In January 1969, one of the most promising young lieutenant colonels the U.S. Army had ever seen touched down in Vietnam for his second tour of duty, which would turn out to be his most daring and legendary. David H. Hackworth had just completed the writing of a tactical handbook for the Pentagon, and now he had been ordered to put his counterguerilla-fighting theories into action. He was given the morale-drained 4/39th -- a battalion of poorly led draftees suffering the Army's highest casualty rate and considered its worst fighting battalion. Hackworth's hard-nosed, inventive and inspired leadership quickly turned the 4/39th into Vietnam's valiant and ferocious Hardcore Recondos.

Drawing on interviews with soldiers from the Hardcore Battalion conducted over the past decade by his partner and coauthor, Eilhys England, Hackworth takes readers along on their sniper missions, ambush actions, helicopter strikes and inside the quagmire of command politics. With Steel My Soldiers' Hearts, Hackworth places the brotherhood of the 4/39th into the pantheon of our nation's most heroic warriors.

By the end of the American war in Vietnam, the coastal province of Phu Yen was one of the least-secure provinces in the Republic of Vietnam. It was also a prominent target of the American strategy of pacification - an effort, purportedly separate and distinct from conventional warfare, to win the 'hearts and minds' of the Vietnamese. In Robert J. Thompson III's analysis, the consistent, and consistently unsuccessful, struggle to place Phu Yen under Saigon's banner makes the province particularly fertile ground for studying how the Americans advanced pacification and why this effort ultimately failed. In March 1970, a disastrous military engagement began in Phu Yen, revealing the enemy's continued presence after more than three years of pacification. Clear, Hold, and Destroy provides a fresh perspective on the war across multiple levels, from those making and implementing policy to those affected by it. Most pointedly, Thompson contends that pacification, far from existing apart from conventional warfare, actually depended on conventional military forces for its application. His study reaches back into Phu Yen's storied history with pacification before and during the French colonial period, then focuses on the province from the onset of the American War in 1965 to its conclusion in 1975. A sharply focused, fine-grained analysis of one critical province during the Vietnam War, Thompson's work demonstrates how pacification is better understood as the foundation of U.S. fighting in Vietnam.

A dedicated career soldier and excellent division and corps commander, Dominique Vandamme was a thorn in the side of practically every officer he served. Outspoken to a fault, he even criticized Napoleon, whom he never forgave for not appointing him marshal. His military prowess so impressed the emperor, however, that he returned Vandamme to command time and again.In this first book-length study of Vandamme in English, John G. Gallaher traces the career of one of Napoleon's most successful midrank officers. He describes Vandamme's rise from a provincial youth with neither fortune nor influence to an officer of the highest rank in the French army. Gallaher thus offers a rare look at a Napoleonic general who served for twenty-five years during the wars of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Empire. This was a time when a general could lose his head if he lost a battle. Despite Vandamme's contentious nature, Gallaher shows, Napoleon needed his skills as a commander, and Vandamme needed Napoleon to further his career. Gallaher draws on a wealth of archival sources in France - notably the Vandamme Papers in Lille - to draw a full portrait of the general. He also reveals new information on such military events as the Silesian campaign of 1807 and the disaster at Kulm in 1813. Gallaher presents Vandamme in the context of the Napoleonic command system, revealing how he related to both subordinates and superiors. Napoleon's Enfant Terrible depicts an officer who was his own worst enemy but who was instrumental in winning an empire.

Systemic and political hostility against the 'left', real and contrived, has been a key, yet under-recognized aspect of the history of the modern world for the past two hundred years. By the 1820s, the new, exploitative and destabilizing character of capitalist industrial production and its accompanying market liberalizations began creating necessities among the working classes and their allies for the new, self-protective politics of 'socialism'. But it is evident that, for the new economic system to sustain itself, such oppositional politics that it necessitated had to be undermined, if not destroyed, by whatever means necessary. Through the imperialism of the later 19th century, and with significant variations, this complex and often highly destructive dialectical syndrome expanded worldwide. Liberals, conservatives, extreme nationalists, fascists, racists, and others have all repeatedly come aggressively and violently into play against 'socialist' oppositions. In this book, Philip Minehan traces the patterns of such hostility and presents numerous crucial examples of it: from Britain, France, Germany and the United States; the British in India; European fascism, the United States and Britain as they operated in China and Indochina; from Kenya, Algeria and Iran; and from Central and South America during the Cold War. In the final chapters, Minehan addresses the post-Cold War, US-led triumphalist wars in the Middle East, the ensuing refugee crises, neo-fascism, and anti-environmentalist politics, to show the ways that the syndrome within which anti-leftist antagonism emerges, in its neoliberal phase since the 1970s, remains as self-destructive and dangerous as ever

John T. Farnham, a sharpshooter in the Union Army, wrote a substantial diary entry nearly every day during his three-year enlistment, sent over 50 long articles to his hometown newspaper, and mailed some 600 letters home. He described training, battles, skirmishes, encampments, furloughs, marches, hospital life, and clerkships at the Iron Brigade headquarters and the War Department. He met Lincoln and acquired a blood-stained cuff taken from his assassinated body. He befriended freed slaves, teaching them to read and write and built them a school. He campaigned for Lincoln's re-election. He subscribed to three newspapers and several magazines and devoured 22 books. He attended 23 plays and six concerts during his service. He was gregarious and popular, naming in his diaries 108 friends in the service and 156 at home. Frail and sickly, he died of tuberculosis four years after his discharge. He paints a detailed portrait of the lives of ordinary soldiers in the Union Army, their food, living conditions, relations among officers and men, ordeals, triumphs, and tragedies. Nominated for the Gilder Lehrman Prize