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Books > Humanities > History > Asian / Middle Eastern history > From 1900 > Postwar, from 1945
A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Duong Van Mai Elliott's The
Sacred Willow illuminates recent Vietnamese history by weaving
together the stories of the lives of four generations of her
family. Beginning with her great-grandfather, who rose from rural
poverty to become an influential landowner, and continuing to the
present, Mai Elliott traces her family's journey through an era of
tumultuous change. She tells us of childhood hours in her
grandmother's silk shop, and of hiding while French troops torched
her village, watching while blossoms torn by fire from the trees
flutter "like hundreds of butterflies" overhead. She makes clear
the agonizing choices that split Vietnamese families: her eldest
sister left her staunchly anti-communist home to join the Viet
Minh, and spent months sleeping in jungle camps with her infant
son, fearing air raids by day and tigers by night. And she follows
several family members through the last, desperate hours of the
fall of Saigon-including one nephew who tried to escape by grabbing
the skid of a departing American helicopter. Based on family
papers, dozens of interviews, and a wealth of other research, this
is not only a memorable family saga but a record of how the
Vietnamese themselves have experienced their times.
Discover never-before-told details of POW underground operations
during the Vietnam War told through one airman's inspiring story of
true love, honor, and courage. Air Force pilot Captain Carlyle
"Smitty" Harris was shot down over Vietnam on April 4, 1965 and
taken to the infamous Hoa Lo prison--nicknamed the "Hanoi Hilton."
For the next eight years, Smitty and hundreds of other American
POWs--including John McCain and George "Bud" Day--suffered torture,
solitary confinement, and unimaginable abuse. It was there that
Smitty covertly taught many other POWs the Tap Code--an old,
long-unused method of communication from World War II. Using the
code, they could softly tap messages of encouragement to lonely
neighbors and pass along resistance policies from their leaders.
The code quickly became a lifeline during their internment. It
helped the prisoners boost morale, stay unified, communicate the
chain of command, and prevail over a brutal enemy. Meanwhile, back
home in the United States, Harris's wife, Louise, raised their
three children alone, unsure of her husband's fate for seven long
years. One of the first POW wives of the Vietnam War, she became a
role model for other military wives by advocating for herself and
her children in her husband's absence. Told through both Smitty's
and Louise's voices, Tap Code shares the riveting true story of:
Ingenuity under pressure Strength and dignity in the face of a
frightening enemy The hope, faith, and resolve necessary to endure
even the darkest circumstances Praise for Tap Code: "Tap Code is an
incredible story about two American heroes. Col. "Smitty" Harris
and his wife, Louise, epitomize the definition of commitment--to
God, to country, and to family. This tale of extreme perseverance
will restore your faith in the human spirit." --Brigadier General
John Nichols, USAF "The incomprehensibly long ordeal of the Harris
family is agonizing. Their love, faith, loyalty, and courage
epitomize all that is good about America." --Lt. Col. Orson
Swindle, USMC (ret.), POW, Hanoi, 11/11/1966 to 3/4/1973
On 30 March 1972 the South Vietnamese positions along the
Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) that separated the North from South
Vietnam were suddenly shelled by hundreds of heavy guns and
multiple rocket launchers. Caught in a series of outposts of what
was the former 'McNamara Line', the shocked defenders had just
enough time to emerge from their bunkers at the end of the barrage
before they were attacked by regular North Vietnamese Army
divisions, supported by hundreds of armoured vehicles that crashed
though their defensive lines along the border. Thus began one of
the fiercest campaigns of the Vietnam War but also one of the less
well documented because by then most of the American ground forces
had been withdrawn. Following on from the details of the downsizing
of American forces and the setting up of the'Vietnamization'
policy, the build up of both the Army of the Republic of Vietnam
(ARVN) in the South and the People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) in the
North is discussed at length. A special emphasis is devoted to the
study of the development the North Vietnamese armoured corps that
would spearhead the coming offensive. Consequently, the nature of
the war changed dramatically, evolving from a guerrilla one into a
conventional conflict. The South Vietnamese resistance shuddered,
and then crumbled under the communist onslaught, putting Hue the
ancient imperial capital at risk. It was only thanks to US
airpower, directed by a small group of courageous American
advisers, which helped to turn the tide. Under the command of a new
capable commander, the South Vietnamese then methodically
counterattacked to retake some of the lost ground. This culminated
in the ferocious street fighting for Quang Tri. This first volume
describes the combat taking place in the northern part of South
Vietnam, and uses not only American archives but also Vietnamese
sources, from both sides. The book contains 130 photos, five maps
and 18 colour profiles. Asia@War - following on from our
highly-successful Africa@War series, Asia@War replicates the same
format - concise, incisive text, rare images and high quality
colour artwork providing fresh accounts of both well-known and more
esoteric aspects of conflict in this part of the world since 1945.
The Vietnam War tends to conjure up images of American soldiers
battling an elusive enemy in thick jungle, the thudding of
helicopters overhead. But there were in fact several Vietnam wars -
an anticolonial war with France, a cold war turned hot with the
United States, a civil war between North and South Vietnam and
among the southern Vietnamese, a revolutionary war of ideas over
what should guide Vietnamese society into its postcolonial future,
and finally a war of memories after the official end of hostilities
with the fall of Saigon in 1975. This book looks at how the
Vietnamese themselves experienced all of these conflicts, showing
how the wars for Vietnam were rooted in fundamentally conflicting
visions of what an independent Vietnam should mean that in many
ways remain unresolved to this day. Drawing upon twenty years of
research, Mark Philip Bradley examines the thinking and the
behaviour of the key wartime decisionmakers in Hanoi and Saigon,
while at the same time exploring how ordinary Vietnamese people,
northerners and southerners, soldiers and civilians, urban elites
and rural peasants, radicals and conservatives, came to understand
the thirty years of bloody warfare that unfolded around them-and
how they made sense of its aftermath.
The Taliban are synonymous with the war in Afghanistan. Doughty,
uncompromising fighters, they plant IEDs, deploy suicide bombers
and wage guerrilla warfare. While much has been written about their
military tactics, media strategy and harsh treatment of women, the
cultural and sometimes less overtly political representation of
their identity, the Taliban's other face, is often overlooked. Most
Taliban fighters are Pashtuns, a people who cherish their vibrant
poetic tradition, closely associated with that of song. The poems
in this collection are meant to be recited and sung; and this is
the manner in which they are enjoyed by the wider Pashtun public
today. From audiotapes traded in secret in the bazaars of Kandahar,
to mp3s exchanged via bluetooth in Kabul, to video files downloaded
in Dubai and London, Taliban poetry has an appeal that transcends
the insurgency. For the Taliban today, these poems, or ghazals,
have a resonance back to the 1980s war against the Soviets, when
similar rhetorical styles, poetic formulae and tricks with metre
inspired mujahideen combatants and non-combatants alike. The poetry
presented here includes 'classics' of the genre from the 1980s and
1990s as well as a selection from the odes and ghazals of today's
conflict . Veering from nationalist paeans to dirges replete with
religious symbolism, the poems are organised under four headings -
- War, Pastoral, Religious and Love - - and cover many themes and
styles. The political is intertwined with the aesthetic, the
celebratory cry is never far from the funeral dirge and praise of
martyrs lost. Two prefatory essays introduce the cultural and
historical context of the poetry. The editors discuss its
importance to the Pashtuns and highlight how poetic themes
correspond to the past thirty years of war in Afghanistan. Faisal
Devji comments on what the poetry reveals of the Taliban's
emotional and ethical hinterland.
War in Afghanistan will never be understood without getting to
grips with the small places - the provinces, districts, and
villages - where most of the fighting occurred, away from the
cities, in hundreds of hamlets, valleys, and farms amid a vast
landscape. Those small places and their people were the frontlines,
and it is only there that we can truly find answers to the
questions that lay at the heart of the war: why people supported
the Taliban, whether intervention brought peace, whether a better
outcome was ever possible. Garmser is a small place that has seen
much violence; a single district within one of Afghanistan's 34
provinces. Its 150,000 people inhabit a fertile strip along the
Helmand River no more than 6 miles wide and 45 miles long. Carter
Malkasian spent years in Garmser district as the political officer
for the US Department of State. He tells the history of thirty
years of war, from 1979 to 2012, explaining how the Taliban
movement formed in Garmser; how, after being routed in 2001, they
re- turned stronger than ever in 2006; and how Afghans, British,
and Americans fought with them between 2006 and 2012. He describes
the lives of Afghans who endured and tried to build some kind of
order out of war. While Americans and British came and went, they
carried on, year after year, inhabitants of a small place.
The Mysteries of Haditha is a war story unlike any other. This
riveting and hilarious memoir of M. C. Armstrong's journey into the
Iraq War as an embedded journalist pulls no punches and lifts the
veil on the lies we tell each other-and the ones we tell ourselves.
This is a story about both the strong women in Armstrong's life and
his road to true manhood. Armstrong's family was nearly ripped at
the seams as he struggled to secure his embed with Navy SEALs in
the Al Anbar Province in 2008. Armstrong's searingly honest
narrative about his relationship with his father, his fiance, and
his friend in the SEAL team takes the reader on a nosedive ride
from a historically black college in the American South straight
into Baghdad, the burn pits, and the desert beyond the mysterious
Haditha dam. Honest and vulnerable, tender but fearless, The
Mysteries of Haditha is an incredible coming-of-age story and a
unique glimpse into the world of the war on terror.
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Shadows
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Doyle H Wyatt
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Warlords are charismatic military leaders who exploit weak central
authorities in order to gain control of sub-national areas.
Notwithstanding their bad reputation, warlords have often
participated in state formation. In Empires of Mud Giustozzi
analyses the dynamics of warlordism in Afghanistan within the
context of such debates. He approaches this complex task by first
analysing aspects of the Afghan environment that might have been
conductive to the fragmentation of central authority and the
emergence of warlords and then accounts for the emergence of
warlordism in the 1980s and subsequently. He accounts for the
phenomenon from the 1980s to today, considering Afghanistan's two
foremost warlords, Ismail Khan and Abdul Rashid Dostum, and their
political, economic, and military systems of rule. Despite the
intervention of Allied forces in 2001, both of these leaders
continue to wield considerable power. The author also discusses
Ahmad Shah Massoud, whose 'system' incorporated elements of rule
not dissimilar from that of the warlords. Giustozzi reveals common
themes in the emergence of warlordism, particularly the role of
local military leaders and their gradual acquisition of 'class
consciousness,' which over time evolves into a more sophisticated,
state-like, or political party-like, structure.
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