In a new and updated second edition, this book--first published in 1983--provides a detailed review of the end of the Vietnam War. Drawing on the author's eyewitness reporting and extensive research, the book relies on carefully reported facts, not partisan myths, to reconstruct the war's last years and harrowing final months. The catastrophic suffering those events brought to ordinary Vietnamese civilians and soldiers is vividly portrayed. The largely unremembered wars in Cambodia and Laos are examined as well, while new material in an updated final chapter points out troubling parallels between the Vietnam War and America's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In February 1968, the U.S. Army's 82nd Airborne Division was understrength, with only enough paratroopers to deploy a single brigade. The 3rd Brigade was flown 9000 miles to reinforce American units fighting the North Vietnamese Army around Hue--received a Valorous Unit Award for their actions there. James Dorn was on Brigade staff. He later led a rifle platoon with the 3rd in the rice paddies west of Saigon. In his second year with the 173rd Airborne Brigade in the Central Highlands. he again led a platoon until promoted to captain. His frank and detailed memoir recounts their diverse combat missions, inhumanity for civilians and the day-to-day life of Infantrymen in the field.

***SOON TO BE A MAJOR HOLLYWOOD FILM*** 'This is aerial drama at its best. Fast, powerful, and moving.' Erik Larson Devotion tells the gripping story of the US Navy's most famous aviator duo - Tom Hudner, a white New Englander, and Jesse Brown, a black sharecropper's son from Mississippi. Against all odds, Jesse beat back racism to become the Navy's first black aviator. Against all expectations, Tom passed up Harvard to fly fighter planes for his country. While much of America remained divided by segregation, the two became wingmen in Fighter Squadron 32 and went on to fight side-by-side in the Korean War. Adam Makos follows Tom and Jesse's dramatic journey to the war's climatic battle at the Chosin Reservoir, where they fought to save an entire division of trapped Marines. It was here that one of them was faced with an unthinkable choice - and discovered how far they would go to save a friend.

Reuel Long's experiences as an MD in the emergency rooms of Flint, Michigan prepared him for only some of what he would see in a mobile army surgical hospital. Antiwar sentiment among the doctors in basic training at Fort Sam Houston set the tone for his tour as a general medical officer. In March 1971, the 27th MASH played a critical role treating survivors of the deadliest attack on any firebase during the Vietnam War. Long's vivid memoir recalls the casualties he cared for during the war, including one he crossed paths with 44 years later-who in his own words describes his rehabilitation from the loss of his legs and his protesting the war from a wheelchair. An addendum gives an insider's account of the U.S. military's initial failure to remedy a fatal design flaw in the M16 rifle, which caused an unknown number of American casualties.

In the summer of 1969, as the Vietnam War was being turned over to the South Vietnamese, Lieutenant John Raschke arrived in Chuong Thien Province deep in the Mekong Delta, eager to have a positive impact. Recounting his assignment to a provincial advisory team of military and civilian personnel, this memoir depicts the ordinary and the extraordinary of life both inside and outside the wire--mortar attacks, firefights and snipers, hot showers, good meals and comradery, the life and death struggles of the Vietnamese people and the bonds he formed with them.

On his second tour in Vietnam, U.S. Army Captain John Haseman served 18 months as a combat advisor in the Mekong Delta's Kien Hoa Province. His detailed memoir gives one of the few accounts of a district-level advisor's experiences at the "point of the spear." Often the only American going into combat with his South Vietnamese counterparts, Haseman highlights the importance of trust and confidence between advisors and their units and the courage of the men he fought with during the 1972 North Vietnamese summer offensive. Among the last advisors to leave the field, Haseman describes the challenges of supporting his counterparts with fewer and fewer resources, and the emotional conclusion of an advisory mission near the end of the Vietnam War.

Steven Grzesik's counter-culture experience in Greenwich Village ended with a bad acid trip followed by a draft notice. The Vietnam War, then at its height, seemed doomed to failure by cynical politicians and a skeptical public, a prediction he weighed against his sense of duty to himself and to his country. Through a variety of combat duties--with the infantry, the 36th Engineer Battalion, F Co. 75th Rangers and the 174th Assault Helicopter Co.--and several close calls with death, Grzesik's detailed memoir recounts his two tours in-country, where he hoped merely to survive with a semblance of heroism, yet ultimately redefined himself.

This book examines the United States neoconservative movement, arguing that its support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq was rooted in an intelligence theory shaped by the policy struggles of the Cold War. The origins of neoconservative engagement with intelligence theory are traced to a tradition of labour anti-communism that emerged in the early 20th century and subsequently provided the Central Intelligence Agency with key allies in the state-private networks of the Cold War era. Reflecting on the break-up of Cold War liberalism and the challenge to state-private networks in the 1970s, the book maps the neoconservative response that influenced developments in United States intelligence policy, counterintelligence and covert action. With the labour roots of neoconservatism widely acknowledged but rarely systematically pursued, this new approach deploys the neoconservative literature of intelligence as evidence of a tradition rooted in the labour anti-communist self-image as allies rather than agents of the American state. This book will be of great interest to all students of intelligence studies, Cold War history, United States foreign policy and international relations.

By the time of the Vietnam War, the U.S. military had transitioned to jet aircraft. Yet leaders soon learned prop-driven planes could still play a role in counterinsurgency warfare. World War II-era Douglas B-26 light bombers proved effective in close air support and interdiction, beginning with Operation Farm Gate in 1961. Forty B-26s were remanufactured as improved A-26 attack aircraft, which destroyed hundreds of North Vietnamese supply vehicles on the Ho Chi Minh Trail in 1966-1969. The personal recollections of 37 pilots, navigators, maintenance and armament personnel, and family members, tell the harrowing story of B-26 and A-26 Air Commando Wing combat operations in Vietnam and Laos.

The conventional narrative of the Vietnam War often glosses over the decade leading up to it. Covering the years 1954-1963, this book presents a thought-provoking reexamination of the war's long prelude--from the aftermath of French defeat at Dien Bien Phu--through Hanoi's decision to begin reunification by force--to the assassination of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem. Established narratives of key events are given critical reappraisal and new light is shed on neglected factors. The strategic importance of Laos is revealed as central to understanding how the war in the South developed.

In 1950, just five years after the end of World War II, Britain and America again went to war--this time to try and combat the spread of communism in East Asia following the invasion of South Korea by communist forces from the North. This book charts the course of the UK-US 'special relationship' from the journey to war beginning in 1947 to the fall of the Labour government in 1951. Ian McLaine casts fresh light on relations between Truman and Attlee and their officials, diplomats and advisors, including Acheson and MacArthur. He shows how Britain was persuaded to join a war it could ill afford and was forced to rearm at great cost to the economy. The decision to participate in the war caused great strain to the Labour party--provoking the Bevan-Gaitskell split which was to keep the party out of office for the next decade. McLaine's revisionist study shows how disastrous the war was for the British--and for the Labour party in particular. It sheds important new light on UK-US relations during a key era in diplomatic and Cold War history.

The first account of the new Taliban-showing who they are, what they want, and how they differ from their predecessors Since the fall of Kabul in 2021, the Taliban have effective control of Afghanistan-a scenario few Western commentators anticipated. But after a twenty-year-long bitter war against the Republic of Afghanistan, reestablishing control is a complex procedure. What is the Taliban's strategy now that they've returned to power? In this groundbreaking new account, Hassan Abbas examines the resurgent Taliban as ruptures between moderates and the hardliners in power continue to widen. The group is now facing debilitating threats-from humanitarian crises to the Islamic State in Khorasan-but also engaging on the world stage, particularly with China and central Asian states. Making considered use of sources and contacts in the region, and offering profiles of major Taliban leaders, Return of the Taliban is the essential account of the movement as it develops and consolidates its grasp on Afghanistan.

"Remarkable. . . . A gift from a heroine who was killed at twenty-seven but whose voice has survived to remind us of the humanity and decency that endure amid--and despite--the horror and chaos of war."
--Francine Prose, O, "The Oprah Magazine"
Brutally honest and rich in detail, this posthumously published diary of a twenty-seven-year-old Vietcong woman doctor, saved from destruction by an American soldier, gives us fresh insight into the lives of those fighting on the other side of the Vietnam War. It is a story of the struggle for one's ideals amid the despair and grief of war, but most of all, it is a story of hope in the most dire circumstances.
"As much a drama of feelings as a drama of war."
--Seth Mydans, "New York Times"
"A book to be read by and included in any course on the literature of the war. . . . A major contribution."
--"Chicago Tribune"
"An illuminating picture of what life was like among the enemy guerrillas, especially in the medical community."
--The VVA Veteran, official publication of Vietnam Veterans of America

At "zero dark thirty" on January 30, 1971, units of the U.S. Fifth Mechanized Division left their firebases along the DMZ heading west along Provincial Route 9. The mission, called Dewey Canyon II, was to reopen the road from Khe Sahn Air Base to the Laotian border, in support of a South Vietnamese invasion of Laos (doomed from the start) to cut off the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Alpha Company of U.S. 61st Infantry performed commendably in keeping Route 9 open, with just one casualty killed by friendly fire. They returned to Firebase Charlie-2 in April, exhausted but hopeful--the Fifth would be leaving Vietnam in July. They patrolled the "western hills" through May as rocket attacks fell each evening. On the 21st, a direct hit on a bunker killed 30 of the 63 men inside--18 were from Alpha Co. This is their story, as told to Specialist Lou Pepi by members of his unit.

Admiral William H. McRaven is a part of American military history, having been involved in some of the most famous missions in recent memory, including the capture of Saddam Hussein, the rescue of Captain Richard Phillips, and the raid to kill Osama bin Laden.Sea Stories begins in 1960 at the American Officers' Club in France, where Allied officers and their wives gathered to have drinks and tell stories about their adventures during World War II -- the place where a young Bill McRaven learned the value of a good story. Sea Stories is an unforgettable look back on one man's incredible life, from childhood days sneaking into high-security military sites to a day job of hunting terrorists and rescuing hostages.Action-packed, inspiring, and full of thrilling stories from life in the special operations world, Sea Stories is a remarkable memoir from one of America's most accomplished leaders.

In 1968, Theodore Hammett stepped forward for a war he believed was wrong, pressured by his father's threat to disown him if he withdrew from a Marine Corps officer candidate program. He hated the Vietnam War and soon grew to hate Vietnam and its people. As a supply officer at a field hospital uncomfortably near the DMZ, he employed thievery, bargaining and lies to secure supplies for his unit and retained his sanity with the help of alcohol, music and the promise of going home. In 2008, he returned to Vietnam for a five-year "second tour" to assist in improving HIV/AIDS policies and prevention programs in Hanoi. His memoir recounts his service at the height of the war, and how the country he detested became his second home.

In 1966, Dr. Richard Carlson was just two years out of medical school and in his mid-20s. He was about to embark on a year-long tour in Vietnam to treat the many forgotten victims of the war: the civilians. During medical school he was introduced to the Los Angeles County General Hospital, the huge institution that provided medical care for LA's socially and medically deprived. Dedicated to the underserved, when drafted he applied to work in a Vietnamese civilian hospital. His tenure at the LA county hospital was the best training for what he'd experience in Vietnam. His arrival coincided with a bloody escalation of the conflict. But like many Americans, he believed South Vietnam desired a democratic future and that the U.S. was helping to achieve that goal. Armed with both his medical bag and a typewriter, Dr. Carlson diligently chronicled his efforts to save lives in the Mekong delta province of Bac Lieu. The result is a vivid recollection, detailing the inspiring stories of the AMA volunteer doctors, USAID nurses and corpsmen that he worked alongside to treat the local citizens, many of whom were Viet Cong. He gives a glimpse of the emerging understanding of post-traumatic stress disorder and his team's development of a pioneering family planning clinic. Featuring more than 80 photographs, this book relates the fighting of both exotic and common diseases and the competition among civilians for medical services. The medical facilities and equipment were primitive, and the doctors' efforts were often hampered by folk remedies and superstition.

'Soft' Counterinsurgency reviews the promise and actual achievement of Human Terrain Teams, the small groups of social scientists that were eventually embedded in every combat brigade in Iraq and Afghanistan. The book, based on interviews with both HTT personnel and their military commanders, examines the military's need for sociocultural information, the ethical issues surrounding research carried out in combat zones, and the tensions between military and social science organizational cultures. The account provides a close, detailed account of HTT activities, a critical reflection on the possibilities of creating a 'softer, ' less violent counterinsurgency, and the difficulty of attempting to make war more 'intelligent' and discriminating.

During the Vietnam War, the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam Studies and Observations Group (MACVSOG) was a highly-classified, U.S. joint-service organization that consisted of personnel from Army Special Forces, the Air Force, Navy SEALs, Marine Corps Force Reconnaissance units, and the CIA. This secret organization was committed to action in Southeast Asia even before the major build-up of U.S. forces in 1965 and also fielded a division-sized element of South Vietnamese military personnel, indigenous Montagnards, ethnic Chinese Nungs, and Taiwanese pilots in its varied reconnaissance, naval, air, and agent operations. MACVSOG was without doubt the most unique U.S. unit to participate in the Vietnam War, since its operational mandate authorized its missions to take place "over the fence" in North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, where most other American units were forbidden to go. During its nine-year existence it managed to participate in most of the significant operations and incidents of the conflict. MACVSOG was there during the Gulf of Tonkin incidents, during air operations over North Vietnam, the Tet Offensive, the secret bombing of and ground incursion into Cambodia, Operation Lam Son 719, the Green Beret murder case, the Easter Invasion, the Phoenix Program, and the Son Tay POW Raid. The story of this extraordinary unit has never before been told in full and comes as a timely blueprint for combined-arms, multi-national unconventional warfare in the post-9/11 age. Unlike previous works on the subject, Black Ops, Vietnam is a complete chronological history of the unit drawn from declassified documents, memoirs, and previous works on the subject, which tended to focus only on particular aspects of the unit's operations.

United States involvement in the Vietnam War was one of the most important events in the post-World War II period. The political, social and military consequences of US involvement and defeat in Vietnam have been keenly felt within the US and the international community, and the 'lessons' learned have continued to exert an influence to the present day. This book focuses on the effects of US propaganda on America's Western allies - particularly France, West Germany and Great Britain - from the time when the Vietnam War began to escalate in February 1965, to the American withdrawal and its immediate aftermath. One of its main aims is to assess the amount and veracity of information passed on by the US administration to allied governments and to compare this with the level of public information on the war within those countries.

A Times Political Book of the Year 2022 A powerful and revelatory eyewitness account of the American collapse in Afghanistan, its desperate endgame, and the war's echoing legacy. Elliot Ackerman left the American military ten years ago, but his time in Afghanistan and Iraq with the Marines and, later, as a CIA paramilitary officer marked him indelibly. When the Taliban began to close in on Kabul in August of 2021 and the Afghan regime began its death spiral, he found himself pulled back into the conflict. The official evacuation process was a bureaucratic failure that led to a humanitarian catastrophe. Ackerman was drawn into an impromptu effort to arrange flights and negotiate with both Taliban and American forces to secure the safe evacuation of hundreds. These were desperate measures taken during a desperate end to America's longest war, but the success they achieved afforded a degree of redemption: and, for Ackerman, a chance to reconcile his past with his present. The Fifth Act is an astonishing human document that brings the weight of twenty years of war to bear on a single week at its bitter end. Using the dramatic rescue efforts in Kabul as his lattice, Ackerman weaves in a personal history of the war's long progress, beginning with the initial invasion in the months after 9/11. It is a play in five acts with a tragic denouement. Any reader who wants to understand what went wrong with the war's trajectory will find a trenchant accounting here. And yet The Fifth Act is not an exercise in finger-pointing: it brings readers into close contact with a remarkable group of characters, who fought the war with courage and dedication, in good faith and at great personal cost. Understanding combatants' experiences and sacrifices demands reservoirs of wisdom and the gifts of an extraordinary storyteller. In Elliot Ackerman, this story has found that author.The Fifth Act is a first draft of history that feels like a timeless classic.

What happens when a career Marine officer stops believing in the doctrine of the Corps and the official pretexts for war? In 2006, Winston Tierney deployed to Iraq's Anbar Province with the Fourth Reconnaissance Battalion, excited and proud to serve his country in the fight against international terrorism. After several trips to Iraq over the next nine years he returned depleted by hatred, mendacity, alcohol abuse and PTSD, he felt he had "seen behind the curtain"-and didn't like what he saw. This hard-hitting memoir depicts the brutal realities of the conflict in Iraq at street level, while giving a clear-eyed treatise on the immorality of war and the catastrophe of America's failures in the Middle East.

For Southeast Asia, the Vietnam War altered forever the history, topography, people, economy, and politics of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), the Republic of Vietnam (RVN), Cambodia, and Laos. That the war was controversial is an understatement as is the notion that the war can be understood from any one perspective. One way of understanding the Vietnam War is by marking its time with turning points, both major and minor, that involved events or decisions that helped to influence its course in the years to follow. By examining a few of these turning points, an organizational framework takes shape that makes understanding the war more possible. Historical Dictionary of the War in Vietnam emphasizes the international nature of the war, as well as provide a greater understanding of the long scope of the conflict. The major events associated with the war will serve as the foundation of the book while additional entries will explore the military, diplomatic, political, social, and cultural events that made the war unique. While military subjects will be fully explored, there will be greater attention to other aspects of the war. All of this is done through a chronology, an introductory essay, an extensive bibliography, and over 600 cross-referenced dictionary entries. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the Vietnam War.

This book analyses the problematique of governance and administration of cultural diversity within the modern state of Afghanistan and traces patterns of national integration. It explores state construction in twentieth-century Afghanistan and Afghan nationalism, and explains the shifts in the state's policies and societal responses to different forms of governance of cultural diversity. The book problematizes liberalism, communitarianism, and multiculturalism as approaches to governance of diversity within the nation-state. It suggests that while the western models of multiculturalism have recognized the need to accommodate different cultures, they failed to engage with them through intercultural dialogue. It also elaborates the challenge of intra-group diversity and the problem of accommodating individual choice and freedom while recognising group rights and adoption of multiculturalism. The book develops an alternative approach through synthesising critical multiculturalism and interculturalism as a framework on a democratic and inclusive approach to governance of diversity. A major intervention in understanding a war-torn country through an insider account, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of politics and international relations, especially those concerned with multiculturalism, state-building, nationalism, and liberalism, as well as those in cultural studies, history, Afghanistan studies, South Asian studies, Middle East studies, minority studies, and to policymakers.