The M113 is the most widely used and versatile armoured vehicle in the world. Fielded in 1960 as a simple 'battlefield taxi', over 80,000 M113s would see service with 50 nations around the world and 55 years later, many thousands are still in use. In addition to its original role of transporting troops across the battlefield, specialized versions perform a multitude of other functions including command and control, fire support, anti-tank and anti-aircraft defence, and casualty evacuation. This new fully illustrated study examines the service record of the M113 from its initial fielding through to the end of the Vietnam War. It will also describe the many US, South Vietnamese, and Australian variants of the M113 used in the Vietnam War as well as information on tactics, unit tables of organization and equipment, and a selection of engagements in which the M113 played a decisive role.

In 1964 Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, activated a joint unconventional task force known as the Studies and Observation Group--MACV-SOG. As a cover its mission was to conduct analysis of lessons learned in combat involved all branches of service. SOG's real mission was to conduct covert strategic reconnaissance missions into Laos, Cambodia, and South Vietnam as well as sabotage and 'Black' psychological operations. Ground, air, and naval assets were employed to insert, collect, extract, and otherwise support these operations. Drawing on detailed, first-hand accounts of the experiences of the service, including action on operations, this book will shed light on one of the most crucial units of the Vietnam War.

First published in 1978. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

From master storyteller Andy McNab, this is the opening book in an adventure-filled and action-packed new series telling, for the first time ever, the true stories of Special Forces missions. 'McNab's first major non-autobiographical work of non-fiction ... The operation is told like a novel [...] and it is as refreshingly informal and compellingly immediate as his other books' Daily Express 'Part history lesson, part military manual, part fixed-bayonets thriller. A must for Special Forces fans' The Sun It is the early 2000s and 9/11 is fresh in the world's memory. The Taliban have taken over Afghanistan, and armed militants and explosive devices are terrorising the people. And now a new threat is emerging in the country: suicide bombings, ordered by military commander of the Taliban, Mullah Dadullah. Special Forces are sent in to stop him. The Hunt is the thrilling story of the secret mission to catch Dadullah, one of the most dangerous men alive. Using classified sources and his unique insight into the way the SAS works, Andy McNab gives a page-turning account of what it took the Special Forces to find their target and what they would have to do to take him down. An explosive story of hostage negotiations, undercovers missions and a final, epic assault on Dadullah's compound that could leave only one side alive, The Hunt is a powerful retelling of a real-life Special Forces mission.

This guide showcases knives used by America's clandestine military in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. It provides the collector and others interested in the period a way of identifying honest SOG (Studies and Observations Group) specimens and separating them from counterfeits. With beautiful color photographs that show a high level of detail, the book identifies all known SOG specimens (over 165 knives) and includes rare personalized knives and custom combat knives made in the United States. Sections of the book focus on Randalls, Eks, Gerbers, and the knives made by tribal artisans in Southeast Asia. This is the eighth in Mike Silvey's series on military knives.

This book critiques the conceptualization of security found in mainstream and critical theoretical debates, and applies this to the empirical case of the 2003 Iraq War. The Iraq War represents one of the most puzzling, complex, and controversial events in the post-Cold War era. The manner in which the Bush administration finally decided to hold Saddam Hussein accountable through military intervention provoked a worldwide outcry due to the narratives they constructed to justify the "pre-emptive use of force" and "enhanced interrogation techniques." Responding to constructivist and post-structuralist scholars' calls for a turn to discourse, and aligning its argument with critical security studies, particularly the Copenhagen School (CS), this book conceptualizes language as a pivotal mechanism of power. Adopting a Wittgensteinian approach, it moves away from thinking about the nexus between security and language from a single action, or speech act, to a series of actions or interactions. To illustrate this new approach, the author examines two cases in particular: the UN inspectors' finding that there was no credible evidence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in early 2003 and the Abu Ghraib scandal in 2004. Both events show that the boundaries and relations between securitized rules and environments are not pre-given but produced in a particular language game. This book will be of much interest to students of critical security studies, US foreign policy, and IR in general.

On June 7, 1998 CNN broadcast Valley of Death, the story of a 1970 raid into Laos by U.S. Special Forces. According to the report, Operation Tailwind had used sarin nerve gas to kill U.S. soldiers who had defected to the North Vietnamese. After a firestorm of controversy, CNN retracted the report, ruining the career of rising star April Oliver and compromising the network's credibility. Called "the TV news story of the year" by TV Guide, CNN's Operation Tailwind fiasco was the biggest news scandal of the 1990s. Hearing about the story after its broadcast, Jerry Lembcke was struck by its resemblance to war legends and myths. His search for the origins of the tale, and an explanation for why top-level journalists would believe it, led him into the shocking world of political paranoia, where conspiracy theory, popular culture, religious fundamentalism, and the fantasies of war veterans cross paths. Approaching the story as a case study in why people believe what they do, Lembcke reversed the normal inquiry into how journalists shape what the rest of us know, to ask questions about the social forces that shape what journalists know. With a likeness to Herbert Gans' 1980 classic, Deciding What's News, Jerry Lembcke's CNN's Tailwind Tale is at once a study of American journalism that opens a window on America itself. Special link to the author's interview on Radio Nation discussing this new book - CNN's Tailwind Tale

When American forces arrived in Vietnam, they found themselves embedded in historical village and frontier spaces already shaped by past conflicts. American bases and bombing targets followed spatial and political logics influenced by the footprints of previous wars in central Vietnam, and these militarized landscapes continue to shape postwar land-use politics. Footprints of War traces the long history of conflict-produced spaces in Vietnam, beginning with early modern wars and the French colonial invasion in 1885 and continuing through the collapse of the Saigon government in 1975. Drawing on extensive archival research and years of interviews and fieldwork in the hills and villages around the city of Hue, David Biggs integrates historical geographic information system (GIS) data and uses aerial, high-altitude, and satellite imagery to render otherwise inscrutable sites as living, multidimensional spaces. This personal and multilayered approach yields an innovative history of the lasting traces of war in Vietnam and a model for understanding other militarized landscapes.

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 book examines the ethics and values that render a war discourse normative, and features the stories of American soldiers who fought in the Iraq War to show how this narrative can change. The invasion of Iraq, launched in March 2003, was led by the United States under the now discredited claim that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction (WMD). However, critical questions concerning what we may be able to learn from this experience remain largely unexplored. The focus of this book, therefore, is on soldiers as systems of war - and the internal battle many of them wage as they live a reality that slowly emerges as inconsistent with familiar beliefs and value commitments. This work offers a reflective study of identity struggle from the perspective of emotional psychology and delves into the 'narrative field' of socio-politics. Going beyond the political contestations over the U.S. military intervention in Iraq, the author analyses original research on the evolving beliefs and value-commitments of veterans of the war, exploring their faith in its 'just cause' and their personal sense of self and national identity. This book will be of much interest to students of the Iraq War, US foreign policy, military studies, discourse analysis, and IR in general.

This book examines relations between China and the Soviet Union during the 1950s, and provides an insight into Chinese thinking about the Korean War. This volume is based on a translation of Shen Zihua's best-selling Chinese-language book, which broke the mainland Chinese taboo on publishing non-heroic accounts of the Korean War.The author combined information detailed in Soviet-era diplomatic documents (released after the collapse of the Soviet Union) with Chinese memoirs, official document collections and scholarly monographs, in order to present a non-ideological, realpolitik account of the relations, motivations and actions among three Communist actors: Stalin, Mao Zedong and Kim Il-sung. This new translation represents a revisionist perspective on trilateral Communist alliance relations during the Korean War, shedding new light on the origins of the Sino-Soviet split and the rather distant relations between China and North Korea. It features a critical introduction to Shen's work and the text is based on original archival research not found in earlier books in English. This book will be of much interest to students of Communist China, Stalinist Russia, the Korean War, Cold War Studies and International History in general.

Fire from the Sky is the first complete history of the most decorated Navy squadron of the Vietnam War. Richard C. Knott tells the dramatic history of the HAL-3 Seawolves, the U.S. Navy's first and only helicopter gunship squadron of the Vietnam War. The squadron was established "in country" to support the fast, pugnacious river patrol boats of the brown water navy. Flying combat-worn Hueys borrowed from the Army, the mission of the Seawolves quickly expanded to include rapid response air support to any friendly force in the Delta needing immediate assistance. The Seawolves inserted SEALs deep into enemy territory, and extracted them, often despite savage enemy opposition. They rescued friendly combatants from almost certain capture or death, and evacuated the wounded when Medevac helicopters were not available.

Strap in alongside the Sabre pilots as they experienced the world's first large-scale jet-vs-jet combats. Brought to life with innovative tactical artwork and dramatic first-hand accounts from the pilots themselves. The F-86A Sabre had entered USAF service in 1949, and in December 1950 three squadrons were sent to South Korea. Despite primitive basing conditions and overwhelming Chinese opposition, the Sabre pilots stopped communist air forces from attacking UN ground troops and allowed Allied fighter-bombers to operate without threat of interception. The ensuing air battles between Sabres and MiG-15s were the first since World War II, and the last in recent times to involve large numbers of jet fighters in direct confrontation. In all of them the victorious F-86 pilots demonstrated the superiority of their training and tactics and the outstanding qualities of their Sabres. Contemporary photographs and specially commissioned artwork, including a dramatic battlescene, armament views, technical diagrams and ribbon diagrams illustrating step-by-step each main dogfight explored in the book, bring the experiences of the Sabre pilots and their battle tactics vividly to life.

Even if you don't know much about the war in Vietnam, you've probably heard of "The Hanoi Hilton," or Hoa Lo Prison, where captured U.S. soldiers were held. What they did there and whether they were treated well or badly by the Vietnamese became lasting controversies. As military personnel returned from captivity in 1973, Americans became riveted by POW cominghome stories. What had gone on behind these prison walls? Along with legends of lionized heroes who endured torture rather than reveal sensitive military information, there were news leaks suggesting that others had denounced the war in return for favorable treatment. What wasn't acknowledged, however, is that U.S. troop opposition to the war was vast and reached well into Hoa Loa Prison. Half a century after the fact, Dissenting POWs emerges to recover this history, and to discover what drove the factionalism in Hoa Lo. Looking into the underlying factional divide between prowar "hardliners" and antiwar "dissidents" among the POWs, authors Wilber and Lembcke delve into the postwar American culture that created the myths of the HeroPOW and the dissidents blamed for the loss of the war. What they found was surprising: It wasn't simply that some POWs were for the war and others against it, nor was it an officersversusenlistedmen standoff. Rather, it was the class backgrounds of the captives and their precaptive experience that drew the lines. After the war, the hardcore heroholdouts-like John McCain-moved on to careers in politics and business, while the dissidents faded from view as the antiwar movement, that might otherwise have championed them, disbanded. Today, Dissenting POWs is a necessary mythbuster, disabusing us of the revisionism that has replaced actual GI resistance with images of suffering POWs - ennobled victims that serve to suppress the fundamental questions of America's drift to endless war.

By January 1968 the fighting in Vietnam seemed to be at a stalemate. Yet General William Westmoreland, commander of American forces, announced a new phase of the war in which 'the end begins to come into view.' The North Vietnamese had different ideas. In mid-1967, the leadership in Hanoi had started planning an offensive intended to win the war in a single stroke. Part military action and part popular uprising, the Tet Offensive included attacks across South Vietnam, but the most dramatic and successful would be the capture of Hue, the country's cultural capital. At 2:30 a.m. on January 31, 10,000 National Liberation Front troops descended from hidden camps and surged across the city of 140,000. By morning, all of Hue was in Front hands save for two small military outposts. The commanders in country and politicians in Washington refused to believe the size and scope of the Front's presence. After several futile and deadly days, Lieutenant Colonel Ernie Cheatham would finally come up with a strategy to retake the city, block by block and building by building, in some of the most intense urban combat since World War II. With unprecedented access to war archives in the U.S. and Vietnam and interviews with participants from both sides, Bowden narrates each stage of this crucial battle through multiple points of view. Played out over twenty-four days of terrible fighting and ultimately costing 10,000 combatant and civilian lives, the Battle of Hue was by far the bloodiest of the entire war. When it ended, the American debate was never again about winning, only about how to leave. In Hue 1968, Bowden masterfully reconstructs this pivotal moment in the American war in Vietnam.

Between 1965 and 1973, hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans participated in one of the most remarkable and significant people's movements in American history. Through marches, rallies, draft resistance, teach-ins, civil disobedience, and non-violent demonstrations at both the national and local levels, Americans vehemently protested the country's involvement in the Vietnam War.

Rethinking the American Anti-War Movement provides a short, accessible overview of this important social and political movement, highlighting key events and key figures, the movement's strengths and weaknesses, how it intersected with other social and political movements of the time, and its lasting effect on the country. The book is perfect for anyone wanting to obtain an introduction to the Anti-War movement of the twentieth century.

Finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist, National Book Award in Nonfiction A New York Times Book Review "The Year in Reading" Selection All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory. From the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Sympathizer comes a searching exploration of the conflict Americans call the Vietnam War and Vietnamese call the American War-a conflict that lives on in the collective memory of both nations. "[A] gorgeous, multifaceted examination of the war Americans call the Vietnam War-and which Vietnamese call the American War...As a writer, [Nguyen] brings every conceivable gift-wisdom, wit, compassion, curiosity-to the impossible yet crucial work of arriving at what he calls 'a just memory' of this war." -Kate Tuttle, Los Angeles Times "In Nothing Ever Dies, his unusually thoughtful consideration of war, self-deception and forgiveness, Viet Thanh Nguyen penetrates deeply into memories of the Vietnamese war...[An] important book, which hits hard at self-serving myths." -Jonathan Mirsky, Literary Review "Ultimately, Nguyen's lucid, arresting, and richly sourced inquiry, in the mode of Susan Sontag and W. G. Sebald, is a call for true and just stories of war and its perpetual legacy." -Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)

The body of work assembled in this collection falls within the tradition of how wars are remembered, and written of, by their surviving veterans. The War I Survived Was Vietnam, and my writing about it, excepting a few poems, has been confined to the staples of non-fiction: memoir, reporting, criticism and commentary. Among the articles reproduced here, criticism is by far the dominant voice in which I have processed my post-war reflections. A good deal of this work also ventures into the exploratory realm of the American veteran identity, to include my personal struggle to outdistance the demons of PTSD. As print has evolved into digital media, my criticism has migrated increasingly to the blogosphere permitting the restrictive boundaries of the book review to blossom over the more far ranging horizons of the essay. Several of these works are of relevance to how the Vietnam experience is being archived by scholars for historical interpretation. Prior to my career in the writing life, I was a political activist advocating for the welfare of GIs and veterans, notably around the health effects of exposure during active service to deadly radiation and poisonous herbicides. Selected material on these topics has also been included in this collection.

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.

The Vietnam War was one of the most heavily documented conflicts of the twentieth century. Although the events themselves recede further into history every year, the political and cultural changes the war brought about continue to resonate, even as a new generation of Americans grapples with its own divisive conflict.

America and the Vietnam War: Re-examining the Culture and History of a Generation reconsiders the social and cultural aspects of the conflict that helped to fundamentally change the nation. With chapters written by subject area specialists, America and the Vietnam War takes on subjects such as women s role in the war, the music and the films of the time, the Vietnamese perspective, race and the war, and veterans and post-traumatic stress disorder. Features include:

• chapter summaries
• timelines
• discussion questions
• guides to further reading
• a companion website with primary source documents and tools (such as music and movie playlists) for both instructors and students.

Heavily illustrated and welcoming to students and scholars of this infamous and pivotal time, America and the Vietnam War is a perfect companion to any course on the Vietnam War Era.

The Vietnam War's influence on politics, foreign policy, and subsequent military campaigns is the center of much debate and analysis. But the impact on veterans across the globe, as well as the war's effects on individual lives and communities, is a largely neglected issue. As a consequence of cultural and legal barriers, the oral histories of the Vietnam War currently available in English are predictably one-sided, providing limited insight into the inner workings of the Communist nations that participated in the war. Furthermore, many of these accounts focus on combat experiences rather than the backgrounds, belief systems, and social experiences of interviewees, resulting in an incomplete historiography of the war. Chinese native Xiaobing Li corrects this oversight in Voices from the Vietnam War: Stories from American, Asian, and Russian Veterans. Li spent seven years gathering hundreds of personal accounts from survivors of the war, accounts that span continents, nationalities, and political affiliations. The twenty-two intimate stories in the book feature the experiences of American, Chinese, Russian, Korean, and North and South Vietnamese veterans, representing the views of both anti-Communist and Communist participants, including Chinese officers of the PLA, a Russian missile-training instructor, and a KGB spy. These narratives humanize and contextualize the war's events while shedding light on aspects of the war previously unknown to Western scholars. Providing fresh perspectives on a long-discussed topic, Voices from the Vietnam War offers a thorough and unique understanding of America's longest war.