"A GRIPPING CLASSIC. Exhaustively researched, The Hunter Killers puts you directly into a Wild Weasel fighter cockpit during the Vietnam War. Dan Hampton lets you feel it for yourself as no one else could."--Colonel LEO THORSNESS, Wild Weasel pilot and Medal of Honor recipient At the height of the Cold War, America's most elite aviators bravely volunteered for a covert program aimed at eliminating an impossible new threat. Half never returned. All became legends. From New York Times bestselling author Dan Hampton comes one of the most extraordinary untold stories of aviation history. Vietnam, 1965: On July 24 a USAF F-4 Phantom jet was suddenly blown from the sky by a mysterious and lethal weapon-a Soviet SA-2 surface-to-air missile (SAM), launched by Russian "advisors" to North Vietnam. Three days later, six F-105 Thunderchiefs were brought down trying to avenge the Phantom. More tragic losses followed, establishing the enemy's SAMs as the deadliest anti-aircraft threat in history and dramatically turning the tables of Cold War air superiority in favor of Soviet technology. Stunned and desperately searching for answers, the Pentagon ordered a top secret program called Wild Weasel I to counter the SAM problem-fast. So it came to be that a small group of maverick fighter pilots and Electronic Warfare Officers volunteered to fly behind enemy lines and into the teeth of the threat. To most it seemed a suicide mission-but they beat the door down to join. Those who survived the 50 percent casualty rate would revolutionize warfare forever. "You gotta be sh*#@ing me!" This immortal phrase was uttered by Captain Jack Donovan when the Wild Weasel concept was first explained to him. "You want me to fly in the back of a little tiny fighter aircraft with a crazy fighter pilot who thinks he's invincible, home in on a SAM site in North Vietnam, and shoot it before it shoots me?" Based on unprecedented firsthand interviews with Wild Weasel veterans and previously unseen personal papers and declassified documents from both sides of the conflict, as well as Dan Hampton's own experience as a highly decorated F-16 Wild Weasel pilot, The Hunter Killers is a gripping, cockpit-level chronicle of the first-generation Weasels, the remarkable band of aviators who faced head-on the advanced Soviet missile technology that was decimating fellow American pilots over the skies of Vietnam.

Frances FitzGerald's landmark history of Vietnam and the Vietnam War, "a compassionate and penetrating account of the collision of two societies that remain untranslatable to one another." (New York Times Book Review) This magisterial work, based on Frances FitzGerald's many years of research and travels, takes us inside the history of Vietnam -- the traditional, ancestor-worshiping villages, the conflicts between Communists and anti-Communists, Catholics and Buddhists, generals and monks, the disruption created by French colonialism, and America's ill-fated intervention -- and reveals the country as seen through Vietnamese eyes. Originally published in 1972, Fire in the Lake was the first history of Vietnam written by an American and won the Pulitzer Prize, the Bancroft Prize, and the National Book Award. With a clarity and insight unrivaled by any author before it or since, Frances FitzGerald illustrates how America utterly and tragically misinterpreted the realities of Vietnam.

Peter Clark's year in Vietnam began in July 1966, when he was shipped out with hundreds of other young recruits, as a replacement in the 1st Infantry Division. Clark was assigned to the Alpha Company. Clark gives a visceral, vivid and immediate account of life in the platoon, as he progresses from green recruit to seasoned soldier over the course of a year in the complexities of the Vietnamese conflict. Clark gradually learns the techniques developed by US troops to cope with the daily horrors they encountered, the technical skills needed to fight and survive, and how to deal with the awful reality of civilian casualties. Fighting aside, it rained almost every day and insect bites constantly plagued the soldiers as they moved through dense jungle, muddy rice paddy and sandy roads. From the food they ate (largely canned meatballs, beans and potatoes) to the inventive ways they managed to shower, every aspect of the platoon's lives is explored in this revealing book. The troops even managed to fit in some R&Rwhilst off-duty in the bars of Tokyo. Alpha One Sixteen follows Clark as he discovers how to cope with the vagaries of the enemy and the daily confusion the troops faced in distinguishing combatants from civilians. The Viet Cong were a largely unseen enemy who fought a guerrilla war, setting traps and landmines everywhere. Clark's vigilance develops as he gets used to 'living in mortal terror,' which a brush with death in a particularly terrifying fire fight does nothing to dispel. As he continues his journey, he chronicles those less fortunate; the heavy toll being taken all round him is powerfully described at the end of each chapter.

Few historians of the Vietnam War have covered the post-1975 era or engaged comprehensively with refugee politics, humanitarianism, and human rights as defining issues of the period. After Saigon's Fall is the first major work to uncover this history. Amanda C. Demmer offers a new account of the post-War normalization of US-Vietnam relations by centering three major transformations of the late twentieth century: the reassertion of the US Congress in American foreign policy; the Indochinese diaspora and changing domestic and international refugee norms; and the intertwining of humanitarianism and the human rights movement. By tracing these domestic, regional, and global phenomena, After Saigon's Fall captures the contingencies and contradictions inherent in US-Vietnamese normalization. Using previously untapped archives to recover a riveting narrative with both policymakers and nonstate advocates at its center, Demmer's book also reveals much about US politics and society in the last quarter of the twentieth century.

In 2012, President Obama announced that the United States would spend the next thirteen years - through November 11, 2025 - commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Vietnam War, and the American soldiers, "more than 58,000 patriots," who died in Vietnam. The fact that at least 2.1 million Vietnamese - soldiers, parents, grandparents, children - also died in that war will be largely unknown and entirely uncommemorated. And U.S. history barely stops to record the millions of Vietnamese who lived on after being displaced, tortured, maimed, raped, or born with birth defects, the result of devastating chemicals wreaked on the land by the U.S. military. The reason for this appalling disconnect of consciousness lies in an unremitting public relations campaign waged by top American politicians, military leaders, business people, and scholars who have spent the last sixty years justifying the U.S. presence in Vietnam. It is a campaign of patriotic conceit superbly chronicled by John Marciano in The American War in Vietnam: Crime or Commemoration?A devastating follow-up to Marciano's 1979 classic Teaching the Vietnam War (written with William L. Griffen), Marciano's book seeks not to commemorate the Vietnam War, but to stop the ongoing U.S. war on actual history. Marciano reveals the grandiose flag-waving that stems from the "Noble Cause principle," the notion that America is "chosen by God" to bring democracy to the world. Marciano writes of the Noble Cause being invoked unsparingly by presidents - from Jimmy Carter, in his observation that, regarding Vietnam, "the destruction was mutual," to Barack Obama, who continues the flow of romantic media propaganda: "The United States of America ...will remain the greatest force for freedom the world has ever known."The result is critical writing and teaching at its best. This book will find a home in classrooms where teachers seek to do more than repeat the trite glorifications of U.S. empire. It will provide students everywhere with insights that can prepare them to change the world.

Speaking to an advisor in 1966 about America's escalation of forces in Vietnam, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara confessed: 'We've made mistakes in Vietnam ... I've made mistakes. But the mistakes I made are not the ones they say I made'. In 'I Made Mistakes', Aurelie Basha i Novosejt provides a fresh and controversial examination of Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara's decisions during the Vietnam War. Although McNamara is remembered as the architect of the Vietnam War, Novosejt draws on new sources - including the diaries of his advisor and confidant John T. McNaughton - to reveal a man who resisted the war more than most. As Secretary of Defense, he did not want the costs of the war associated with a new international commitment in Vietnam, but he sacrificed these misgivings to instead become the public face of the war out of a sense of loyalty to the President.

North and South Vietnamese youths had very different experiences of growing up during the Vietnamese War. The book gives a unique perspective on the conflict through the prism of adult-youth relations. By studying these relations, including educational systems, social organizations, and texts created by and for children during the war, Olga Dror analyzes how the two societies dealt with their wartime experience and strove to shape their futures. She examines the socialization and politicization of Vietnamese children and teenagers, contrasting the North's highly centralized agenda of indoctrination with the South, which had no such policy, and explores the results of these varied approaches. By considering the influence of Western culture on the youth of the South and of socialist culture on the youth of the North, we learn how the youth cultures of both Vietnams diverged from their prewar paths and from each other.

History of the United States Naval Operations in World War II.

This is the story of the friendships that defined one of America's most beloved Presidents. Chris Matthews, who has been following and studying the Kennedys most of his life, has interviewed President Kennedy's closest confidants - family, friends, and those who served with him--to create a moving portrait of a man many loved but few really understood. These friends were with Jack Kennedy as he took surprising risks, struggled with chronic illness, and repeatedly confronted "the thin membrane between life and death." As Matthews describes it, Jack Kennedy was a rebel, an adventurer, and a great enjoyer of life precisely because he understood its fragility. Being with Jack Kennedy was great fun for his friends. Now readers will share in that experience.

An army, Lewis Mumford once observed, 'is a body of pure consumers' and it is logistics that feeds this body's insatiable appetite for men and materiel. Successful logistics - the transportation of supplies and combatants to battle - cannot guarantee victory, but poor logistics portends defeat. In Feeding Victory, Jobie Turner asks how technical innovation has affected this connection over time and whether advances in technology, from the railroad and the airplane to the nuclear weapon and the computer, have altered both the critical relationship between logistics and warfare and, ultimately, geopolitical dynamics. Covering a span of three hundred years, Feeding Victory focuses on five distinct periods of technological change, from the preindustrial era to the information age. For each era Turner presents a case study: the campaign for Lake George from 1755 to 1759, the Western Front in 1917, the Battle of Guadalcanal in 1942, the Battle of Stalingrad from 1942 to 1943, and the Battle of Khe Sanh in 1968. In each of these cases the logistics of the belligerents were at their limit because of geography or the vast material needs of war. With such limits, the case studies both give a clear accounting of the logistics of the period, particularly with respect to the mode of transportation - whether air, land, or sea - and reveal the inflection points between success and failure. What are the continuities between eras, Turner asks, and what can these campaigns tell us about the relationship of technology to logistics and logistics to geopolitics? In doing so, Turner discovers just how critical the biological needs of the soldiers on the battlefield prove to be; in fact, they overwhelm firepower in their importance, even in the modern era. His work shows how logistics aptly represents technological shifts from the enlightenment to the dawn of the twenty-first century and how, in our time, ideas have come to trump the material forces of war.

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.

At Easter 1972, North Vietnam invaded the South, and there were almost no US ground troops left to stop it. But air power reinforcements could be rushed to the theater. Operation Linebacker's objective was to destroy the invading forces from the air and cut North Vietnam's supply routes – and luckily in 1972, American air power was beginning a revolution in both technology and tactics.

Most crucial was the introduction of the first effective laser-guided bombs, but the campaign also involved the fearsome AC-130 gunship and saw the debut of helicopter-mounted TOW missiles. Thanks to the new Top Gun fighter school, US naval aviators now also had a real advantage over the MiGs.

This is the fascinating story of arguably the world's first “modern” air campaign. It explains how this complex operation – involving tactical aircraft, strategic bombers, close air support and airlift – defeated the invasion. It also explains the shortcomings of the campaign, the contrasting approaches of the USAF and Navy, and the impact that Linebacker had on modern air warfare.

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.

Here is the epic story of Vietnam and the sixties told through the events of a few gripping, passionate days of war and peace in October 1967. "They Marched Into Sunlight" brings that tumultuous time back to life while exploring questions about the meaning of dissent and the official manipulation of truth, issues as relevant today as they were decades ago.
In a seamless narrative, Maraniss weaves together the stories of three very different worlds: the death and heroism of soldiers in Vietnam, the anger and anxiety of antiwar students back home, and the confusion and obfuscating behavior of officials in Washington. To understand what happens to the people in these interconnected stories is to understand America's anguish. Based on thousands of primary documents and 180 on-the-record interviews, the book describes the battles that evoked cultural and political conflicts that still reverberate.

The aeroscouts of the 1st Infantry Division had three words emblazoned on their unit patch: Low Level Hell. It was then and continues today as the perfect, concise definition of what these intrepid aviators experienced as they ranged the skies of Vietnam from the Cambodian border to the Iron Triangle. The Outcasts, as they were known, flew low and slow, aerial eyes of the division in search of the enemy. Too often for longevity's sake they found the Viet Cong and the fight was on. These young pilots (19-22 years-old) literally "invented" the book as they went along.

North and South Vietnamese youths had very different experiences of growing up during the Vietnamese War. The book gives a unique perspective on the conflict through the prism of adult-youth relations. By studying these relations, including educational systems, social organizations, and texts created by and for children during the war, Olga Dror analyzes how the two societies dealt with their wartime experience and strove to shape their futures. She examines the socialization and politicization of Vietnamese children and teenagers, contrasting the North's highly centralized agenda of indoctrination with the South, which had no such policy, and explores the results of these varied approaches. By considering the influence of Western culture on the youth of the South and of socialist culture on the youth of the North, we learn how the youth cultures of both Vietnams diverged from their prewar paths and from each other.

On October 17, 1965, Navy LTJG Porter Halyburton was shot down over North Vietnam on his 76th mission and listed as killed in action. One-and-a-half years later he was found to be alive and a prisoner of war. Halyburton was held captive for more than seven years. Reflections on Captivity, is a collection of fifty short stories about this young naval officer's experiences as a POW in North Vietnam. This book recounts difficult times but focuses more on the positive aspects--the humor, creativity, friendships, courage, and leadership of an amazing group of Americans and how they helped each other survive and even thrive. These vignettes demonstrate how the human mind, body, and spirit can adapt and find meaning in life in the most challenging circumstances. There are powerful lessons learned from this complex experience that continue to guide the author's life to this day. Despite hardship, suffering, and long separation, Halyburton strongly believes one's quality of life is determined more by choices made than by circumstances, and the most liberating choice we can make is to forgive. Reflections on Captivity furthers the reader's understanding about the nature of captivity, race relations, human relations, aspects of the air war against North Vietnam, and highlights the importance of leadership, ethics, and devotion to duty in difficult times.

** NOW A MAJOR MOVIE STARRING ZAC EFRON, RUSSELL CROWE AND BILL MURRAY THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER 'An extraordinary story.' - Daily Mail 'An unforgettable, wild ride from start to finish.' - John Bruning 'The astounding true story - from the streets of Manhattan to the jungles of Vietnam.' - Thomas Kelly IT SEEMED LIKE A GOOD IDEA AT THE TIME. As a result of a rowdy night in his local New York bar, ex-Marine and merchant seaman "Chick" Donohue volunteers for a legendary mission. He will sneak into Vietnam to track down his buddies in combat to bring them a cold beer and supportive messages from home. It'll be the greatest beer run ever! Now, decades on from 1968, this is the remarkable true story of how he actually did it. Armed with Irish luck and a backpack full of alcohol, Chick works his passage to Vietnam, lands in Qui Nhon and begins to carry out his quest, tracking down the disbelieving soldiers one by one. But things quickly go awry, and as he talks his way through checkpoints and unwittingly into dangerous situations, Chick sees a lot more of the war than he ever planned - spending a terrifying time in the Demilitarized Zone, and getting caught up in Saigon during the Tet Offensive. With indomitable spirit, Chick survives on his wits, but what he finds in Vietnam comes as a shock. By the end of his epic adventure, battered and exhausted, Chick finds himself questioning why his friends were ever led into the war in the first place.

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.

Beginning as a young boy, Jules takes you through the unique process of becoming a Naval Aviator, engages you into his experiences as a brand new pilot in a combat squadron and, finally becoming a flying warrior. Having survived two combat cruises aboard the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk from 1966-1968, compiling 332 career carrier take offs and landings, being shot at daily by enemy fire while completing 200 combat missions over Vietnam, he clearly shares the views of the aviators who flew along with him on these missions while fighting this unpopular war. Jules was awarded the Nation's Distinguished Flying Cross, 21 Air Medals, and many other accolades. After reading this book the reader will have a new understanding and appreciation about the Warriors who protect not only their comrades in arms, but the defense of the nation as well.

Going beyond the dominant orthodox narrative to incorporate insight from revisionist scholarship on the Vietnam War, Michael G. Kort presents the case that the United States should have been able to win the war, and at a much lower cost than it suffered in defeat. Presenting a study that is both historiographic and a narrative history, Kort analyzes important factors such as the strong nationalist credentials and leadership qualities of South Vietnam's Ngo Dinh Diem; the flawed military strategy of 'graduated response' developed by Robert McNamara; and the real reasons South Vietnam collapsed in the face of a massive North Vietnamese invasion in 1975. Kort shows how the US commitment to defend South Vietnam was not a strategic error but a policy consistent with US security interests during the Cold War, and that there were potentially viable strategic approaches to the war that might have saved South Vietnam.

In 2002, Governor General Michael Jeffrey stated that 'we Australians had everything under control in Phuoc Tuy Province'. This referred not only to military control, but to the policy of 'pacification' employed by the Republic of Vietnam and external 'Free World' allies such as the US and Australia. In the hopes of stemming the tide of Communism, pacification aimed to win the allegiance of the populace through political, economic and social reform. In this new work, Thomas Richardson explores the 1st Australian Task Force's (1ATF) implementation of this policy in Phuoc Tuy between 1966 and 1972. Using material from US and Australian archives, as well as newly translated Vietnamese histories, Destroy and Build: Pacification in Phuoc Tuy, 1966-1972 challenges the accepted historiography of the Western forces' fight against insurgency in Vietnam.