It is about a young Marine being sent to Vietnam and my experiences in the infantry. Assign to the 1st Battalion 9th Marines, Charlie Company 2nd Platoon. Just before I get to my new outfit, a Marine that has been in Vietnam for a while come up to us and tells us that we're going to a badass outfit.

I joined the 2nd platoon of Charlie Company with 46 men in March of 1967 and ended up with only four men left in Dec. pf 1967. During that time with the 1st Battalion 9th Marines other Marines outfits called us "the Walking Dead." From the time I was with them the N.V.A. have hit us with mortars, artillery, human wave attacks, flamethrowers, and ambushes. The only people that help us were artillery from both the Army and Marines and F-4 Phantom aircrafts.

On Dec. 16, 1967 I transferred over to a new Recon outfit being for in the 3rd Marines Division called "E" Echo Company. The last time this company was formed was back in World War II. When back to Okinawa for thirty days to be trained as Recon and then sent back to Vietnam to finish my tour. I stayed with this outfit until I rotated back home which was April 1, 1968.

On September 10, 2001, the United States was the most open country in the world. But in the aftermath of the worst terrorist attacks on American soil, the U.S. government began to close its borders in an effort to fight terrorism. The Bush administration's goal was to build new lines of defense without stifling the flow of people and ideas from abroad that has helped build the world's most dynamic economy. Unfortunately, it didn't work out that way.

Based on extensive interviews with the administration officials who were charged with securing the border after 9/11, and with many innocent people whose lives have been upended by the new security regulations, "The Closing of the American Border" is a striking and compelling assessment of the dangers faced by a nation that cuts itself off from the rest of the world.

A multitude of literary and cinematic works were spawned by the Vietnam war, but this is a unique book, combining moving prose with powerful illustrations created by combat artists in the U.S. military. Dr. Noble has assembled a remarkable collection of 153 reproductions printed in black and white, arranged with oral histories, letters and other commentaries to give the reader a more intimate understanding of the combat soldier who served in Vietnam and what he had to endure. Forgotten Warriors is not intended to argue the merits of U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia. Rather, through the visual impact of the illustrations, the soldiers themselves express what the Vietnam experience was like in a way that is different and more profound than perhaps any other work on the subject.

The main focus of the book is on the way artists saw the world of the grunt: patrols, life in the rear, fighting the terrain and weather, tests of endurance, the machines of war and the effects of combat and its aftermath. The reader is also given a sense of how some writers and artists felt about the country and the people of South Vietnam. To date, our perceptions of the Vietnam war have been influenced largely by movies, television and novels. Recognizing this, Dr. Noble enlisted Professor William J. Palmer, a noted authority on the media and their reportage fo the war, to provide an essay that allows the reader to compare his or her past impressions with the art works contained in this book. A moving collection, "Forgotten WarriorS" offers the truest picture of the Vietnam war in human terms.

This volume analyses several recent evolutions in global defence activities. Since the 1990s the industry has gradually repositioned because of geostrategic transformations, spatial reorganisation, budgetary trends, and evolutions within the production of defence per se, which have disrupted its economic and social fabric. These changes widen the scope of industrial activities and modify the organization of relations between armed forces, firms and local economies as well as society. They deeply affect the footprints of defence in several dimensions and its impacts on local communities, public/private boundaries and evolving requirements of armed forces. This volume analyses key features of recent and ongoing transformations of defence issues, from four perspectives. The first section considers those factors which are redefining the boundaries of defence, with a focus on defence economics; part two focuses on the spatial footprint of defence and its transformations and analyses the insertion of defence activities within urban landscapes; the third part analyses how armed forces manage their human resources; and the final section considers the international landscape of defence.

Why young men voluntarily go off to war has long defied understanding. Eagerly risking one's life seems contrary to the innate instinct for self-preservation. Are young males--notorious risk-takers--courting death out of some irresistible altruistic impulse to sacrifice their lives for a larger cause or, conversely, do they expect something in return? In this engrossing exploration of men's motives for war, the author argues persuasively that one important subconscious reason young men volunteer for battle is to enhance their status as marriage partners for the women on the home front. Especially for men from low socioeconomic backgrounds becoming a soldier offers a sexual and reproductive edge over their civilian male peers. The author also examines the subtle influence that women's expanding power in society has on male attitudes regarding conflict. Drawing upon extensive literary as well as historical sources, he demonstrates how tensions over gender roles affect men's willingness to go to war, and how the experience of war, in turn, changes the relations between the sexes. Until very recently, war has reaffirmed the central social importance of masculinity and demoted women to supportive, domestic roles. Reviewing the social circumstances leading up to conflicts from the American Civil War through the Viet Nam War and the current clash between the West and Islamic fundamentalists, he convincingly shows that gender-based pressures play a significant, if often unconscious, role in tipping a society toward the decision of war. Thoroughly researched, yet engagingly and accessibly written, this unique discussion of men and women's roles in a society contemplating war offers much food for thought.

Twelve experts analyze existing threats to American security, problems of defense, the prospects of limited and total wars, and possible strategies to meet the crisis in light of the stresses and strengths of NATO.

Confronting Sukarno examines the regional and international implications of the Malaysian-Indonesian Confrontation, a crisis more popularly known as Konfrontasi. By doing so, fundamental themes concerning the Asian Cold War are discussed. In particular, the concern of western policy makers with an increasingly belligerent communist China, the importance of Konfrontasi to the war in Vietnam and the British 'role' east of Suez, are all examined in detail. Being a work of international history, the book draws extensively from recently de-classified documents in the United States, Britain, Australia and New Zealand.

From the invasion of Zululand & Isandhlwana to Rorke's Drift & Ulundi-the Zulu War freshly related. Zulu:1879 is an unusual book. It brings to life a war - nearly 130 years in the past - almost as though it was a modern conflict. We hear the voices of the time speaking with the immediacy of recent recollection. Here are officers, newspaper reporters, teamsters, ordinary soldiers and even the Zulu warriors themselves recounting their experiences of this remarkable conflict. D.C.F Moodie's selection has been refined and enhanced by the Leonaur Editors with 3 additional engaging accounts of Zulu Warfare together with a special bonus account from the ranks of the Buffs selected from Leonaur's book "Tommy Atkins' War Stories"

George Luther Stearns became John Brown's single most important financial backer. He personally owned the 200 Sharps rifles Brown brought to Harper's Ferry. Massachusetts Governor John Andrew asked Stearns to recruit the first northern state African-American regiment, the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, recently made famous by the Hollywood movie Glory. Stearns was made a major and made Assistant Adjutant General for the Recruitment of Coloured Troops. He recruited over 13,000 African-Americans and established schools for their children and found work for their families. After Emancipation, he worked tirelessly for African-American civil rights. Friends and associates included the Emersons and the Alcotts, Thoreau, Lydia Maria Child, Charles Sumner, Andrew Johnson, and Frederick Douglass.

Mockaitis begins by providing a working definition of counterinsurgency that distinguishes it from conventional war while discussing the insurgents' uses of terror as a method to support their broader strategy of gaining control of a country. Insurgent movements, he notes, use terror far more selectively than do terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda, which kills indiscriminately and is more than willing to produce mass casualties. Such methods stand in stark contrast to the American approach to armed conflict, which is more ideally suited to pragmatic culture leery of involvement in protracted foreign wars and demands immediate results. Within this context, Mocktaitis examines the conflict in Iraq, from post conflict troubles with Saddam in the early 1990s, to pre-invasion planning in 2003. He then moves into a discussion of the rise of insurgent movements and the challenges they posed in the aftermath of the fighting, tracing the ongoing efforts to shape a doctrine that allows US forces to successfully deal with the growing insurgency The U.S. military in Iraq faces the most complex counterinsurgency campaign in its history and perhaps the history of modern warfare. At the outset, it confronted as many as 22 different domestic insurgent and foreign terrorist groups in an environment made more difficult by thousands of criminals released by Saddam Hussein. Over the past three years, the conflict has evolved with growing ethnic violence complicating an already difficult security situation. Even the most optimistic assessments predict a continued deployment of significant U.S. forces for at least five years for the country to be stabilized. It remains to be seen whether public opinionwill support such a deployment. Mockaitis situates the Iraq War in its broad historical and cultural context. He argues that failure to prepare for counterinsurgency in the decades following the end of the Vietnam War left the U.S. military ill equipped to handle irregular warfare in the streets of Baghdad. Lack of preparation and inadequate troop strength led American forces to adopt a conventional approach to unconventional war. Over-reliance on firepower combined with cultural insensitivity to alienate many Iraqis. However, during the first frustrating year of occupation, U.S. forces revised their approach, relearning lessons from past counterinsurgency campaigns and adapting them to the new situation. By the end of 2004, they had developed an effective strategy and tactics but continued to be hampered by troop shortages, compounded by the unreliability of many Iraqi police and military units. The Army's new doctrine, embodied in FM 3-24 Counterinsurgency, outlines the correct approach to winning Iraq. However, three years of desultory conflict amid ongoing revelations that the premises upon which the administration argued the need for invading Iraq may be false have eroded support for the war. The American armed forces may soon find themselves in the unfortunate situation of having found a formula for success at almost the same time the voters demand withdrawal.

This book studies the made-to-order genre of socialist-realist fiction that was produced at the direction of the Main Political Directorate of the Soviet Army and Navy (MPD) as a part of the war for men's minds waged by the Soviet State. The first chapter is a history of the genre, tracing it from its roots in the Revolution to the dissolution of the MDP in 1991. Topics examined in the book include the attitude toward Germans following World War II; the retirement of the World War II generation; military wives; Dear John letters; life at remote posts; the military as a socializing institution; the use of lethal force by sentries; attitudes toward field training exercises, heroism, and initiative; legitimacy of command; and the reception of Afghan vets.