In 1951, James Michener went to Korea to report on a little-known aspect of America's stalemated war: Navy aviators. His research-inspired, bestselling novel became perhaps the most widely read book ever written about aerial combat. Using Michener's notes, author David Sears tracked down the actual pilots to tell their riveting true stories. The result, Such Men As These , brims with action-packed accounts of combat, from the icy, windswept decks of aircraft carriers to the treacherous skies over Korea, while providing unforgettable portraits of the pilots whose skill and sacrifice made epic history.

For many of the 1.6 million U.S. service members who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001, the trip home is only the beginning of a longer journey. Many undergo an awkward period of readjustment to civilian life after long deployments. Some veterans may find themselves drinking too much, unable to sleep or waking from unspeakable dreams, lashing out at friends and loved ones. Over time, some will struggle so profoundly that they eventually are diagnosed with post-traumatic stress Disorder (PTSD).

Both heartbreaking and hopeful, Fields of Combat tells the story of how American veterans and their families navigate the return home. Following a group of veterans and their their personal stories of war, trauma, and recovery, Erin P. Finley illustrates the devastating impact PTSD can have on veterans and their families. Finley sensitively explores issues of substance abuse, failed relationships, domestic violence, and even suicide and also challenges popular ideas of PTSD as incurable and permanently debilitating.

Drawing on rich, often searing ethnographic material, Finley examines the cultural, political, and historical influences that shape individual experiences of PTSD and how its sufferers are perceived by the military, medical personnel, and society at large. Despite widespread media coverage and public controversy over the military's response to wounded and traumatized service members, debate continues over how best to provide treatment and compensation for service-related disabilities. Meanwhile, new and highly effective treatments are revolutionizing how the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) provides trauma care, redefining the way PTSD itself is understood in the process. Carefully and compassionately untangling each of these conflicts, Fields of Combat reveals the very real implications they have for veterans living with PTSD and offers recommendations to improve how we care for this vulnerable but resilient population.

"Chitose Road is novel about a strange cast of Americans stationed on the Island of Hokkaido in the early 1950s involving espionage, romance, and crowded living conditions, as they learned how to interact with the Japanese culture during and after the Korean War."

History needs transparency. This book examines how history can be lost, distorted, changed, or erased to suit the needs of the person or people writing it. Unaccounted for Prisoners-of-War from the Korean War are being used as an example of how the facts of a conflict from more than 50 years ago are still being manipulated to this day, and the fates of these POWs are still being witheld. This book also demonstrates the need for government transparency in order to accurately document and understand the motives and actions of people in history whose decisions affected millions and altered the course of events. This book has been written from the compilation of many sources such as the voluminous historical materials from the US Government National Archives, historical books on the subject, and witness testimony to the US Congress. Also included are statements from a phone interview with officials at the Defense Prisoner of War-Missing Personnel Office (DPMO) conducted in September of 2008. An annotated bibliography is included. What happened to these men? Why are their fates still being witheld decades after the war's end? What do the Russians, Chinese, and North Koreans have to hide after all this time? One possible answer has the potential to shatter the ceasefire and explode into a new conflict: Some of these POWs might still be alive.

This a reprint of 1991 study published by the United States Army Center of Military History. "A Soldier Supporting Soldiers" represents the collective insights of distinguished U.S. Army logistician Joseph M. Heiser Jr. He infuses his narrative with specific firsthand experiences in the organization of combat service support, thus illuminating larger principles of not only logistics but also military leadership and ethics. Heiser describes and analyzes problems still familiar to those who provide the materials and other support required by today's Army, especially in an environment of limited resources and challenging contingency operations. Military logisticians and military policymakers will benefit greatly from the logistics lessons.

Based on Captain Matt Gallagher's controversial and popular blog, which the U.S. Army shut down in June 2008, Kaboom is a sardonic, unnerving, one-of-a-kind Iraq war memoir. "At turns hilarious, maddening and terrifying," providing "raw and insightful snapshots of conflict" ( Washington Post ), Kaboom resonates with stoical detachment from and timeless insight into a war that we are still trying to understand.

In the most dramatic and intimate account of battle reporting since Michael Herr's classic "Dispatches," NBC News's award-winning Middle East Bureau Chief, Richard Engel, offers an unvarnished and often emotional account of five years in Iraq.

Engel is the longest serving broadcaster in Iraq and the only American television reporter to cover the country continuously before, during, and after the 2003 U.S. invasion. Fluent in Arabic, he has had unrivaled access to U.S. military commanders, Sunni insurgents, Shiite militias, Iraqi families, and even President George W. Bush, who called him to the White House for a private briefing. He has witnessed nearly every major milestone in this long war.

"War Journal" describes what it was like to go into the hole where U.S. Special Operations Forces captured Saddam Hussein. Engel was there as the insurgency began and watched the spread of Iranian influence over Shiite religious cities and the Iraqi government. He watched as Iraqis voted in their first election. He was in the courtroom when Saddam was sentenced to death and interviewed General David Petraeus about the surge.

In vivid, sometimes painful detail, Engel tracks the successes and setbacks of the war. He describes searching, with U.S troops, for a missing soldier in the dangerous Sunni city of Ramadi; surviving kidnapping attempts, IED attacks, hotel bombings, and ambushes; and even the smell of cakes in a bakery attacked by sectarian gangs and strewn with bodies of the executed.

"War Journal" describes a sectarian war that American leaders were late to understand and struggled to contain. It is an account of the author's experiences, insights, bittersweet reflections, and moments from his private video diary -- itself the subject of a highly acclaimed documentary on MSNBC.

"War Journal" is the story of the transformation of a young journalist who moved to the Middle East with $2,000 and a belief that the region would be ""the" story" of his generation into a seasoned reporter who has at times believed that he would die covering the war. It is about American soldiers, ordinary Iraqis, and especially a few brave individuals on his team who continually risked their lives to make his own daring reporting possible.

Contains the definitive history of the extensive but little known U.S. Army amphibious operations during the Korean War, 1950-1953. Provides insights to modern planners crafting future joint or combined operations in that part of the world.Originally published in 2008. Illustrated.

Foreword; Introduction; Chapter One: Maslow is Non-Deployable: Modifying Maslow's Hierarchy for Contemporary Counterinsurgency; Chapter Two: The Use of Cultural Studies in Military Operations: A Model for Assessing Values-Based Differences; Chapter Three: Developing the Iraqi Army: The Long Fight in the Long War; Chapter Four: The Way Ahead: Reclaiming the Pashtun Tribes through JointTribal Engagement; Chapter Five: The Application of Cultural Military Education for 2025; Chapter Six: Operational Culture: Is the Australian Army Driving the Train or Left Standing at the Station ? Conclusions. Appendixes. Photos. Maps.

This volume presents a collection of 47 articles describing different aspects of U.S. Marine Corps participation in Operation Iraqi Freedom during 2003. As with the previously published anthologies on the Spanish American, Vietnam, and Persian Gulf Wars, our intent is to provide a general overview that will serve as an interim resource for educating Marines and informing the public about the conflict, until the History Division completes an intended series of monographs dealing with major Marine Corps operations in that campaign. As the operational environment continues to mature, the authors' varied accounts will also serve as an introduction to changing tactics and strategies encountered or developed by Marines conducting stability and support operations in Iraq. Subsequent volumes will cover other campaigns being conducted elsewhere during the Global War on Terrorism.

Low-intensity conflict (LIC) often has been viewed as the wrong kind of warfare for the American military, dating back to the war in Vietnam and extending to the present conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. From the American perspective, LIC occurs when the U.S. military must seek limited aims with a relatively modest number of available regular forces, as opposed to the larger commitments that bring into play the full panoply of advanced technology and massive commitments of troops. Yet despite the conventional view, U.S. forces have achieved success in LIC, albeit "under the radar" and with credit largely assigned to allied forces, in a number of counterguerrilla wars in the 1960s."Scenes from an Unfinished War: Low-Intensity Conflict in Korea, 1966-1969" focuses on what the author calls the Second Korean conflict, which flared up in November 1966 and sputtered to an ill-defined halt more than three years later. During that time, North Korean special operations teams had challenged the U.S. and its South Korean allies in every category of low-intensity conflict - small-scale skirmishes along the Demilitarized Zone between the two Koreas, spectacular terrorist strikes, attempts to foment a viable insurgency in the South, and even the seizure of the USS Pueblo - and failed. This book offers a case study in how an operational-level commander, General Charles H. Bonesteel III, met the challenge of LIC. He and his Korean subordinates crafted a series of shrewd, pragmatic measures that defanged North Korea's aggressive campaign. According to the convincing argument made by "Scenes from an Unfinished War," because the U.S. successfully fought the "wrong kind" of war, it likely blocked another kind of wrong war - a land war in Asia. The Second Korean Conflict serves as a corrective to assumptions about the American military's abilities to formulate and execute a winning counterinsurgency strategy. Originally published in 1991. 180 pages. maps. ill.

A Veterans Memorial Individually Honoring Each Of The 2,322,000 U.S. Military Wartime Veterans Of The Persian Gulf War.

In the 2010 federal election, independent candidate Andrew Wilkie grabbed headlines after winning the seat of Denison, and with it a key role in deciding who would form the next government of Australia.Before he was a politician, however, Wilkie was Australia's most talked-about whistleblower. In March 2003, Wilkie resigned from Australia's peak intelligence agency in protest over the looming war in Iraq. He was the only serving intelligence officer from the 'coalition of the willing' - the US, the UK and Australia - to do so, and his dramatic move was reported throughout the world. Wilkie's act of conscience put him on a collision course with the Australian government. Why was he willing to risk his career and reputation to tell the truth? What happened when he decided to take a stand? In Axis of Deceit, Wilkie tells his story. He exposes how governments skewed, spun and fabricated intelligence advice. And he offers a rare glimpse into the world of international intelligence and life as a spook. With a brand-new preface, this is the fascinating inside story of a man now set to play a pivotal role in our public life.

In this report the author explores the concept on rogue or 'crazy' states in the international community, an important topic in the increasingly multipolar and dangerous world of the post-cold war era. In such an environment, the author concludes, after examining the progressive craziness of the Third Reich under Adolf Hitler, the rational basis for strategy breaks down. Strategic rationality is simply not sufficient to gauge the behavior of such states in the international arena--a particularly dangerous turn of events in an era of mass destruction weapons proliferation.

LTC Waite provides an honest and raw perspective on the Iraq War from that of a citizen-soldier. He describes for any interested American the effects war has upon the extraordinary people that fight in it, and the families left behind.

They marched under the heat with 40-pound rucksacks on their backs. They fired M16s out of the windows of military vehicles, defending their units in deadly firefights. And they did things that their male counterparts could never do--gather intelligence on the Taliban from the women of Afghanistan. As females they could circumvent Muslim traditions and cultivate relationships with Afghan women who were bound by tradition not to speak with American military men. And their work in local villages helped empower Afghan women, providing them with the education and financial tools necessary to rebuild their nation--and the courage to push back against the insurgency that wanted to destroy it. For the women warriors of the military's Female Engagement Teams (FET) it was dangerous, courageous, and sometimes heartbreaking work. Beyond the Call follows the groundbreaking journeys of three women as they first fight military brass and culture and then enemy fire and tradition. And like the men with whom they served, their battles were not over when they returned home.

Eye-witness accounts of atrocities committed by North Koreans to American prisoners-of-war.

United States Army Center of Military History publication, CMH Pub 70-113-1. United States Army in Iraq and Afghanistan Series. Edited by Jon T. Hoffman. Provides a soldier's-eye view of the Iraq war.

Fusing perspectives from politics, media studies and cultural studies, and focusing on Iraq, this title offers detailed insights into the impact of different media forms. Fusing perspectives from politics, media studies and cultural studies, "Sousveillance, Media and Strategic Political Communication" offers insights into impacts on strategic political communication of the emergence of web-based participatory media ('Web 2.0') across the first decade of the 21st century. Countering the control engendered in strategic political communication, Steve Mann's concepts of hierarchical sousveillance (politically motivated watching of the institutional watchers) and personal sousveillance (apolitical, human-centred life-sharing) is applied to Web 2.0. Focusing on interplays of user-generated and mainstream media about, and from, Iraq, detailed case studies explore different levels of control over strategic political communication during key moments, including the start of the 2003 Iraq war, the 2004 Abu Ghraib scandal, and Saddam Hussein's execution in 2006. These are contextualized by overviews of political and media environments from 2001-09. Dr Bakir outlines broader implications of sousveillant web-based participatory media for strategic political communication, exploring issues of agenda-building, control, and the cycle of emergence, resistance and reincorporation of Web 2.0. Sousveillance cultures are explored, delineating issues of anonymity, semi-permanence, instanteneity resistance and social change.

UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL How quickly we forget our heroes... those who daily risk their lives for our freedom. It is difficult to imagine the anguish, the determination and yes even the fear, in the heart of a man driven by enemy fire into a fox hole. How do you capture in words the feelings and thoughts of soldiers under attack by the enemy? William A. Cummins met that challenge with this remarkable book, "THE FORGOTTEN" as he unveils a series of stories by Korean War Veterans depicting their combat experiences in their very own words. Battlefield experiences from a war that must never be forgotten. You will follow a 19 year old PFC Marine from his sharecropping youth in Ohio to a brutal battlefield ambush in Korea and finally to a pulpit in Florida. Dozens of stories and photographs of our unsung heroes provide a written witness to the nearly three million people who perished during that horrific war. Each veteran expresses a small fragment of himself during the war for his children and grandchildren to read in a book.

The Hills Went Boom
Join with the "United States Marine Corps " newly formed Reconnaissance Battalion. The year is 1952 and twelve enlisted men; eleven Marines and one US Navy Corpsman have completed their yearlong Reconnaissance, Demolition and Survival training.
The twelve are known as "Recon Unit One" and their mission is to conduct clandestine and highly classified raids on tunnels and caves in the Chinese Communist controlled mountains of North Korea.
The missions are complex and filled with danger from many sources. Operating well North of the UN mandated DMZ, in enemy territory; these twelve have been sent to destroy the caves and tunnels of North Korea, most of them built during the Japanese occupation.
The Unit must parachute into zones occupied by enemy forces, secure the area, reconnoiter the caves and tunnels then destroy them and "get out" using methods here-to-for unused for these purposes. The reader will identify with some or all of the men who make up this elite force. They come from all walks of life, in post World War II America, and have the same frailties and strengths most of us share.
As with all things military there are moments of humor, as well as those moments of danger. Those moments that rekindles our memory and touches our hearts, minds and souls.
-Hank Acker

Soon after the bombs stopped falling on Kabul, award-winning journalist and women's rights activist Ann Jones set out for the shattered city. This is her trenchant report from the city where she spent the next four winters working in humanitarian aid. Investigating the city's prison for women, retraining Kabul's long-silenced English teachers, Jones enters the lives of everyday women and men and reveals through small events some big disjunctions: between the new Afghan "democracy" and the still-entrenched warlords, between American promises and performance, between what's boasted of and what is. At once angry, profound, and starkly beautiful, "Kabul in Winter" brings alive the people and day-to-day life of a place whose future depends upon our own.