From a political cult to the heart of the Washington establishment - the bizarre and untold story of how the CIA tried to infiltrate a radical group of US military deserters during the Cold War. Stockholm, 1968. A thousand American deserters and draft-resisters are arriving to escape the war in Vietnam. They're young, they're radical, and they want to start a revolution. The Swedes treat them like pop stars - but the CIA is determined to stop all that. It's a job for the deep-cover men of Operation Chaos and their allies - agents who know how to infiltrate organizations and destroy them from inside. Within months, the GIs have turned their fire on one another, and the group dissolves into interrogations and recriminations. When Matthew Sweet began investigating this story, he thought the madness was over. He was wrong. Instead, he became the confidant of an eccentric and traumatized group of survivors - each with his own intricate theory about the traitors in their midst. All Sweet has to do is discover the truth . . . and stay sane. Reminiscent of Jon Ronson's The Men who Stare at Goats and as compelling as Ben McIntyre's Agent Zigzag, in Operation Chaos Matthew Sweet's fascinating journey of discovery sheds new light on one of the great untold tales of the Cold War, where the facts are wilder than any work of fiction.

First published in 1915, Towards International Government considers the consequences of war for global diplomacy and the alliance system. Hobson argues that, to reduce armaments and the possibility of another world war, an organisational structure of international government must be put into place. An extension of the League of Nations, Hobson proposes that this council would need to hold legislative powers enabling it to impose economic sanctions and, if necessary, the ability to deploy an international force. This is a fascinating and exceptionally forward-thinking work, of great importance to economic and political historians of the twentieth century.

This is the first history of the legendary US Army's HAWK missile system, the world's first mobile air-defense missile system, which saw service and combat around the world. Designed to counteract the threat posed by advanced 1950s Soviet-built aircraft, the first HAWK unit became operational in 1959. At its peak, it saw frontline service in the Far East, Panama, Europe, and in the Middle East. Units were also used during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam War, and Persian Gulf War. In the hands of other nations, HAWK proved its efficacy in combat during the Arab-Israeli Wars, Iran-Iraq War, Chadian-Libyan War, and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Credited with shooting down more than 100 aircraft during its combat career, the HAWK system was respected for its lethality. Such was Soviet concern, that the USSR developed electronic jammers, anti-radiation missiles, and other countermeasures specifically to degrade its effectiveness. The US retired its HAWK systems soon after the Cold War ended in 1991 when air defense priorities shifted from aircraft to ballistic missile defense, yet a modernized version of the system remains in service to this day in many nations. Packed with archive photos and original artwork, this is the first book about the HAWK system. Featuring research from HAWK technical and field manuals, interviews with HAWK veterans, and detailing the authors' personal experiences with HAWK missile units, it provides a comprehensive study of one of the most lethal and effective air missile systems of all time.

In 2014, the US marks the 50th anniversary of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, the basis for the Johnson administration s escalation of American military involvement in Southeast Asia and war against North Vietnam. "Vietnam War Slang "outlines the context behind the slang used by members of the United States Armed Forces during the Vietnam War.

Troops facing and inflicting death display a high degree of linguistic creativity. Vietnam was the last American war fought by an army with conscripts, and their involuntary participation in the war added a dimension to the language. War has always been an incubator for slang; it is brutal, and brutality demands a vocabulary to describe what we don t encounter in peacetime civilian life. Furthermore, such language serves to create an intense bond between comrades in the armed forces, helping them to support the heavy burdens of war.

The troops in Vietnam faced the usual demands of war, as well as several that were unique to Vietnam a murky political basis for the war, widespread corruption in the ruling government, untraditional guerilla warfare, an unpredictable civilian population in Vietnam, and a growing lack of popular support for the war back in the US. For all these reasons, the language of those who fought in Vietnam was a vivid reflection of life in wartime.

"

Vietnam War Slang "lays out the definitive record of the lexicon of Americans who fought in the Vietnam War. Assuming no prior knowledge, it presents around 2000 headwords, with each entry divided into sections giving parts of speech, definitions, glosses, the countries of origin, dates of earliest known citations, and citations. It will be an essential resource for Vietnam veterans and their families, students and readers of history, and anyone interested in the principles underpinning the development of slang. "

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.

In 2014, the US marks the 50th anniversary of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, the basis for the Johnson administration s escalation of American military involvement in Southeast Asia and war against North Vietnam. "Vietnam War Slang "outlines the context behind the slang used by members of the United States Armed Forces during the Vietnam War.

Troops facing and inflicting death display a high degree of linguistic creativity. Vietnam was the last American war fought by an army with conscripts, and their involuntary participation in the war added a dimension to the language. War has always been an incubator for slang; it is brutal, and brutality demands a vocabulary to describe what we don t encounter in peacetime civilian life. Furthermore, such language serves to create an intense bond between comrades in the armed forces, helping them to support the heavy burdens of war.

The troops in Vietnam faced the usual demands of war, as well as several that were unique to Vietnam a murky political basis for the war, widespread corruption in the ruling government, untraditional guerilla warfare, an unpredictable civilian population in Vietnam, and a growing lack of popular support for the war back in the US. For all these reasons, the language of those who fought in Vietnam was a vivid reflection of life in wartime.

"

Vietnam War Slang "lays out the definitive record of the lexicon of Americans who fought in the Vietnam War. Assuming no prior knowledge, it presents around 2000 headwords, with each entry divided into sections giving parts of speech, definitions, glosses, the countries of origin, dates of earliest known citations, and citations. It will be an essential resource for Vietnam veterans and their families, students and readers of history, and anyone interested in the principles underpinning the development of slang. "

A major revision of our understanding of JFK's commitment to Vietnam, revealing that his administration's plan to withdraw was a political device, the effect of which was to manage public opinion while preserving US military assistance. In October 1963, the White House publicly proposed the removal of US troops from Vietnam, earning President Kennedy an enduring reputation as a skeptic on the war. In fact, Kennedy was ambivalent about withdrawal and was largely detached from its planning. Drawing on secret presidential tapes, Marc J. Selverstone reveals that the withdrawal statement gave Kennedy political cover, allowing him to sustain support for US military assistance. Its details were the handiwork of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, whose ownership of the plan distanced it from the president. Selverstone's use of the presidential tapes, alongside declassified documents, memoirs, and oral histories, lifts the veil on this legend of Camelot. Withdrawal planning was never just about Vietnam as it evolved over the course of fifteen months. For McNamara, it injected greater discipline into the US assistance program. For others, it was a form of leverage over South Vietnam. For the military, it was largely an unwelcome exercise. And for JFK, it allowed him to preserve the US commitment while ostensibly limiting it. The Kennedy Withdrawal offers an inside look at presidential decisionmaking in this liminal period of the Vietnam War and makes clear that portrayals of Kennedy as a dove are overdrawn. His proposed withdrawal was in fact a cagey strategy for keeping the United States involved in the fight-a strategy the country adopted decades later in Afghanistan.

This book revisits the American canon of novels, memoirs, and films about the war in Vietnam, in order to reassess critically the centrality of the discourse of American victimization in the country's imagination of the conflict, and to trace the strategies of representation that establish American soldiers and veterans as the most significant victims of the war. By investigating in detail the imagery of the Vietnamese landscape recreated by American authors and directors, the volume explores the proposition that Vietnam has been turned into an American myth, demonstrating that the process resulted in a dehistoricization and mystification of the conflict that obscured its historical and political realities. Against this background, representations of the war's victims-Vietnamese civilians and American soldiers-are then considered in light of their ideological meanings and uses. Ultimately, the book seeks to demonstrate how, in a relation of power, the question of victimhood can become ideologized, transforming into both a discourse and a strategy of representation-and in doing so, to demythologize something of the "Vietnam" of American cultural narrative.

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.

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.

This book describes and explains Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore s attitudes and policies regarding the Vietnam War. While it is generally known that all three countries supported the US war effort in Vietnam, it reveals the motivations behind the decisions of the decision makers, the twists and turns and the nuances in the attitudes of Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore following the development of the war from the 1950s through to its end in 1975. Although the principal focus is the three supposedly non-aligned countries - Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore, the perspectives of Thailand and the Philippines - the two Southeast Asian countries which were formally allied with the United States - are discussed at the appropriate junctures. It makes an original contribution to the gradually growing literature on the international history of the Vietnam War and furthers our knowledge of the diplomatic history of Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore in the early independent years, 1945/1949, 1957 and 1965 respectively, which coincided with early years of the Cold War in Southeast Asia.

Chemical Warfare during the Vietnam War documents the use of antipersonnel chemical weapons throughout the Vietnam War, and explores their effectiveness under the wide variety of circumstances in which they were employed. The short, readable account follows the US program as it progressed from a focus on the humanitarian aspects of non-lethal weapons to their use as a means of augmenting and enhancing the lethality of traditional munitions. It also presents the efforts of the North Vietnamese to both counter US chemical operations and to develop a chemical capability of their own. Chemical Warfare during the Vietnam War is a comprehensive and thoroughly fascinating examination of riot-control agents during the Vietnam War.

** 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.

More than thirty years later, the Vietnam War still stands as one of the most controversial events in the history of the United States, and historians have so far failed to come up with a definitive narrative of the wartime experience. With competing viewpoints already in play, Mark Moyara (TM)s recent revisionist approach in Triumph Forsaken has created heated debate over who "owns" the history of Americaa (TM)s war in Vietnam.

Triumph Revisited: Historians Battle for the Vietnam War collects critiques of Triumph Forsaken from both sides of this debate, written by an array of Vietnam scholars, cataloguing arguments about how the war should be remembered, how history may be reconstructed, and by whom. A lively introduction and conclusion by editors Andrew Wiest and Michael Doidge provide context and balance to the essays, as well as Moyara (TM)s responses, giving students and scholars of the Vietnam era a glimpse into how history is constructed and reconstructed.

More than thirty years later, the Vietnam War still stands as one of the most controversial events in the history of the United States, and historians have so far failed to come up with a definitive narrative of the wartime experience. With competing viewpoints already in play, Mark Moyar 's recent revisionist approach in Triumph Forsaken has created heated debate over who "owns" the history of America 's war in Vietnam.

Triumph Revisited: Historians Battle for the Vietnam War collects critiques of Triumph Forsaken from both sides of this debate, written by an array of Vietnam scholars, cataloguing arguments about how the war should be remembered, how history may be reconstructed, and by whom. A lively introduction and conclusion by editors Andrew Wiest and Michael Doidge provide context and balance to the essays, as well as Moyar 's responses, giving students and scholars of the Vietnam era a glimpse into how history is constructed and reconstructed.

This book describes and explains Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore's attitudes and policies regarding the Vietnam War. While it is generally known that all three countries supported the US war effort in Vietnam, it reveals the motivations behind the decisions of the decision makers, the twists and turns and the nuances in the attitudes of Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore following the development of the war from the 1950s through to its end in 1975. Although the principal focus is the three supposedly non-aligned countries - Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore, the perspectives of Thailand and the Philippines - the two Southeast Asian countries which were formally allied with the United States - are discussed at the appropriate junctures. It makes an original contribution to the gradually growing literature on the international history of the Vietnam War and furthers our knowledge of the diplomatic history of Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore in the early independent years, 1945/1949, 1957 and 1965 respectively, which coincided with early years of the Cold War in Southeast Asia.

The first book to give equal weight to the Vietnamese and American sides of the Vietnam war.

This book is a unique source of information about U.S. troop involvement in South Vietnam from 1965 to 1972. It stresses that Vietnam was a war without fronts or battle lines-a war different from any that the United States had previously fought.

T his BOOK EXAMINES the world confronted by the men of an American combat division during the Vietnam War. Although the unit in question is the 25th Infantry Division, this is not a unit history or standard military chronology. Instead, I try to view all of the major parts of the soldiers' world-including subjects as diverse as climate, living conditions, deadly combat, and morale. The world inhabited by the soldiers of the 25th Division was not theirs alone; the men and women who served with other frontline units in Vietnam will immediately recognize the major landmarks. Using the 25th Division as a focal point, I hope to help the people of today better understand what the Vietnam War was like in fact, not fiction. This work is based on a variety of sources. The documentary foundations come from a great number of 25th Division records generated during the war; the most important of which are the large quarterly Division reports. They, in turn, are complemented by the quarterly reports that came from II Field Force, Vietnam, the Army headquarters for the units operating in the provinces near Saigon. The Center of Military History, Department of the Army, provided these documents to me while I was doing research on the village war in a Vietnamese province. I used this research to write The Dynamics of Defeat: The Vietnam War in Hau Nghia Province (Westview Press, 1991), which deals with the political and military struggle waged by both sides in an important part of the 25th Division's area of operations.

By the Tet Offensive in early 1968, what had been widely heralded as the best qualified, best-trained army in US history was descending into crisis as the Vietnam War raged without end. Morale was tanking. AWOL rates were rising. And in August of that year, a group of Black soldiers seized control of the infamous Long Binh Jail, burned buildings, and beat a white inmate to death with a shovel. The days of "same mud, same blood" were over, and by the end of the decade, a new generation of Black GIs had decisively rejected the slights and institutional racism their forefathers had endured. Acclaimed military historian Beth Bailey shows how the Army experienced, defined, and tried to solve racism and racial tension (in its own words, "the problem of race") in the Vietnam War era. Some individuals were sympathetic to the problem but offered solutions that were more performative than transformational, while others proposed remedies that were antithetical to the army's fundamental principles of discipline, order, hierarchy, and authority. Bailey traces a frustrating yet fascinating arc where the army initially rushed to create solutions without taking the time to fully identify the origins, causes, and proliferation of racial tension. It was a difficult, messy process, but only after Army leaders ceased viewing the issue as a Black issue and accepted their own roles in contributing to the problem did change become possible.

There is an important debate raging about whether Iraq is becoming another Vietnam. Those who deny the similarities most vociferously are often those who know (or remember) the least about Vietnam. Kenneth Campbell knows Vietnam from his thirteen months of fighting there (he received a Purple Heart), and years of political organizing to get the United States out of the war. Here, Campbell lays out the political process of getting into, sinking deeper, hitting bottom, and finally pulling out of the Vietnam quagmire. He traces the chief lessons of Vietnam, which helped the United States successfully avoid quagmires for thirty years, and explains how neoconservatives within the Bush administration cynically used the tragedy of 9/11 to override the "Vietnam syndrome" and drag the nation into a new quagmire in Iraq. In view of where the United States finds itself today-unable to stay but unable to leave-Campbell recommends that the country rededicate itself to the essential lessons of Vietnam: the danger of imperial arrogance, the limits of military force, the importance of international and constitutional law, and the power of morality.

There is an important debate raging about whether Iraq is becoming another Vietnam. Those who deny the similarities most vociferously are often those who know (or remember) the least about Vietnam. Kenneth Campbell knows Vietnam from his thirteen months of fighting there (he received a Purple Heart), and years of political organizing to get the United States out of the war. Here, Campbell lays out the political process of getting into, sinking deeper, hitting bottom, and finally pulling out of the Vietnam quagmire. He traces the chief lessons of Vietnam, which helped the United States successfully avoid quagmires for thirty years, and explains how neoconservatives within the Bush administration cynically used the tragedy of 9/11 to override the "Vietnam syndrome" and drag the nation into a new quagmire in Iraq. In view of where the United States finds itself today-unable to stay but unable to leave-Campbell recommends that the country rededicate itself to the essential lessons of Vietnam: the danger of imperial arrogance, the limits of military force, the importance of international and constitutional law, and the power of morality.

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.