilful use of imagery and descriptive text he describes the many variants deployed and their contribution. The ill-fated French Expeditionary Force was largely US equipped with WW2 M3 and M5 Stuart, M4 Sherman and M24 light tanks as well as armoured cars and half-tracks. Most of these eventually went to the Army of the Republic of Vietnam but were outdated and ineffective due to lack of logistics and training. The US Army and Marine Corps build-up in the 1960s saw vast quantities of M48 Pattons, M113 APCs and many specialist variants and improvised armoured vehicles arrive in theatre. The Australians brought their British Centurion tanks. But it was the Russians, Chinese and North Vietnamese who won the day and their T-38-85 tanks, ZSU anti-aircraft platforms and BTR-40 and -50 swept the Communists to victory. This fine book brings details and images of all these diverse weaponry to the reader in one volume.

During the Vietnam war 3500 officers and men served in the Swift Boat program in a fleet of 130 boats with no armor plating. The boats patrolled the coast and rivers of South Vietnam, with the average age of the crew being twenty-four. Their days consisted of deadly combat, intense lightning firefights, storms and many hidden dangers. This action-packed story of combat written by Dan Daly, a Vietnam combat veteran who was the Officer in Charge of PCF 76 makes you part of the Swift Boat crew. The six man crew of PCF 76 were volunteers from all over the United States, eager to serve their country in a highly unique type of duty not seen since the PT boats of WWII. This inexperienced and disparate group of men would meld into a combat team - a team that formed an unbreakable, lifelong bond. After training they were plunged into a 12 month tour of duty. Combat took place in the closest confines imaginable, where the enemy were hidden behind a passing sand dune or a single sniper could be concealed in an onshore bunker, mines might be submerged at every fork in the river. The enemy was all around you, hiding, waiting, while your fifty-foot Swift Boat works its way upriver. In many cases the rivers became so narrow there was barely room to maneuver or turn around. The only way out might be into a deadly ambush. Humor and a touch of romance relieve the tension in this thrilling ride with America's finest.

This volume tells the story of the American civil rights movement through the rousing and often wrenching photographs that recorded, promoted and protected it. After an introduction explaining the vital importance of photography to the movement, the book proceeds from the Montgomery bus boycott through the student, local and national movements; the big marches in Washington and Selma; Freedom Summer; Malcolm X and Black Power; and the death of Martin Luther King. Each chapter begins with a fast-paced narrative of a crucial event in the movement, complemented by a portfolio of effective and evocative photographs of the subject. Ranging from the well-known to the rare, these images were shot by photographers including Richard Avedon, Danny Lyon, Charles Moore, Gordon Parks, Dan Weiner, and over 50 others. Many of the pictures are accompanied by remembrances and analysis by various photographers and participants. The book also features a concise chronology of the major civil rights events of the period and suggestions for additional reading.

During the Vietnam war, the United States sought to undermine Hanoi's subversion of the Saigon regime by sending Vietnamese operatives behind enemy lines. A secret to most Americans, this covert operation was far from secret in Hanoi: all of the commandos were killed or captured, and many were turned by the Communists to report false information.

"Spies and Commandos" traces the rise and demise of this secret operation-started by the CIA in 1960 and expanded by the Pentagon beginning in1964-in the first book to examine the program from both sides of the war. Kenneth Conboy and Dale Andrade interviewed CIA and military personnel and traveled in Vietnam to locate former commandos who had been captured by Hanoi, enabling them to tell the complete story of these covert activities from high-level decision making to the actual experiences of the agents.

The book vividly describes scores of dangerous missions-including raids against North Vietnamese coastal installations and the air-dropping of dozens of agents into enemy territory-as well as psychological warfare designed to make Hanoi believe the "resistance movement" was larger than it actually was. It offers a more complete operational account of the program than has ever been made available-particularly its early years-and ties known events in the war to covert operations, such as details of the "34-A Operations" that led to the Tonkin Gulf incidents in 1964. It also explains in no uncertain terms why the whole plan was doomed to failure from the start.

One of the remarkable features of the operation, claim the authors, is that its failures were so glaring. They argue that the CIA, and later the Pentagon, was unaware for years that Hanoi had compromised the commandos, even though some agents missed radio deadlines or filed suspicious reports. Operational errors were not attributable to conspiracy or counterintelligence, they contend, but simply to poor planning and lack of imagination.

Although it flourished for ten years under cover of the wider war, covert activity in Vietnam is now recognized as a disaster. Conboy and Andrade's account of that episode is a sobering tale that lends a new perspective on the war as it reclaims the lost lives of these unsung spies and commandos.