"The Dust of Life" is a collection of vivid and devastating oral histories of Vietnamese Amerasians. Abandoned during the war by their American fathers, discriminated against by the victorious Communists, and ignored for many years by the American government, they endured life in impoverished Vietnam. Their stories are sad, sometimes tragic, but they are also testimonials to the strength of human resiliency.

Robert S. McKelvey is a former marine who served in Vietnam in the late 1960s. Now a child psychiatrist, he returned to Vietnam in 1990 to begin the long series of interviews that resulted in this book. While allowing his subjects to speak for themselves, McKelvey has organized their narratives around themes common to their lives: early maternal loss, the experience of prejudice and discrimination, coping with adversity, dealing with shattered hopes for the future, and, for some, adapting to the alien environment of the United States.

While unique in many respects, the Vietnamese Amerasian story also illustrates themes that are tragically universal: neglect of the human by-products of war, the destructiveness of prejudice and racism, the pain of abandonment, and the horrors of life amidst extreme poverty, hostility, and neglect.

""Winter Soldiers "is an immensely valuable contribution to the history of the Vietnam War. It brings to life, through the words of the veterans themselves, the journey each individual made, through the crucible of combat, from warrior to protester."--Howard Zinn

"Stacewicz has captured the simple, rough-hewn elegance of the voices of Vietnam veterans. As in other wars, the ordinary soldier always has the most extraordinary words for history."--Stanley Kutler, editor of "The Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War"

"By turns irreverent and painfully sincere, "Winter Soldiers "will transform stereotyped views of both veterans and the antiwar movement."--Marilyn Young

The Vietnam War left an indelible mark on those who took part in it and spawned an antiwar movement more popular than any other in US history. In all that has been written about the war, rarely do the worlds of the Vietnam veteran and the antiwar demonstrator come together. Yet in a small but articulate organization known as the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), the two made common cause.

"Winter Soldiers "recovers this moving chapter in the history of the Vietnam War era. Bringing together the voices of more than thirty former and current members of the VVAW, oral historian Richard Stacewicz offers an eloquent account of the impact of the war on the lives of individuals and the nation.

Richard Stacewicz teaches history at Oakton Community College in Des Plaines, Illinois.

A Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist in History Winner of the 2018 Marine Corps Heritage Foundation Greene Award for a distinguished work of nonfiction. The first battle book from Mark Bowden since his #1 New York Times bestseller Black Hawk Down, Hue 1968, "an instantly recognizable classic of military history" (Christian Science Monitor), was published to massive critical acclaim and became a New York Times bestseller. In the early hours of January 31, 1968, the North Vietnamese launched over one hundred attacks across South Vietnam in what would become known as the Tet Offensive. The lynchpin of Tet was the capture of Hue, Vietnam's intellectual and cultural capital, by 10,000 National Liberation Front troops who descended from hidden camps and surged across the city of 140,000. Within hours the entire city was in their hands save for two small military outposts. American commanders refused to believe the size and scope of the Front's presence, ordering small companies of marines against thousands of entrenched enemy troops. After several futile and deadly days, Lieutenant Colonel Ernie Cheatham would finally come up with a strategy to retake the city in some of the most intense urban combat since World War II. With unprecedented access to war archives in the U.S. and Vietnam and inter-views with participants from both sides, Bowden narrates each stage of this crucial battle through multiple viewpoints. Played out over twenty-four days and ultimately costing 10,000 lives, the Battle of Hue was the bloodiest of the entire war. When it ended, the American debate was never again about winning, only about how to leave. Hue 1968 is a gripping and moving account of this pivotal moment.

The tragic, the comic, the terrifying, the poignant are all part of the story of the Black Pony pilots who distinguished themselves in the Mekong Delta during the Vietnam War. Flying their turboprop Broncos"down and dirty, low and slow," they destroyed more enemies and saved more allied lives with close-air support than all the other naval squadrons combined during the three years they saw action. Author Kit Lavell was part of this squadron of"black sheep" given a chance to make something of themselves flying these dangerous missions. The U.S. Navy's only land-based attack squadron, Light Attack Squadron Four (VAL-4) flew support missions for the counter insurgency forces, SEALs, and allied units in borrowed, propeller-driven OV-10s. For fixed-wing aircraft they were dangerous, unorthodox missions, a fact readers will quickly come to appreciate. About the Author Kit Lavell flew 243 missions with the Black Ponies and earned the Distinguished Flying Cross. He is now a screenwriter and playwright, living in California.

A poignant, angry, articulate book Newsweek 'Mr Fall's book is a dramatic treatment of a historic event graphic impact New York Times Originally published in 1961, before the United States escalated its involvement in South Vietnam, Street Without Joy offered a clear warning about what American forces would face in the jungles of Southeast Asia; a costly and protracted revolutionary war fought without fronts against a mobile enemy. In harrowing detail, Fall describes the brutality and frustrations of the Indochina War, the savage eight-year conflict, ending in 1954 after the fall of Dien Bien Phu, in which French forces suffered a staggering defeat at the hands of Communist-led Vietnamese nationalists. Street Without Joy was required reading for policymakers in Washington and GIs in the field and is now considered a classic.

The "Silent Majority" Speech treats Richard Nixon's address of November 3, 1969, as a lens through which to examine the latter years of the Vietnam War and their significance to U.S. global power and American domestic life. The book uses Nixon's speech - which introduced the policy of "Vietnamization" and cited the so-called bloodbath theory as a justification for continued U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia - as a fascinating moment around which to build an analysis of the last years of the war. For Nixon's strategy to be successful, he requested the support of what he called the "great silent majority," a term that continues to resonate in American political culture. Scott Laderman moves beyond the war's final years to address the administration's hypocritical exploitation of moral rhetoric and its stoking of social divisiveness to achieve policy aims. Laderman explores the antiwar and pro-war movements, the shattering of the liberal consensus, and the stirrings of the right-wing resurgence that would come to define American politics. Supplemental primary sources make this book an ideal tool for introducing students to historical research. The "Silent Majority" Speech is critical reading for those studying American political history and U.S.-Asian/Southeast Asian relations.

"Matterhorn" author Karl Marlantes' nonfiction debut is a powerful book about the experience of combat and how inadequately we prepare our young men and women for the psychological and spiritual stresses of war. One of the most important and highly-praised books of 2011, Karl Marlantes' "What It Is Like to Go to War" is set to become just as much of a classic as his epic novel "Matterhorn". In 1968, at the age of twenty-two, Karl Marlantes was dropped into the highland jungle of Vietnam, an inexperienced lieutenant in command of a platoon of forty Marines who would live or die by his decisions. In his thirteen-month tour he saw intense combat. He killed the enemy and he watched friends die. Marlantes survived, but like many of his brothers in arms, he has spent the last forty years dealing with his experiences. In "What It Is Like to Go to War", Marlantes takes a deeply personal and candid look at the experience and ordeal of combat, critically examining how we might better prepare our young soldiers for war. War is as old as humankind, but in the past, warriors were prepared for battle by ritual, religion, and literature - which also helped bring them home. In a compelling narrative, Marlantes weaves riveting accounts of his combat experiences with thoughtful analysis, self-examination, and his readings - from Homer to the Mahabharata to Jung. He tells frankly about how he is haunted by the face of the young North Vietnamese soldier he killed at close quarters and explains how he finally found a way to make peace with his past. He makes it clear just how poorly prepared our nineteen-year-old warriors - mainly men but increasingly women - are for the psychological and spiritual aspects of their journey.

Major John L. Plaster, a three-tour veteran of Vietnam tells the story of the most highly classified United States covert operatives to serve in the war: The Studies and Observations Group, code-named SOG. Comprised of volunteers from such elite military units as the Army's Green Berets, the USAF Air Commandos, and Navy SEALs, SOG agents answered directly to the Pentagon's Joint Chiefs, with some missions requiring approval from the White House. Now for the first time, the dangerous assignments of this top-secret unit can at last be revealed

Western historians have long speculated about Chinese military intervention in the Vietnam War. It was not until recently, however, that newly available international archival materials, as well as documents from China, have indicated the true extent and level of Chinese participation in the conflict of Vietnam. For the first time in the English language, this book offers an overview of the operations and combat experience of more than 430,000 Chinese troops in Indochina from 1968-73. The Chinese Communist story from the "other side of the hill" explores one of the missing pieces to the historiography of the Vietnam War. The book covers the chronological development and Chinese decision-making by examining Beijing's intentions, security concerns, and major reasons for entering Vietnam to fight against the U.S. armed forces. It explains why China launched a nationwide movement, in Mao Zedong's words, to "assist Vietnam and resist America" in 1965-72. It details PLA foreign war preparation, training, battle planning and execution, tactical decisions, combat problem solving, political indoctrination, and performance evaluations through the Vietnam War. International Communist forces, technology, and logistics proved to be the decisive edge that enabled North Vietnam to survive the U.S. Rolling Thunder bombing campaign and helped the Viet Cong defeat South Vietnam. Chinese and Russian support prolonged the war, making it impossible for the United States to win. With Russian technology and massive Chinese intervention, the NVA and NLF could function on both conventional and unconventional levels, which the American military was not fully prepared to face. Nevertheless, the Vietnam War seriously tested the limits of the communist alliance. Rather than improving Sino-Soviet relations, aid to North Vietnam created a new competition as each communist power attempted to control Southeast Asian communist movement. China shifted its defense and national security concerns from the U.S. to the Soviet Union.

The Vietnam War tends to conjure up images of American soldiers battling an elusive enemy in thick jungle, the thudding of helicopters overhead. But there were in fact several Vietnam wars - an anticolonial war with France, a cold war turned hot with the United States, a civil war between North and South Vietnam and among the southern Vietnamese, a revolutionary war of ideas over what should guide Vietnamese society into its postcolonial future, and finally a war of memories after the official end of hostilities with the fall of Saigon in 1975. This book looks at how the Vietnamese themselves experienced all of these conflicts, showing how the wars for Vietnam were rooted in fundamentally conflicting visions of what an independent Vietnam should mean that in many ways remain unresolved to this day. Drawing upon twenty years of research, Mark Philip Bradley examines the thinking and the behaviour of the key wartime decisionmakers in Hanoi and Saigon, while at the same time exploring how ordinary Vietnamese people, northerners and southerners, soldiers and civilians, urban elites and rural peasants, radicals and conservatives, came to understand the thirty years of bloody warfare that unfolded around them-and how they made sense of its aftermath.

Despite French President Charles de Gaulle's persistent efforts to constructively share French experience and use his resources to help engineer an American exit from Vietnam, the Kennedy administration responded to de Gaulle's peace initiatives with bitter silence and inaction. The administration's response ignited a series of events that dealt a massive blow to American prestige across the globe, resulting in the deaths of over fifty-eight thousand American soldiers and turning hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese citizens into refugees. This history of Franco-American relations during the Kennedy presidency explores how and why France and the US disagreed over the proper western strategy for the Vietnam War. France clearly had more direct political experience in Vietnam, but France's postwar decolonization cemented Kennedy's perception that the French were characterized by a toxic mixture of short-sightedness, stubbornness, and indifference to the collective interests of the West. At no point did the Kennedy administration give serious consideration to de Gaulle's proposals or entertain the notion of using his services as an honest broker in order to disengage from a situation that was rapidly spiraling out of control. Kennedy's Francophobia, the roots of which appear in a selection of private writings from Kennedy's undergraduate years at Harvard, biased his decision-making. The course of action Kennedy chose in 1963, a rejection of the French peace program, all but handcuffed Lyndon Johnson into formally entering a war he knew the United States had little chance of winning.

Through the Valley is the captivating memoir of the last U.S. Army soldier taken prisoner during the Vietnam War. A narrative of courage, hope, and survival, Through the Valley is more than just a war story. It also portrays the thrill and horror of combat, the fear and anxiety of captivity, and the stories of friendships forged and friends lost In 1971 William Reeder was a senior captain on his second tour in Vietnam. He had flown armed, fixed-wing OV-1 Mohawks on secret missions deep into enemy territory in Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam on his first tour. He returned as a helicopter pilot eager to experience a whole new perspective as a Cobra gunship pilot. Believing that Nixon's Vietnamization would soon end the war, Reeder was anxious to see combat action. To him, it appeared that the Americans had prevailed, beaten the Viet Cong, and were passing everything over to the South Vietnamese Army so that Americans could leave.

Often described as the US Army's aerial jeep the UH-1 Iroquois ('Huey') was the general-purpose vehicle that provided mobility in a hostile jungle environment which made rapid troop movement extremely challenging by any other means. Hueys airlifted troops, evacuated casualties, rescued downed pilots, transported cargo externally and enabled rapid transit of commanders in the field. Although 'vertical aviation' had only become a practical reality during the Korean War helicopters evolved rapidly in the decade before Vietnam and by 1965 the US Army and US Marines relied on them as primary combat tools. This was principally because North Vietnam's armed forces had long experience of jungle operations, camouflage and evasion. Generally avoiding set-piece pitched battles they relied on rapid, frequent strikes and withdrew using routes that were generally inaccessible to US vehicles. They commonly relied on darkness and bad weather to make their moves, often rendering them immune to conventional air attack. Gunship helicopters, sometimes equipped with Firefly searchlights and early night vision light intensifiers, were more able to track and attack the enemy. Innovative tactics were required for this unfamiliar combat scenario and for a US Army that was more prepared for conventional operations in a European-type setting. One of the most valuable new initiatives was the UH-1C 'Huey Hog' or 'Frog' gunship, conceived in 1960 and offering more power and agility than the UH-1B that pioneered gunship use in combat. Heavily armed with guns and rockets and easily transportable by air these helicopters became available in large numbers and they became a major problem for the insurgent forces throughout the war. Covering fascinating details of the innovations in tactics and combat introduced by gunship helicopters, this book offers an analysis of their adaptability and usefulness in a variety of operations, while exploring the insurgent forces' responses to the advent of 'vertical aviation'.

In the spring of 1966 the Vietnam War was intensifying, driven by the US military build up, under which the 9th Infantry Division was reactivated. Charlie Company was part of the 9th and representative of the melting pot of America. But, unlike the vast majority of other companies in the US Army, the men of Charlie Company were a close-knit family. They joined up together, trained together, and were deployed together. This is their story. From the joker who roller-skated into the Company First Sergeant's office wearing a dress, to the nerdy guy with two left feet who would rather be off somewhere inventing computers, and the everyman who just wanted to keep his head down and get through un-noticed and preferably unscathed. Written by leading Vietnam expert Dr Andrew Wiest, The Boys of '67 tells the unvarnished truth about the war in Vietnam, recounting the fear of death and the horrors of battle through the recollections of the young men themselves. America doesn't know their names or their story, the story of the boys of Charlie, young draftees who had done everything that their nation had asked of them and received so little in return - lost faces and silent voices of a distant war.

In 1964 Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, activated a joint unconventional task force known as the Studies and Observation Group--MACV-SOG. As a cover its mission was to conduct analysis of lessons learned in combat involved all branches of service. SOG's real mission was to conduct covert strategic reconnaissance missions into Laos, Cambodia, and South Vietnam as well as sabotage and 'Black' psychological operations. Ground, air, and naval assets were employed to insert, collect, extract, and otherwise support these operations. Drawing on detailed, first-hand accounts of the experiences of the service, including action on operations, this book will shed light on one of the most crucial units of the Vietnam War.

In the summer of 1936, James Agee and Walker Evans set out on assignment for Fortune magazine to explore the daily lives of sharecroppers in the South. Their journey would prove an extraordinary collaboration and a watershed literary event when in 1941 LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN was first published to enormous critical acclaim. This unsparing record of place, of the people who shaped the land, and of the rhythm of their lives was called intensely moving and unrelentingly honest, and is "renowned for its fusion of social conscience and artistic radicality" (New York Times). Today it stands as a poetic tract of its time, recognized by the New York Public Library as one of the most influential books of the twentieth century. With an elegant new design as well as a sixty-four-page photographic prologue of Evans's classic images, reproduced from archival negatives, this sixtieth anniversary edition reintroduces the legendary author and photographer to a new generation.

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.

On March 16, 1968, American soldiers killed as many as five hundred Vietnamese men, women, and children in a village near the South China Sea. In "My Lai" William Thomas Allison explores and evaluates the significance of this horrific event. How could such a thing have happened? Who (or what) should be held accountable? How do we remember this atrocity and try to apply its lessons, if any?

My Lai has fixed the attention of Americans of various political stripes for more than forty years. The breadth of writing on the massacre, from news reports to scholarly accounts, highlights the difficulty of establishing fact and motive in an incident during which confusion, prejudice, and self-preservation overwhelmed the troops.

Son of a Marine veteran of the Vietnam War--and aware that the generation who lived through the incident is aging--Allison seeks to ensure that our collective memory of this shameful episode does not fade.

Well written and accessible, Allison's book provides a clear narrative of this historic moment and offers suggestions for how to come to terms with its aftermath.

The Vietnam War examines this conflict from its origins up until North Vietnam's victory in 1975. Historian Mitchell K. Hall's lucid account is an ideal introduction to the key debates surrounding a war that remains controversial and disputed in American scholarship and collective memory. The new edition has been fully updated and expanded to include additional material on the preceding French Indochina War, the American antiwar movement, North Vietnamese perspectives and motivations, and the postwar scholarly debate. The text is supported by a documents section and a wide range of study tools, including a timeline of events, glossaries of key figures and terms, and a rich "further reading" section accompanied by a new bibliographical essay. Concise yet comprehensive, The Vietnam War remains the most accessible and stimulating introduction to this crucial 20th-century conflict.

Vietnam is an ancient and beautiful land, with a deep history of occupational conflict that remains an enigma in Americans' collective memory. It is still easy to forget that Vietnam is a country and not a war, even as America's role in Vietnam inflamed and divided the American citizenry in ways that are still evident today. It is as if Vietnam's civil war resurrected our own. And if you are a Vietnam War veteran or a family member of a vet, it's worse, because, even after a half-century, many of the wounds won't heal. What do you do when you have given up on forgetting? Chuck Forsman is one of a sizable number of aging Vietnam vets who have found deep satisfaction in revisiting Vietnam, supporting charities, orphanages, and clinics, doing volunteer work and more-anything to redeem what the U.S. military did there. He is also a renowned painter and photographer who depicts places and environments in ways that become unforgettable visual experiences for the contemporary viewer. Lost in Vietnam chronicles a journey, not a country. They were taken on visits averaging two months each and two-year intervals over a decade. Forsman traveled largely by motorbike throughout the country-south, central, and north-sharing his experiences through amazing photographs of Vietnam's lands and people. His visual journey of one such veteran's twofold quest: the one for redemption and understanding, and the other to make art. The renowned Le Ly Hayslip introduces the book and sets the table for Forsman's incredible sojourn.

Triumph Regained: The Vietnam War, 1965-1968 is the long-awaited sequel to the immensely influential Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965. Like its predecessor, this book overturns the conventional wisdom using a treasure trove of new sources, many of them from the North Vietnamese side. Rejecting the standard depiction of U.S. military intervention as a hopeless folly, it shows America's war to have been a strategic necessity that could have ended victoriously had President Lyndon Johnson heeded the advice of his generals. In light of Johnson's refusal to use American ground forces beyond South Vietnam, General William Westmoreland employed the best military strategy available. Once the White House loosened the restraints on Operation Rolling Thunder, American bombing inflicted far greater damage on the North Vietnamese supply system than has been previously understood, and it nearly compelled North Vietnam to capitulate. The book demonstrates that American military operations enabled the South Vietnamese government to recover from the massive instability that followed the assassination of President Ngo Dinh Diem. American culture sustained public support for the war through the end of 1968, giving South Vietnam realistic hopes for long-term survival. America's defense of South Vietnam averted the imminent fall of key Asian nations to Communism and sowed strife inside the Communist camp, to the long-term detriment of America's great-power rivals, China and the Soviet Union.

The most thorough account yet available of a revolution that saw the first true agrarian reform in Central America, this book is also a penetrating analysis of the tragic destruction of that revolution. In no other Central American country was U.S. intervention so decisive and so ruinous, charges Piero Gleijeses. Yet he shows that the intervention can be blamed on no single "convenient villain." "Extensively researched and written with conviction and passion, this study analyzes the history and downfall of what seems in retrospect to have been Guatemala's best government, the short-lived regime of Jacobo Arbenz, overthrown in 1954, by a CIA-orchestrated coup."--Foreign Affairs "Piero Gleijeses offers a historical road map that may serve as a guide for future generations. . . . Readers] will come away with an understanding of the foundation of a great historical tragedy."--Saul Landau, The Progressive " Gleijeses's] academic rigor does not prevent him from creating an accessible, lucid, almost journalistic account of an episode whose tragic consequences still reverberate."--Paul Kantz, Commonweal

A hard-hitting history of the U.S. airborne unit who made a name for themselves in the unforgiving jungles of South Vietnam. "It was easier killing than living." Third Battalion 506th Airborne veteran Drawing on interviews with veterans, many of whom have never gone on the record before, Ian Gardner follows up his epic trilogy about the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment in World War II with the story of the unit's reactivation at the height of the Vietnam War. This is the dramatic history of a band of brothers who served together in Vietnam and who against the odds lived up to the reputation of their World War II forefathers. Brigadier General Salve Matheson's idea was to create an 800-strong battalion of airborne volunteers in the same legendary "Currahee" spirit that had defined the volunteers of 1942. The man he chose to lead them was John Geraci, who would mold this young brotherhood into a highly cohesive and motivated force. In December 1967, the battalion was sent into the Central Highlands of Lam Dong Province. Geraci and his men began their Search and Destroy patrols, which coincided with the North Vietnamese build-up to the Tet Offensive and was a brutal introduction to the reality of a dirty, bloody war. Gardner reveals how it was here that the tenacious volunteers made their mark, just like their predecessors had done in Normandy, and the battalion was ultimately awarded a Valorous Unit Citation. This book shows how and why this unit was deserving of that award, recounting their daily sanguinary struggle in the face of a hostile environment and a determined enemy. Through countless interviews and rare personal photographs, Sign Here for Sacrifice shows the action, leadership, humor and bravery displayed by these airborne warriors.

In the Cambodian proverb, "when broken glass floats" is the time when evil triumphs over good. That time began in 1975, when the Khmer Rouge took power in Cambodia and the Him family began their trek through the hell of the "killing fields." In a mesmerizing story, Him vividly recounts a Cambodia where rudimentary labor camps are the norm and technology, such as cars and electricity, no longer exists. Death becomes a companion at the camps, along with illness. Yet through the terror, Chanrithy's family remains loyal to one another despite the Khmer Rouge's demand of loyalty only to itself. Moments of inexpressible sacrifice and love lead them to bring what little food they have to the others, even at the risk of their own lives. In 1979, "broken glass" finally sinks. From a family of twelve, only five of the Him children survive. Sponsored by an uncle in Oregon, they begin their new lives in a land that promises welcome to those starved for freedom.