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Books > History > American history > From 1900 > Postwar, from 1945
This is the third volume in a planned 10-volume operational and
chronological series covering the Marine Corps' participation in
the Vietnam War. This volume details the continued buildup in 1966
of the III Marine Amphibious Force in South Vietnam's northernmost
corps area, I Corps, and the accelerated tempo of fighting during
the year. The result was an "expanding war."
A work of creative nonfiction inspired by the true story of two
South Dakota teenagers, Mark St. Pierre's Of Uncommon Birth draws
upon extensive interviews and exhaustive research in military
archives to present a harrowing story of two young men - one white,
one Indian - caught in the vortex of the Vietnam War. Dale, a young
middle-class white American from South Dakota, joins the army
during the Vietnam War and dreams of serving his country. Frank, a
young Lakota Indian, joins the army in an effort to flee the
seemingly inescapable circumstances of his life and to follow his
people's warrior tradition. Mark St. Pierre intimately weaves
together the lives of these two men from different worlds, as each
struggles with issues of loyalty, responsibility, sacrifice, and
personal identity through his experiences in Vietnam. Of Uncommon
Birth presents the ironic story of an American Indian soldier who
lets himself become stereotyped as the Native ""good luck charm,""
even if the brave Indian scout stereotype carries with it the smell
of death.
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.
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.
A book of the life of a Navy Seals while in Vietnam. The book is
faction half fact and half fiction. All things might of and could
of happened. It tells us how we never go to war alone. All things
in this book have either been declassified or never classified to
start with.
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