Ron Kovic went to Vietnam dreaming of being an American hero. What he found there changed him profoundly, even before the severe battlefield injury that left him paralysed from the waist down. He returned to an America indifferent to the realities of war and the fate of those who fought for their country. From his wheelchair he became one of the most visible and outspoken opponents of the Vietnam War. Born on the Fourth of July is a journey of self-discovery, a reckoning with the horrors of an unjust war, a testament to courage and a call to protest. A modern classic of anti-war writing, it inspired an Oscar-winning film, sold over one million copies and remains as powerful and relevant today as when it was first published.

In the early 1990s, false reports of Iraqi soldiers in Kuwait allowing premature infants to die by removing them from their incubators helped to justify the Persian Gulf War, just as spurious reports of weapons of mass destruction later undergirded support for the Iraq War in 2003. In The Discourse of Propaganda, John Oddo examines these and other such cases to show how successful wartime propaganda functions as a discursive process. Oddo argues that propaganda is more than just misleading rhetoric generated by one person or group; it is an elaborate process that relies on recontextualization, ideally on a massive scale, to keep it alive and effective. In a series of case studies, he analyzes both textual and visual rhetoric as well as the social and material conditions that allow them to circulate, tracing how instances of propaganda are constructed, performed, and repeated in diverse contexts, such as speeches, news reports, and popular, everyday discourse. By revealing the agents, (inter)texts, and cultural practices involved in propaganda campaigns, The Discourse of Propaganda shines much-needed light on the topic and challenges its readers to consider the complicated processes that allow propaganda to flourish. This book will appeal not only to scholars of rhetoric and propaganda but also to those interested in unfolding the machinations motivating America's recent military interventions.

The wars since 9/11, both in Iraq and Afghanistan, have generated frustration and an increasing sense of failure in the West. Much of the blame has been attributed to poor strategy. In both the United States and the United Kingdom, public enquiries and defence think tanks have detected a lack of consistent direction, of effective communication, and of governmental coordination. In this important book, Sir Hew Strachan, one of the world's leading military historians, reveals how these failures resulted from a fundamental misreading and misapplication of strategy itself. He argues that the wars since 2001 have not in reality been as 'new' as has been widely assumed and that we need to adopt a more historical approach to contemporary strategy in order to identify what is really changing in how we wage war. If war is to fulfil the aims of policy, then we need first to understand war.

Each pilot and bombardier/navigator sat side by side in an all-weather jet built for low-level bombing runs, precision targeting, and night strikes. Their success--and their very lives--depended on teamwork in flying their versatile A-6 Intruders. And when the North Vietnamese mounted a major offensive in 1972, they answered the call.

Carol Reardon chronicles the operations of Attack Squadron 75, the "Sunday Punchers," and their high-risk bombing runs launched off the U.S.S. Saratoga during the famous LINEBACKER campaigns. Based on unparalleled access to crew members and their families, her book blends military and social history to offer a unique look at the air war in Southeast Asia, as well as a moving testament to the close-knit world of naval aviators.

Theirs was one of the toughest jobs in the military: launching off the carrier in rough seas as well as calm, flying solo and in formation, dodging dense flak and surface-to-air missiles, delivering ordnance on target, and recovering aboard safely. Celebrating the men who climbed into the cockpits as well as those who kept them flying, Reardon takes readers inside the squadron's ready room and onto the flight decks to await the call, "Launch the Intruders " Readers share the adrenaline-pumping excitement of each mission--as well as those heart-stopping moments when a downed aircraft brought home to all, in flight and on board, that every aspect of their lives was constantly shadowed by danger and potential death.

More than a mere combat narrative, Launch the Intruders interweaves human drama with familial concerns, domestic politics, and international diplomacy. Fliers share personal feelings about killing strangers from a distance while navy wives tell what it's like to feel like a stranger at home. And as the war rages on, headlines like Jane Fonda's visit to Hanoi and the Paris Peace Accords are all viewed through the lens of this heavily tasked, hard-hitting attack squadron.

A rousing tale of men and machines, of stoic determination in the face of daunting odds, Reardon's tale shines a much-deserved light on group of men whose daring exploits richly deserve to be much better known.

This book provides an overview of NATO and other Allied air power in the lengthy campaign to secure democracy in Afghanistan and destroy Taliban and other Islamic extremist terror forces in the combat zone. It contains a mix of explanatory text, diagrams and stunning action colour photography. Tim Ripley has had access to all NATO air bases in the area and brings an unprecedented degree of detail and accuracy to the book.

Despite tremendous sentiment against the American-led occupations, citizens and soldiers continue to die. Award-winning journalist Jamail shows a new generation of American soldiers taking opposition into its own hands. As one of the few unembedded journalists in Iraq, he investigates the growing anti-war resistance of GIs embodied in organisations such as Iraq Veterans Against the War. Gathering stories from these courageous men and women, Jamail makes explicit the betrayal committed by politicians.

The almost universally accepted explanation for the Iraq War is very clear and consistent - the US decision to attack Saddam Hussein's regime on March 19, 2003 was a product of the ideological agenda, misguided priorities, intentional deceptions and grand strategies of President George W. Bush and prominent 'neoconservatives' and 'unilateralists' on his national security team. Despite the widespread appeal of this version of history, Frank P. Harvey argues that it remains an unsubstantiated assertion and an underdeveloped argument without a logical foundation. His book aims to provide a historically grounded account of the events and strategies which pushed the US-UK coalition towards war. The analysis is based on both factual and counterfactual evidence, combines causal mechanisms derived from multiple levels of analysis and ultimately confirms the role of path dependence and momentum as a much stronger explanation for the sequence of decisions that led to war.

'Reporter is just wonderful. Truly a great life, and what shines out of the book, amid the low cunning and tireless legwork, is Hersh's warmth and humanity. Essential reading for every journalist and aspiring journalist the world over' John le Carre In the early 1950s, teenage Seymour Hersh was finishing high school and university - while running the family's struggling dry cleaning store in a Southside Chicago ghetto. Today, he is one of America's premier investigative journalists, whose fearless reporting has earned him fame, front-page bylines in virtually every newspaper in the world, a staggering collection of awards, and no small amount of controversy. Reporter is the story of how he did it. It is a story of slog, ingenuity and defiance, following Hersh from his first job as a crime reporter for the Chicago City News Bureau, through his Pulitzer Prize-winning freelance investigative exposes, to the heights of his reporting for The New York Times and the New Yorker. It is a tale of night-time encounters with great Civil Rights leaders, unauthorised meetings with Pentagon officials, raucous dinners with Canadian soldiers in Hanoi, tense phone calls with Secretaries of State, desperate to save face; of exposing myriad military and political wrongdoing, from My Lai to Watergate to Abu Ghraib, and the cynical cover-ups that followed in Washington and New York. Here too are unforgettable encounters with some of the most formidable figures from recent decades, from Saul Bellow to Martin Luther King Jr., from Henry Kissinger to Bashar al-Assad. Ultimately, in unfurling Seymour Hersh's life and career, Reporter tells a story of twentieth-century America, in all its excitement and darkness.

This work is a cultural history of the Vietnam War and its continuing impact upon contemporary American society. The author presents an investigation of how myths about the war evolved and why people depend on them to answer the confusing questions that have become the legacy of the war. Memories change and reconstruct the past, and in this text, the author argues that the American memory of Vietnam has left fact and experience behind so that what remains is myth and denial.

Professor Havens analyzes the efforts of Japanese antiwar organizations to portray the war as much more than a fire across the sea" and to create new forms of activism in a country where individuals have traditionally left public issues to the authorities. This path-breaking study examines not only the methods of the protesters but the tightrope dance performed by Japanese officials forced to balance outspoken antiwar sentiment with treaty obligations to the U.S. Originally published in 1987. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

This searching analysis of what has been called America's longest war" was commissioned by the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations to achieve an improved understanding of American participation in the conflict. Part I begins with Truman's decision at the end of World War II to accept French reoccupation of Indochina, rather than to seek the international trusteeship favored earlier by Roosevelt. It then discusses U.S. support of the French role and U.S. determination to curtail Communist expansion in Asia. Originally published in 1986. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

This concluding volume of The Vietnam War and International Law focuses on the last stages of America's combat role in Indochina. The articles in the first section deal with general aspects of the relationship of international law to the Indochina War. Sections II and III are concerned with the adequacy of the laws of war under modern conditions of combat, and with related questions of individual responsibility for the violation of such laws. Section IV deals with some of the procedural issues related to the negotiated settlement of the war. The materials in Section V seek to reappraise the relationship between the constitutional structure of the United States and the way in which the war was conducted, while the final section presents the major documents pertaining to the end of American combat involvement in Indochina. A supplement takes account of the surrender of South Vietnam in spring 1975. Contributors to the volume--lawyers, scholars, and government officials--include Dean Rusk, Eugene V. Rostow, Richard A. Falk, John Norton Moore, and Richard Wasserstrom. Originally published in 1976. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

For more than a decade, the United States has been fighting wars so far from the public eye as to risk being forgotten, the struggles and sacrifices of its volunteer soldiers almost ignored. Photographer and writer Ashley Gilbertson has been working to prevent that. His dramatic photographs of the Iraq war for the New York Times and his book Whiskey Tango Foxtrot took readers into the mayhem of Baghdad, Ramadi, Samarra, and Fallujah. But with Bedrooms of the Fallen, Gilbertson reminds us that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have also reached deep into homes far from the noise of battle, down quiet streets and country roads-the homes of family and friends who bear their grief out of view. The book's wide-format black-and-white images depict the bedrooms of forty fallen soldiers-the equivalent of a single platoon-from the United States, Canada, and several European nations. Left intact by families of the deceased, the bedrooms are a heartbreaking reminder of lives cut short: we see high school diplomas and pictures from prom, sports medals and souvenirs, and markers of the idealism that carried them to war, like images of the Twin Towers and Osama Bin Laden. A moving essay by Gilbertson describes his encounters with the families who preserve these private memorials to their loved ones and shares what he has learned from them about war and loss. Bedrooms of the Fallen is a masterpiece of documentary photography and an unforgettable reckoning with the human cost of war.