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Books > Social sciences > Warfare & defence > Military life & institutions > General
More than seventy years following the D-Day Landings of 6 June
1944, Normandy's war heritage continues to intrigue visitors and
researchers. Receiving well over two million visitors a year, the
Normandy landscape of war is among the most visited cultural sites
in France. This book explores the significant role that heritage
and tourism play in the present day with regard to educating the
public as well as commemorating those who fought. The book examines
the perspectives, experiences and insights of those who work in the
field of war heritage in the region of Normandy where the D-Day
landings and the Battle of Normandy occurred. In this volume
practitioner authors represent a range of interrelated roles and
responsibilities. These perspectives include national and regional
governments and coordinating agencies involved in policy, planning
and implementation; war cemetery commissions; managers who oversee
particular museums and sites; and individual battlefield tour
guides whose vocation is to research and interpret sites of memory.
Often interviewed as key informants for scholarly articles, the
day-to-day observations, experiences and management decisions of
these guardians of remembrance provide valuable insight into a
range of issues and approaches that inform the meaning of tourism,
remembrance and war heritage as well as implications for the
management of war sites elsewhere. Complementing the Normandy
practitioner offerings, more scholarly investigations provide an
opportunity to compare and debate what is happening in the
management and interpretation at other World War II related sites
of war memory, such as at Pearl Harbor, Okinawa and Portsmouth, UK.
This innovative volume will be of interest to those interested in
remembrance tourism, war heritage, dark tourism, battlefield
tourism, commemoration, D-Day and World War II.
Accounting is frequently portrayed as a value free mechanism for
allocating resources and ensuring they are employed in the most
efficient manner. Contrary to this popular opinion, the research
presented in Accounting at War demonstrates that accounting for
military forces is primarily a political practice. Throughout
history, military force has been so pervasive that no community of
any degree of complexity has succeeded in. Through to the present
day, for all nation states, accounting for the military and its
operations has primarily served broader political purposes. From
the Crimean War to the War on Terror, accounting has been used to
assert civilian control over the military, instill rational
business practices on war, and create the visibilities and
invisibilities necessary to legitimize the use of force. Accounting
at War emphasizes the significant power that financial and
accounting controls gave to political elites and the impact of
these controls on military performance. Accounting at War examines
the effects of these controls in wars such as the Crimean, South
African and Vietnam wars. Accounting at War also emphasizes how
accounting has provided the means to rationalize and normalize
violence, which has often contributed to the acceleration and
expansion of war. Aimed at researchers and academics in the fields
of accounting, accounting history, political management and
sociology, Accounting at War represents a unique and critical
perspective to this cutting-edge research field.
This book examines war veterans' history after 1945 from a global
perspective. In the Cold War era, in most countries of the world
there was a sizeable portion of population with direct war
experience. This edited volume gathers contributions which show the
veterans' involvement in all the major historical processes shaping
the world after World War II. Cold War politics, racial conflict,
decolonization, state-building, and the reshaping of war memory
were phenomena in which former soldiers and ex-combatants were
directly involved. By examining how different veterans' groups,
movements and organizations challenged or sustained the Cold War,
strived to prevent or to foster decolonization, and transcended or
supported official memories of war, the volume characterizes
veterans as largely independent and autonomous actors which
interacted with societies and states in the making of our times.
Spanning historical cases from the United States to Hong-Kong, from
Europe to Southern Africa, from Algeria to Iran, the volume
situates veterans within the turbulent international context since
World War II.
This book contributes important new insights into how deployment on
international military missions affects soldiers and their lives.
Using both quantitative data and in-depth interviews, the authors
provide a longitudinal perspective covering the participants in
these missions before, during, and after deployment on a large
range of life outcomes. The research centres around four key
themes; who are the men and women who choose to be deployed; why do
they choose to be deployed; what challenges do these soldiers face
before, during, and after returning home from a mission; and what
are the consequences of deployment for the soldiers' individual
lives? Danish soldiers provide an illustrative study and data is
drawn from administrative registries and is supplemented with
broader surveys of present and former soldiers, in-depth interviews
of parents and other relatives, and support group professionals.
Using specifically constructed datasets and comparing these
soldiers with relevant control groups, this book offers a unique
analysis of the impact of deployment on important issues such as
personal finances, the labour market, criminal activity, smoking
and drinking, and overall health. Mapping a full portrait of the
men and women who choose to be deployed, and explaining both their
initial motivations, this book highlights the challenges they face
before and during deployment and upon returning home.
There are 37,780 First World War memorials in Britain, listing
names from all walks of life - estates, villages, places of work.
They stand as landmarks to a defining period in British history -
and yet one which is in danger of slipping away from popular
memory. NOT FORGOTTEN is a revealing look at the untold stories
that lie behind these lists of names - stories of the impact of
World War One on British society, the echoes of which can still be
felt today. More than a conflict overseas, it was the catalyst for
an extraordinary period of rapid and radical change to the social,
cultural and political fabric of the nation. Social restrictions on
women were revolutionised, from jobs and the vote to new freedoms
in dress, behaviour and sexuality. The class system was thrown into
disarray, both at home and on the front lines; roles were reversed
in family life for a large part of the population, through
bereavement, evacuation and children put to work in munitions
factories. And as the state took drastic measures to cope with this
turmoil, so the foundations were laid for the society in which we
live today.
A hard-hitting history of the U.S. airborne unit who made a name
for themselves in the unforgiving jungles of South Vietnam. "It was
easier killing than living." Third Battalion 506th Airborne veteran
Drawing on interviews with veterans, many of whom have never gone
on the record before, Ian Gardner follows up his epic trilogy about
the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment in World War II with the
story of the unit's reactivation at the height of the Vietnam War.
This is the dramatic history of a band of brothers who served
together in Vietnam and who against the odds lived up to the
reputation of their World War II forefathers. Brigadier General
Salve Matheson's idea was to create an 800-strong battalion of
airborne volunteers in the same legendary "Currahee" spirit that
had defined the volunteers of 1942. The man he chose to lead them
was John Geraci, who would mold this young brotherhood into a
highly cohesive and motivated force. In December 1967, the
battalion was sent into the Central Highlands of Lam Dong Province.
Geraci and his men began their Search and Destroy patrols, which
coincided with the North Vietnamese build-up to the Tet Offensive
and was a brutal introduction to the reality of a dirty, bloody
war. Gardner reveals how it was here that the tenacious volunteers
made their mark, just like their predecessors had done in Normandy,
and the battalion was ultimately awarded a Valorous Unit Citation.
This book shows how and why this unit was deserving of that award,
recounting their daily sanguinary struggle in the face of a hostile
environment and a determined enemy. Through countless interviews
and rare personal photographs, Sign Here for Sacrifice shows the
action, leadership, humor and bravery displayed by these airborne
warriors.
The challenges facing military veterans who return to civilian life
in the United States are persistent and well documented. But for
all the political outcry and attempts to improve military members'
readjustments, veterans of all service eras face formidable
obstacles related to mental health, substance abuse, employment,
and - most damningly - homelessness. Homelessness Among U.S.
Veterans synthesizes the new glut of research on veteran
homelessness - geographic trends, root causes, effective and
ineffective interventions to mitigate it - in a format that
provides a needed reference as this public health fight continues
to be fought. Codifying the data and research from the U.S.
Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) campaign to end veteran
homelessness, psychologist Jack Tsai links disparate lines of
research to produce an advanced and elegant resource on a defining
social issue of our time.
In this ambitious follow-up to Achilles in Vietnam, Dr. Jonathan Shay uses the Odyssey, the story of a soldier's homecoming, to illuminate the pitfalls that trap many veterans on the road back to civilian life. Seamlessly combining important psycho- logical work and brilliant literary interpretation with an impassioned plea to renovate American military institutions, Shay deepens our understanding of both the combat veteran's experience and one of the world's greatest classics.
Helping Soldiers Heal tells the story of the US Army's
transformation from a disparate collection of poorly standardized,
largely disconnected clinics into one of the nation's leading
mental health care systems. It is a step-by-step guidebook for
military and civilian health care systems alike. Jayakanth
Srinivasan and Christopher Ivany provide a unique insider-outsider
perspective as key participants in the process, sharing how they
confronted the challenges firsthand and helped craft and guide the
unfolding change. The Army's system was being overwhelmed with
mental health problems among soldiers and their family members,
impeding combat readiness. The key to the transformation was to
apply the tenets of "learning" health care systems. Building a
learning health care system is hard; building a learning mental
health care system is even harder. As Helping Soldiers Heal
recounts, the Army overcame the barriers to success, and its
experience is full of lessons for any health care system seeking to
transform.
This is the first book ever to present the authentic ninja
techniques in a highly accessible, illustrated 'how to' format. The
shadowy figure of the ninja – expert commando, secret agent,
maverick who operates outside social norms – continues to exert
fascination in the West, yet much of what is presented as ninja
fact today is distorted or wrong. Drawing on the scrolls created by
historical Japanese ninjas (or shinobi, as they were then known),
this book offers the real ninja teachings in 150 easy-to-follow,
illustrated lessons designed to draw contemporary students of ninja
straight into the world of these skilled spy-commandos. The truth
about the ninja is so much more complex and intriguing than the
Hollywood clichés we know today. We may think, for example, of a
ninja as being always garbed in black and fighting with 'throwing
stars' but in fact, a ninja had clothes in different colours to
serve as disguises for different times of day, and their arsenal of
weaponry could include anything from poison, poison gas, pepper
spray and fire-creating tools to swords, spears and knives (but no
throwing stars). The 150 lessons in this book cover all the basics
of ninja warcraft, including clever ideas for infiltrating an enemy
compound (from wearing 'silent sandals' to faking passes and
passwords), tactics for hiding and retreat (in the racoon dog
retreat, a ninja will crouch low and halt, allowing the pursuer to
collide with him at speed, whereupon the agent kills his enemy),
and ways of crossing marshes and water (for example, with special
shoes made of boards, or using a foldaway floating seat). The
description is made all the more vivid by step-by-step photographs
of the fighting techniques, diagrams outlining military tactics and
beautiful samples of Japanese calligraphy.
The English Civil War of 1642-6 was one of the most formative
periods of British history. This book, originally published in
1974, was one of the first to explore in depth the situation of the
common soldier - how he was trained, clothed, equipped , fed and
paid; how he amused himself, was disciplined and cared for
medically. As well as discussing aspects such as uniforms, pensions
and the drill & establishment for artillery, cavalry, pike and
musketeers, a typical Civil War battle is dissected into 7 phases,
exploring the part played by both officers and men.
As accomplished as she is unknown, Marie Marvingt set the world's
first women's aviation records, won the only gold medal ever given
for being outstanding in all sports, invented the ambulance
airplane, was the first female bomber pilot in history, fought in
World War I disguised as a man, has been recognized as a hero of
the Resistance in World War II, was the first to survive a crossing
of the English Channel in a balloon, worked all her life as a
journalist, spent years in North Africa, exploring, nursing,
accompanying troops, and inventing metal skis. Today she remains
the most decorated woman in the world. Unbelievable? Some people
think so. Her life was so unusually rich in exploits, daring, and
accomplishments that people dismissed it as a hoax. This biography
introduces you to the gifted woman said to be ""the most incredible
woman since Joan of Arc,"" provides proof that she did indeed do
everything ascribed to her, and investigates some of the other
reasons she has been forgotten. Known as the ""fiancee of danger,""
she was the model for the silent film series, The Perils of
Pauline. This first English-language biography of Marie Marvingt is
the story of the real ""Pauline.
6 June, 1944. 156,000 troops from 12 different countries, 11,000
aircraft, 7,000 naval vessels, 24 hours. D-Day - the beginning of
the Allied invasion of Hitler's formidable 'Fortress Europe' - was
the largest amphibious invasion in history. There has never been a
battle like it, before or since. But beyond the statistics and over
sixty years on, what is it about the events of D-Day that remain so
compelling? The courage of the men who fought and died on the
beaches of France? The sheer boldness of the invasion plan? Or the
fact that this, Rommel's 'longest day', heralded the beginning of
the end of World War II? One of the defining battles of the war,
D-Day is scored into the imagination as the moment when the
darkness of the Third Reich began to be swept away. This is the
story of D-Day, told through the voices of over 1,000 survivors -
from high-ranking Allied and German officers, to the paratroopers
who landed in Normandy before dawn, the infantry who struggled
ashore and the German troops who defended the coast. Cornelius Ryan
captures the horror and the glory of D-Day, relating in emotive and
compelling detail the years of inspired tactical planning that led
up to the invasion, its epic implementation and every stroke of
luck and individual act of heroism that would later define the
battle. In the words of its author, The Longest Day is a story not
of war, but of the courage of men.
As provider networks on military bases are overwhelmed with new
cases, civilian clinicians are increasingly likely to treat
military families. However, these clinicians do not receive the
same military mental-healthcare training as providers on military
installations, adding strain to clinicians' workloads and creating
gaps in levels of treatment. Families Under Fire fills these gaps
with real-world examples, clear, concise prose, and nuts-and-bolts
approaches for working with military families utilizing a
systems-based practice that is effective regardless of branch of
service or the practitioner's therapeutic preference. Any civilian
mental-health practitioner who wants to understand the diverse
needs of military personnel, their spouses, and their families will
rely on this indispensable guidebook for years to come.
"Lands of Lost Borders carried me up into a state of openness and
excitement I haven't felt for years. It's a modern classic."-Pico
Iyer A brilliant, fierce writer, and winner of the 2019 RBC Taylor
Prize, makes her debut with this enthralling travelogue and memoir
of her journey by bicycle along the Silk Road-an illuminating and
thought-provoking fusion of The Places in Between, Lab Girl, and
Wild that dares us to challenge the limits we place on ourselves
and the natural world. As a teenager, Kate Harris realized that the
career she craved-to be an explorer, equal parts swashbuckler and
metaphysician-had gone extinct. From what she could tell of the
world from small-town Ontario, the likes of Marco Polo and Magellan
had mapped the whole earth; there was nothing left to be
discovered. Looking beyond this planet, she decided to become a
scientist and go to Mars. In between studying at Oxford and MIT,
Harris set off by bicycle down the fabled Silk Road with her
childhood friend Mel. Pedaling mile upon mile in some of the
remotest places on earth, she realized that an explorer, in any day
and age, is the kind of person who refuses to live between the
lines. Forget charting maps, naming peaks: what she yearned for was
the feeling of soaring completely out of bounds. The farther she
traveled, the closer she came to a world as wild as she felt
within. Lands of Lost Borders, winner of the 2018 Banff Adventure
Travel Award and a 2018 Nautilus Award, is the chronicle of
Harris's odyssey and an exploration of the importance of breaking
the boundaries we set ourselves; an examination of the stories
borders tell, and the restrictions they place on nature and
humanity; and a meditation on the existential need to explore-the
essential longing to discover what in the universe we are doing
here. Like Rebecca Solnit and Pico Iyer, Kate Harris offers a
travel account at once exuberant and reflective, wry and rapturous.
Lands of Lost Borders explores the nature of limits and the
wildness of the self that can never fully be mapped. Weaving
adventure and philosophy with the history of science and
exploration, Lands of Lost Borders celebrates our connection as
humans to the natural world, and ultimately to each other-a
belonging that transcends any fences or stories that may divide us.
A Guardian Best Book of the Year "A gripping study of white
power...Explosive." -New York Times "Helps explain how we got to
today's alt-right." -Terry Gross, Fresh Air The white power
movement in America wants a revolution. Returning to a country
ripped apart by a war they felt they were not allowed to win, a
small group of Vietnam veterans and disgruntled civilians who
shared their virulent anti-communism and potent sense of betrayal
concluded that waging war on their own country was justified. The
command structure of their covert movement gave women a prominent
place. They operated with discipline, made tragic headlines in
Waco, Ruby Ridge, and Oklahoma City, and are resurgent under
President Trump. Based on a decade of deep immersion in previously
classified FBI files and on extensive interviews, Bring the War
Home tells the story of American paramilitarism and the birth of
the alt-right. "A much-needed and troubling revelation... The power
of Belew's book comes, in part, from the fact that it reveals a
story about white-racist violence that we should all already know."
-The Nation "Fascinating... Shows how hatred of the federal
government, fears of communism, and racism all combined in
white-power ideology and explains why our responses to the movement
have long been woefully inadequate." -Slate "Superbly
comprehensive...supplants all journalistic accounts of America's
resurgent white supremacism." -Pankaj Mishra, The Guardian
When does becoming part of the team go too far? For decades, young
men and women endured degrading and dangerous rituals in order to
join sororities and fraternities while college administrators
blindly accepted their consequences. In recent years, these
practices have spilled over into the mainstream, polluting military
organizations, sports teams, and even secondary schools. In
Destroying Young Lives: Hazing in Schools and the Military, Hank
Nuwer assembles an extraordinary cast of analysts to catalog the
evolution of this dangerous practice, from the first hazing death
at Cornell University in 1863 to present day tragedies. This
hard-hitting compilation addresses the numerous, significant, and
often overlooked impacts of hazing, including including sexual
exploitation, mental distress, depression, and even suicide.
Destroying Young Lives is a compelling look at how universities,
the military, and other social groups can learn from past mistakes
and protect their members going forward.
The assumptions that military service helps candidates attract
votes-while lacking it harms a candidate's chances-has been an
article of faith since the electoral coronation of George
Washington in 1789. Perhaps the most compelling fact driving the
perception that military service helps win votes is the large
number of veterans who have held public office. Some candidates
even exaggerate their military service to persuade voters. However,
sufficient counter-examples undermine the idea that military
veterans enjoy an advantage when seeking political office. In Why
Veterans Run, Jeremy Teigenexplains the tendency of parties to
elevate those with armed forces experience to run for high office.
He describes the veteran candidate phenomenon by examining the
related factors and patterns, showing why different eras have more
former generals running and why the number of veterans in election
cycles varies. With both quantitative and qualitative analysis, Why
Veterans Run investigates each postwar era in U.S. electoral
history and elaborates why so many veterans run for office. Teigen
also reveals how election outcomes with veteran candidates
illuminate the relationship between the military and civilian
spheres as well as the preferences of the American electorate.
In today's volunteer military many recruits enlist for the
educational benefits, yet a significant number of veterans struggle
in the classroom, and many drop out. The difficulties faced by
student veterans have been attributed to various factors: poor
academic preparation, PTSD and other postwar ailments, and
allegedly antimilitary sentiments on college campuses. In Grateful
Nation Ellen Moore challenges these narratives by tracing the
experiences of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans at two California
college campuses. Drawing on interviews with dozens of veterans,
classroom observations, and assessments of the work of veteran
support organizations, Moore finds that veterans' academic
struggles result from their military training and combat
experience, which complicate their ability to function in civilian
schools. While there is little evidence of antimilitary bias on
college campuses, Moore demonstrates the ways in which college
programs that conflate support for veterans with support for the
institutional military lead to suppression of campus debate about
the wars, discourage antiwar activism, and encourage a growing
militarization.
Restore your faith in love and family with one Army wife's
courageous story of how she helped her husband recuperate from
losing both of his legs while serving in Afghanistan.Paige received
the phone call that every military wife prays will never come. Her
husband, Army Sergeant Josh Wetzel, stepped on an improvised
explosive device while patrolling in Afghanistan. The blast
resulted in the immediate loss of his legs. His survival was
uncertain, and in the days to come, this traumatic incident began
an unbelievable journey of faith for them as a couple.Paige's
vulnerability as she struggles physically, emotionally, and
spiritually, will remind you of the power of commitment and love in
the face of adversity. You will discover the bravery and grit of a
woman who stood behind the battle lines but faced a battle of her
own to save her marriage and her family. As a military wife, Paige
had to come to terms with the priorities of the military: God,
Country, and then Family.
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