#1 New Release in Military & Wars Follow the Coming of Age Adventures of a U.S. Military Brat During the Early Vietnam War Years in Saigon.The early Vietnam war years through the eyes of a U.S. military brat: In May of 1962, Naval Chief Petty Officer Bryant Arbuckle flew to Saigon to establish a new Armed Forces radio station. Next to follow were his wife and three boys, Leslie among them. Saigon Kids is the candid, recondite slice of fourteen-year-old military brat Les Arbuckle's experience at the American Community School (ACS) during the critical months of the Vietnam War when events would, quite literally, ignite in downtown Saigon. In 1963, Saigon was beautiful, violent, and dirty and the most exciting place a fourteen-year-old American boy could live. Saigon offered a rich array of activities, and much to the consternation of their parents and teachers, Les and his fellow military brats explored the dangers with reckless abandon running from machine gun fire, watching a Buddhist monk burn to death, visiting brothels late at night or, trading currency on the black market. Coming of age in the streets of Vietnam War torn Saigon: When Les first arrives in Vietnam, he is a stranger in a strange land, expecting boredom in a country he doesn't know. But the American social scene is more vibrant than he expected. The American Community School is a blend of kids from all over the globe who arrived in Saigon as the fuse on Saigon was about to ignite. As the ACS students continue their American lifestyle behind barbed wire, Saigon unravels in chaos and destruction. In spite of this ugliness an ever-present feature of everyday life Les tells his story of teenage angst with humor and precocity. Coming of age tale with a twist: The events leading up to the Vietnam War provide an unusual backdrop for this coming-of-age tale with a twist. Saigon Kids will also make a perfect companion to the documentary film (sponsored by the New York Foundation for the Arts) currently in production. The film chronicles the lives of "military brats" living in Saigon in the volatile years from 1958 to 1964.

Comic books have presented fictional and fact-based stories of the Korean War, as it was being fought and afterward. Comparing these comics with events that inspired them offers a deeper understanding of the comics industry, America's "forgotten war," and the anti-comics movement, championed by psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, who criticized their brutalization of the imagination. Comics--both newsstand offerings and government propaganda--used fictions to justify the unpopular war as necessary and moral. This book examines the dramatization of events and issues, including the war's origins, germ warfare, brainwashing, Cold War espionage, the nuclear threat, African Americans in the military, mistreatment of POWs, and atrocities.

This book picks up where Passing Time: A Vietnam Veteran Against the War left off, and completes the trilogy begun with Vietnam-Perkasie: A Combat Marine Memoir. It begins with the Coast Guard raid on Ehrhart's oil tanker and ends with the conclusion of his trial for possession of "controlled substances," a span of time that corresponds almost exactly with the opening of the House Judiciary Committee's hearings on the impeachment of Richard Nixon and Nixon's resignation and pardon by Gerald Ford. Along the way, Ehrhart encounters a wise and sympathetic lawyer, an MG Midget, a local New Jersey cop who thinks he's Wyatt Earp, New York City detectives who arrest him for armed robbery of a liquor store, a forklift that can turn on a dime, a Coast Guard prosecutor who wants to teach Ehrhart a lesson, the Carranza Memorial, and three ghosts who are as real as you and me.

In recent years questions of ethical responsibility and justice in war have become increasingly significant in international relations. This focus has been precipitated by United States (U.S.) led invasions in Afghanistan and Iraq. In turn, Western conceptions of ethical responsibility have been largely informed by human rights based understandings of morality. This book directly addresses the question of what it means to act ethically in times of war by drawing upon first-hand accounts of U.S. war fighting in Iraq during the 2003 invasion and occupation. The book focuses upon the prominent rights based justification of war of Michael Walzer. Through an in-depth critical reading of Walzer's work, this title demonstrates the broader problems implicit to human rights based justifications of war and elucidates an alternative account of ethical responsibility: ethics as response. Putting forward a compelling case for people to remain troubled and engaged with questions of ethical responsibility in war, this work will be of great interest to students and scholars in a range of areas including international relations theory, ethics and security studies.

Developed specifically for the Vietnam War (and made famous by the 2004 presidential campaign), Swift Boats were versatile craft "big enough to outrun anything they couldn't outfight" but too small to handle even a moderate ocean chop, too loud to sneak up on anyone, and too flimsy to withstand the mildest of rocket attacks. This made more difficult an already tough mission: navigating coastal waters for ships and sampans smuggling contraband to the Viet Cong, disrupting enemy supply lines on the rivers and canals of the Mekong Delta, and inserting SEALs behind enemy lines. The stories in this book cover the Swift Boats' early years, which saw search-and-inspect operations in Vietnam's coastal waters, and their later years, when the Swift Boats' mission shifted to the Mekong Delta's labyrinth of 3,000 miles of rivers, streams, and canals. This is an intimate, exciting oral history of Swift Boats at war in Vietnam.

Running Toward the Guns is an autobiographical story and an accounting of Chanty Jong's personal inner self-healing journey that lead to a successfully unexpected discovery. Jong survived the Cambodian genocide during the Khmer Rouge regime of 1975-1979, witnessing the horrors of the killing fields, torture, starvation and much more. His vivid narrative recounts the suffering under the Khmer Rouge, his perseverance to survive physically and emotionally and his perilous escape to America. His memoir relives the traumatic memories of his experiences and traces his arduous personal transformation toward a life of inner peace through intensive meditation.

This book is a chronicle of the 1975 flight of Vietnamese from their country. It traces the departure from Vietnam and the resettlement of 130,000 of these refugees in the United States and focuses on the process by which Vietnamese went from refugees to immigrants.

Iraq: The Moral Reckoning applies classic just war theory to the U.S. decision to go to war in 2003. That theory, which evolved over several millennia, is a simple, profound tool for evaluating the rightness and wisdom of starting a war. The Bush administration and its supporters referred directly and indirectly to the theory in making a pro-war case to the world. The theory provides three core moral criteria for a just war: sovereign authority, just cause, and right intention (which includes an aim of peace). It adds three practical criteria: proportionality of ends, last resort, and reasonable chance of success. For a just war, each criterion should be substantially met. Since war is destructive and each country is presumed to have the right to live in peace, the evidence in favor of war must be clearly stronger than evidence against it. For each criterion, Iraq: The Moral Reckoning painstakingly weighs Bush administration statements, or those of its supporters, against evidence available at the time. A wide range of viewpoints and evidence is considered, and contrary arguments are refuted. One full chapter is given to neoconservative arguments on just war theory and its application from prominent war supporters. Each criterion, except sovereign authority, is shown not to have been met. The book concludes with a discussion of the implications of an unjust war for the United States and the world. The intensive weighing of each criterion against the facts and the balanced approach make the book unique. By demonstrating a comprehensive application of the theory to one war, it not only sets a new standard for evaluating the 2003 Iraq war, but also shows how present and future wars can be better evaluated in moral and practical terms, based on knowledge available at the time.

The emerging Jewish national consciousness in Europe toward the end of the 19th century claims many spiritual fathers, some of which have been seriously underestimated so far. Zionist intellectuals such as Moses Hess, Leon Pinsker and Isaac Rulf were already committed to the self-liberation of the Jewish people long before Theodor Herzl. Their experiences and observations brought them to believe that the emancipation and integration of Jews were not realistically possible in Europe. Instead, they began to think in national and territorial terms. The author explores the question as to what extent religious messianism influenced the ideas of these men and how this reflects in today's collective Israeli consciousness. In a comprehensive epilogue, Julius H. Schoeps critically correlates ideas of messianic salvation, Zionist pioneer ideals, the settler's movement before and after 1967, and the unsolved conflict between Israelis and Palestinians which has been lasting for over 100 years.

Like many other young men during the Vietnam War, Ed Corlew enlisted in hopes of having some influence regarding assignment-safety and training. Instead he found himself in the dangerous door gunner position and, soon after, the crew chief aboard a CH-47 Chinook, 15 miles from the DMZ in 1967 and 1968. Assigned to the famed 1st Cavalry Division, Corlew was shot down three times: in the Battle of Hue, the Battle of Quang Tri, and the A Shau Valley. This memoir began both as a journal and as counselor-recommended therapy for PTSD. He earned four bronze service stars for his service (an estimated 1000 flying hours) during the war's bloodiest year, enduring enemy mortar and rocket attacks. Engaging, frank, and full of action, Corlew describes his many combat experiences as well as the emotional effects-all through the lens of his Christian faith.

After the swift defeat of the Taliban in 2001, American optimism has steadily evaporated in the face of mounting violence; a new "war of a thousand cuts" has now brought the country to its knees. In the Graveyard of Empires is a political history of Afghanistan in the "Age of Terror" from 2001 to 2009, exploring the fundamental tragedy of America's longest war since Vietnam. After a brief survey of the great empires in Afghanistan-the campaigns of Alexander the Great, the British in the era of Kipling, and the late Soviet Union-Seth G. Jones examines the central question of our own war: how did an insurgency develop? Following the September 11 attacks, the United States successfully overthrew the Taliban regime. It established security throughout the country-killing, capturing, or scattering most of al Qa'ida's senior operatives-and Afghanistan finally began to emerge from more than two decades of struggle and conflict. But Jones argues that as early as 2001 planning for the Iraq War siphoned off resources and talented personnel, undermining the gains that had been made. After eight years, he says, the United States has managed to push al Qa'ida's headquarters about one hundred miles across the border into Pakistan, the distance from New York to Philadelphia. While observing the tense and often adversarial relationship between NATO allies in the Coalition, Jones-who has distinguished himself at RAND and was recently named by Esquire as one of the "Best and Brightest" young policy experts-introduces us to key figures on both sides of the war. Harnessing important new research and integrating thousands of declassified government documents, Jones then analyzes the insurgency from a historical and structural point of view, showing how a rising drug trade, poor security forces, and pervasive corruption undermined the Karzai government, while Americans abandoned a successful strategy, failed to provide the necessary support, and allowed a growing sanctuary for insurgents in Pakistan to catalyze the Taliban resurgence. Examining what has worked thus far-and what has not-this serious and important book underscores the challenges we face in stabilizing the country and explains where we went wrong and what we must do if the United States is to avoid the disastrous fate that has befallen many of the great world powers to enter the region.

The Vietnam War has had many long-reaching, traumatic effects, not just on the veterans of the war, but on their children as well. In this book, Weber examines the concept of the war as a social monad, a confusing array of personal stories and public histories that disrupt traditional ways of knowing the social world for the second generation.

Cold War Friendships explores the plight of the Asian ally of the American wars in Korea and Vietnam. Enlisted into proxy warfare, this figure is not a friend but a "friendly," a wartime convenience enlisted to serve a superpower. It is through this deeply unequal relation, however, that the Cold War friendly secures her own integrity and insists upon her place in the neocolonial imperium. This study reads a set of highly enterprising wartime subjects who make their way to the US via difficult attachments. American forces ventured into newly postcolonial Korea and Vietnam, both plunged into civil wars, to draw the dividing line of the Cold War. The strange success of containment and militarization in Korea unraveled in Vietnam, but the friendly marks the significant continuity between these hot wars. In both cases, the friendly justified the fight: she was also a political necessity who redeployed cold war alliances, and, remarkably, made her way to America. As subjects in process-and indeed, proto-Americans-these figures are prime literary subjects, whose processes of becoming are on full display in Asian American novels and testimonies of these wars. Literary writings on both of these conflicts are presently burgeoning, and Cold War Friendships performs close analyses of key texts whose stylistic constraints and contradictions-shot through with political and historical nuance-present complex gestures of alliance.

As a 26-year old Marine radar intercept officer (RIO), Fleet Lentz flew 131 combat missions in the back seat of the supersonic F-4 B Phantom II during the wind-down of the Vietnam War. Overcoming military regulations, he and his fellow Marines at The Rose Garden (Royal Thai Air Base Nam Phong) kept sorely needed supplies moving in while moving combat troops out of Southeast Asia. His personal and accessible memoir describes how pilots and RIOs executed dangerous air-to-ground bombing missions in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos--quite different from the air-to-air warfare for which they had trained--and kept themselves mission-capable (and human) while surviving harsh circumstances.

This book analyses the various ways counterinsurgency in Afghanistan is gendered. The book examines the US led war in Afghanistan from 2001 onwards, including the invasion, the population-centric counterinsurgency operations and the efforts to train a new Afghan military charged with securing the country when the US and NATO withdrew their combat forces in 2014. Through an analysis of key counterinsurgency texts and military memoirs, the book explores how gender and counterinsurgency are co-constitutive in numerous ways. It discusses the multiple military masculinities that counterinsurgency relies on, the discourse of 'cultural sensitivity', and the deployment of Female Engagement Teams (FETs). Gendering Counterinsurgency demonstrates how population-centric counterinsurgency doctrine and practice can be captured within a gendered dynamic of 'killing and caring' - reliant on physical violence, albeit mediated through 'armed social work'. This simultaneously contradictory and complementary dynamic cannot be understood without recognising how the legitimation and the practice of this war relied on multiple gendered embodied performances of masculinities and femininities. Developing the concept of 'embodied performativity' this book shows how the clues to understanding counterinsurgency, as well as gendering war more broadly are found in war's everyday gendered manifestations. This book will be of much interest to students of counterinsurgency warfare, gender politics, governmentality, biopolitics, critical war studies, and critical security studies in general.

Now in its second edition, Grunts: The American Combat Soldier in Vietnam provides a fresh approach to understanding the American combat soldier's experience in Vietnam by focusing on the day-to-day experiences of front-line troops. The book delves into the Vietnam combat soldier's experience, from the decision to join the army, life in training and combat, and readjusting to civilian life with memories of war. By utilizing letters, oral histories, and memoirs of actual veterans, Kyle Longley and Jacqueline Whitt offer a powerful insight into the minds and lives of the 870,000 "grunts" who endured the controversial war. Important topics such as class, race, and gender are examined, enabling students to better analyze the social dynamics during this divisive period of American history. In addition to an updated introduction and epilogue, the new edition includes expanded sections on military chaplains, medics, and the moral injury of war. A new timeline provides details of major events leading up to, during, and after the war. A truly comprehensive picture of the Vietnam experience for soldiers, this volume is a valuable and unique addition to military history courses and classes on the Vietnam War and 1960s America.

Available in paperback for the first time, this book assesses the strains within the 'Special Relationship' between London and Washington and offers a new perspective on the limits and successes of British influence during the Korean War. The interaction between the main personalities on the British side - Attlee, Bevan, Morrison, Churchill and Eden - and their American counterparts - Truman, Acheson, Eisenhower and Dulles - are chronicled. By the end of the war the British were concerned that it was the Americans, rather than the Soviets, who were the greater threat to world peace. British fears concerning the Korean War were not limited to the diplomatic and military fronts these extended to the 'Manchurian Candidate' threat posed by returning prisoners of war who had been exposed to communist indoctrination. The book is essential reading for those interested in British and US foreign policy and military strategy during the Cold War. -- .

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.

Code-named the Studies and Observations Group, SOG was the most secret elite U.S. military unit to serve in the Vietnam War-its very existence denied by the government. Composed entirely of volunteers from such ace fighting units as the Army Green Berets, Air Force Air Commandos, and Navy SEALs, SOG took on the most dangerous covert assignments, in the deadliest and most forbidding theaters of operation.
John L. Plaster, a three-tour SOG veteran, shares the gripping account of SOG's stunning operations behind enemy lines-penetrating heavily- defended North Vietnamese military facilities, holding off mass enemy attacks, and launching daring missions to rescue downed U.S. pilots. From sabotage to espionage to hand-to-hand combat, these are some of the most extraordinary true stories of honor and heroism in the history of the U.S. military.

Poems by Nguyen Phan Que Mai

Translated from the Vietnamese by Bruce Weigl and Nguyen Phan Que Mai

Nguyen Phan Que Mai is among the most exciting writers to emerge from post-war Vietnam. Bruce Weigl, driven by his personal experiences as a soldier during the war in Vietnam, has spent the past 20 years translating contemporary Vietnamese poetry. These penetrating poems, published in bilingual English and Vietnamese, build new bridges between two cultures bound together by war and destruction. "The Secret of Hoa Sen," Que Mai's first full-length U.S. publication, shines with craft, art, and deeply felt humanity.

"I cross the Lam River to return to my homeland
where my mother embraces my grandmother's tomb in the rain,
the soil of Nghe An so dry the rice plants cling to rocks.
My mother chews dry corn; hungry, she tries to forget."