On June 25, 1950 the North Korean Peoples Army crossed the 38th parallel and invaded South Korea. The United Nations, primarily the United States, came to South Korea's aid. Because America had largely dismantled its Army and Navy after World War II, the Navy needed to quickly take 110 WW-II destroyers out of mothballs, return them to fleet service and staff them with crews. Many young men answered their country's call and joined the Navy -- among them was a young music school student named Archie T. Miller. This book depicts his sailor's story of adventures in the "Tin Can" Navy. Plucked from a comfortable civilian life Miller and his shipmates adapted to the spartan conditions of life at sea in a small hard riding ship. The discipline, responsibility, danger, travel and camaraderie of those four years forever changed their lives. The crew of USS Wren traveled over 50,000 miles completely around the world while taking their ship to Korea. This book describes life in a small ship in smooth and rough seas while operating with Fast Carrier Task Force 77 off the coasts of Korea, dodging and sinking mines, conducting antisubmarine operations and searching for North Korean ships above the 38th parallel in blinding snowstorms. Home from Korea, Wren aided a burning troopship, rode out hurricanes, visited Havana, participated in fleet exercises and trained midshipmen. Wren also blockaded Puerto Barrios while the CIA overthrew the freely elected government of Guatemala. The Wrens lived the slogan "Join the Navy and see the world" -- and still treasure their experiences. They were funny, scary, awe inspiring, sobering and exciting. They still talk about them -- they call them Sea Stories. And this book is those stories.

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.

Alabama native, World War II veteran and long-time Associated Press photographer Fred O. Waters shares his remarkable life story as a Naval Seaman, Army journalist and hall-of-fame professional photographer. Travel with Waters as he enlists into the Navy at age 16, ships out for Guam and supports the U.S. military effort against the Japanese Empire. Continue Waters' first-hand account of enlisting into the Army and photographing the recovery of Japan after the atomic bomb drops on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Following his military career, Waters remains in Southeast Asia and covers conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, Laos and many island nations. Eventually, Waters returns Stateside and embarks on a 25-year career with the Associated Press in St. Louis, Missouri, covering the Civil Rights Movement, floods, politics, athletics and the rigors of news gathering prior to the digital communications age.

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.

A renowned historian contends "that the American warrior, not technology, wins wars." (Patrick K. O'Donnell, author of "Give Me Tomorrow")
John C. McManus covers six decades of warfare in which the courage of American troops proved the crucial difference between victory and defeat. Based on years of archival research and personal interviews with veterans, Grunts demonstrates the vital, and too often forgotten, importance of the human element in protecting the American nation, and advances a passionate plea for fundamental change in our understanding of war.

America's unofficial nightmare during the Iraq War was the infamous Triangle of Death, sometimes referred to by Iraqis as the Graveyard of the Americans. While serving in the Triangle, Chaplain Jeff Bryan ministered to a 1,200-man infantry task force, often while patrolling streets, fields, and villages as his unit cleared them in close-quarters combat.

During the most violent and controversial phase of the war, Chaplain Bryan brought God to the American warrior. He witnessed life, death, and faith at every level, including a worst-case scenario in which several troops in his unit were ambushed and captured. Memoirs from Babylon is a dramatic account of humanity at its best and worst, a gut-wrenching experience of fear and faith under fire. Chaplain Bryan's story is a unique combination of life, leadership, military history, and God-centered hope in the midst of America's nightmare.

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.

In 1991, at the start of the first Gulf War, I was as a 4th year medical student in Paris France on a general surgery rotation. Little did I know that fifteen years later, as I cared for Iraqi - civilians, military, terrorists who would have killed us given the chance, the words of Dr. Jean Louis Paille would echo in my mind - "Patient care trumps politics every time... Every time." Under fire and under pressure in Balad, Iraq, Lt. Col Jay T. Bishoff, a United States Air Force surgeon, gives a first-hand account of the war in Iraq through unique photographic images and his personal encounters in his new book, Boots of War. Dr. Bishoff recounts true stories from the 332 EMDG Hospital in Balad Iraq when it was the busiest trauma center in the world. While insurgents launched mortar and rocket attacks onto the Balad, Iraq Air base an average of seven times a day, medical personnel continually cared for critically injured U.S. and coalition soldiers, Iraqi nationals and even the rocket firing insurgents themselves. Full of laughter and tears, these modern-day war stories are unforgettable accounts of Operation Iraqi Freedom, its human cost, and its moral lessons.

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.

The war on terror-fought shot by shot, bullet by bullet, kill by kill. The ongoing War on Terror is unlike any conflict the United States Armed Forces have fought. There are no set battles. The enemy adheres to no warrior code or international law. Their only desire is to kill-or be killed. That's where the snipers of the U.S. Marine, Army, and Navy SEALs come in. Here in their own words are the compelling and gripping true stories of the snipers whose sole purpose is to eliminate any and all enemy threats with a single bullet. From the deserts and rubble-strewn streets of Iraq to the endless labyrinth of the remote Afghanistan mountain country, this is life and death beyond the front lines of battle and behind the scope of a high-powered rifle.

"Raw, direct, and powerful...This work is vitally important." -Ken Stern, former CEO of National Public Radio
Benjamin Tupper takes us inside the intricacies of the war, opening up a unique and multifaceted view of Afghan culture and warfare, and illuminates the challenges of the war, vividly bringing to life both the mundane and the extraordinary and the search for a way forward.

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 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.

A unique on-the-ground account of a country shattered
Iraqi playwright Issam Jameel returned to Iraq after a 12-year exile. Giving up the relative safety of Jordan, he made a perilous journey to Baghdad for a reunion. Unfortunately, the reason for his trip was to grieve for his nephew, recently killed by American forces while guarding an Iraq parliament member from insurgents. Jameel also mourns the loss of a formerly secular civil society replaced by vehement sectarianism, intolerance, and ignorance. Basic human needs like food, water, and power have become an endless daily struggle amidst the shards of infrastructure. Routine tasks, such as selling a house or getting a job are fraught with peril as old scores continue to be settled on religious, ethnic, and political fronts. Everywhere he turns, people are desperate to leave, but fear for the worst. After escaping this madness, he recorded his eyewitness report, desperate to provide an honest and impartial tale of an epic tragedy which has killed more than 100,000 people and displaced many more.
Today, the US government gambles with Iraq's stability by turning a blind eye to Al-Maliki's internal policy, especially after Wikileaks revealed his complicity in death squads. We are jeopardizing the hard-won political gains that the US achieved by neutralizing the Sunnis of Iraq when it converted them from fighters and boycotters to voters. The US administration fails to show much real concern for the future of democracy in Iraq except perhaps for its anxiety about Obama's promises of military withdrawal.
Critics Praise "Iraq Through A Bullet Hole"
"Issam Jameel's "Iraq Through A Bullet Hole" is evocative in the best sense of the word. A native Iraqi, he describes with measured sadness and authenticity the dismemberment of his country by a senseless war. His perspective on events there-both personal and general-will not be found in reporting done by the Western press. His tale reminds us that the things that matter most-family, friends, and faith can and will endure even the most severe trials. I highly recommend this book for its relevance and timelessness."
--Cristobal Krusen, Author and Filmmaker
"Iraq has been a focus for our attention for years now, since our armed forces went looking for nonexistent weapons of mass destruction there. The media have presented a picture-but how real is it? What is life really like in that unfortunate country? Find out by reading this book."
--Robert Rich, PhD, Author of "Cancer: A Personal Challenge"
"Going home is such a trivial thing to so many people in the world. This story is the revealing statement of one man that went home to find it lost in such a strife-filled region, considered by historians as the origin of modern civilization. For those who do know how difficult his journey was, they will relate to Issam's message which is one of perseverance, shared hope and a common faith in mankind that in the end, all could eventually be well. If only men would let it..."
--Bill Evans, civilian contractor in Iraq
More info at www.IraqThruABulletHole.com
Book #5 in the Reflections of History Series from Modern History Press www.ModernHistoryPress.com
BIO000000 Biography & Autobiography: General
HIS027170 History: Military - Iraq War (2003-)
HIS026000 History: Middle East - General

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.

No Lack of Courage is the story of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's Operation Medusa, the largely Canadian action in Afghanistan from 1 to 17 September 2006, to dislodge a heavily entrenched Taliban force in the Pashmul district of Afghanistans Kandahar Province. At stake, according to senior Afghan politicians and NATO military commanders, was nothing less than the very existence of the reconstituted state of Afghanistan, as well as the NATO alliance itself. In a bitterly fought conflict that lasted more than two weeks, Canadian, Afghan, and Coalition troops defeated the dug-in enemy forces and chased them from the Pashmul area.

In the end, the brunt of the fighting fell on the Canadians, and the operation that saved Afghanistan exacted a great cost. However, the battle also demonstrated that Canada had shed its peacekeeping mythology and was once more ready to commit troops deliberately to combat. Moreover, it revealed yet again that Canadian soldiers have no lack of courage.