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Books > Humanities > History > American history > From 1900 > Postwar, from 1945
The Vietnamese stole their land. The NVA raped their daughters. The
Green Berets knew them as the most fearless and loyal warriors in
the land.... They were the Montagnards, who called themselves "Sons
of the Mountains" and always fought to the death. In this
incredible memoir of wall-to-wall combat in the jungle near the
Laotian border, Special Forces Lieutenant Don Bendell recounts the
saga of the A camp of Dak Pek, 242. On those death-strewn hilltops
in 1969-70, a handful of Green Berets and an army of 'Yards held
off the entire might of North Vietnamese regulars-until even their
courage and fighting skill could not staunch the flow of blood and
tears.
For the conscripts of who experienced the Vietnam 'police action',
the way the world was seen, shaped, and understood was
irretrievably changed by war. In his gentle, humorous and moving
memoir, Ted George gives voice to the experience that changed the
course of his life - and the lives of so many men - forever.
The Marines in Vietnam, 1954 - 1973, an anthology and Annotated
Bibliography, based on articles that appeared in the U.S. Naval
Institute Proceedings, Naval Review, and Marine Corps Gazette, has
served well for 14 years as an interim reference on the Vietnam
War. In 1974, events in Vietnam and the appearance of additional
significant articles in the three periodicals have made both the
anthology and bibliography somewhat dated. This expanded edition
extends the coverage of the anthology to 1975 and the entries in
the bibliography to 1984.
This is the eighth volume in a planned 10-volume operational and
chronological series covering the Marine Corps' participation in
the Vietnam War. A separate topical series will complement the
operational histories. This particular volume details the gradual
withdrawl in 1970-1971 of Marine combat forces from South Vietnam's
northernmost corps area, I Corps, as part of an overall American
strategy of turning the ground was against the North Vietnamese and
Viet Cong over to the Armed Forces of the Republic of Vietnam.
This is the eighth volume of a projected nine-volume history of
Marine Corps operations in the Vietnam War. A separate functional
series complements the operational histories. This volume details
the activities of Marine Corps units after the departure from
Vietnam in 1971 of III Marine Amphibious Force, through to the 1973
ceasefire, and includes the return of Marine prisoners of war from
North Vietnam. Written from diverse views and sources, the common
thread in this narrative is the continued resistance of the South
Vietnames Armed Forces, in particular the Vietnamese Marine Corps,
to Communist aggression. This book is written from the perspective
of the American Marines who assisted them in their efforts. Someday
the former South Vietnamese Marines will be able to tell their own
story.
In the decades since the Vietnam War, veteran memoirs have
influenced Americans' understanding of the conflict. Yet few
historians or literary scholars have scrutinized how the genre has
shaped the nation's collective memory of the war and its aftermath.
Instead, veterans' accounts are mined for colorful quotes and then
dropped from public discourse; are accepted as factual sources with
little attention to how memory, no matter how authentic, can
diverge from events; or are not contextualized in terms of the
race, gender, or class of the narrators. Veteran Narratives and the
Collective Memory of the Vietnam War is a landmark study of the
cultural heritage of the war in Vietnam as presented through the
experience of its American participants. Crossing disciplinary
borders in ways rarely attempted by historians, John A. Wood
unearths truths embedded in the memoirists' treatments of combat,
the Vietnamese people, race relations in the United States
military, male-female relationships in the war zone, and veterans'
postwar troubles. He also examines the publishing industry's
influence on collective memory, discussing, for example, the
tendency of publishers and reviewers to privilege memoirs critical
of the war. Veteran Narratives is a significant and original
addition to the literature on Vietnam veterans and the conflict as
a whole.
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