Beginning with the withdrawal of French forces from South Vietnam in 1955, the U.S. took an ever-widening role in defending the country against invasion by North Vietnam. By 1965, the U.S. had "Americanized" the war, relegating the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) to a supporting role. While the U.S. won many tactical victories, it had difficulty controlling the territory it fought for. As the war grew increasingly unpopular with the American public, the North Vietnamese launched two large-scale invasions in 1968 and 1972-both tactical defeats but strategic victories for the North that precipitated the U.S. policy of "Vietnamization," the drawdown of American forces that left the ARVN to fight alone. This book examines the maturation of the ARVN, and the major battles it fought from 1963 to its demise in 1975. Despite its flaws, the ARVN was a well-organized and disciplined force with an independent spirit and contributed enormously to the war effort. Had the U.S. "Vietnamized" the war earlier, it might have been won in 1967-1968.

Before unmanned combat drones, there was the Grumman OV-1C Mohawk, a twin-engine turboprop fixed-wing reconnaissance aircraft loaded with state-of-the-art target detection systems. Crewed by a pilot and observer, it flew at treetop level by day, taking panoramic photographs. By night it scanned the landscape from 800 feet with side-looking airborne radar (SLAR) and infrared. This lively, detailed memoir recounts the author's 1968-1969 tour with the 1st Cavalry Division in Vietnam, serving as a technical observer (T.O.) aboard an unarmed Mohawk, searching for elusive enemy forces near the DMZ and along the Laotian and Cambodian borders, dodging mountains in the dark and avoiding anti-aircraft fire.

In this heartfelt memoir, Dennis Blessing, Sr., shares his experiences as a grunt in the First Cavalry Division in 1966 and 1967. Blessing's story is drawn from his own remembrance and from the 212 letters that he wrote to his wife while deployed. Among his many combat experiences was the battle of Bong Son in May 1966, in which his platoon was nearly wiped out, going from 36 to only 6 troopers in just a few hours. Told with honesty and vulnerability, the book combines gripping combat with personal reflection, and the author hopes that his story will help other veterans escape the shadow of the war.

In 1968, twenty-one-year-old Fred McCarthy transitioned from the monastic life of a seminary student to that of a U.S. Army helicopter gunship commander in Vietnam. Despite preparation from a family tradition of decorated combat service, a strong sense of patriotism, a love for aviation, and a desire for adventure, he got far more than he bargained for. Written after 50 years of reflection, reading, and study, this memoir tells both a universal story about war, adventure, and perseverance and, also shares the intensely personal experience of the Vietnam War and its legacy for those who fought in it. McCarthy describes many of his missions, reflects on the nature of being a combat helicopter pilot, and processes the experience through his poetry, letters home, and reflective analysis.

The captivating individual stories of 17 U.S. Navy corpsmen who served in Vietnam, told in their own words. Their accounts relate why they joined the Navy in wartime, why they became corpsmen--the enlisted medical specialists of the Navy and Marine Corps--along with many day-to-day, sometimes minute-to-minute recollections of caring for both the wounded and the dead under fire. They also reflect on the long-term effects the war had on them and their families.

This book is a chronicle of the 1975 flight of Vietnamese from their country. It traces the departure from Vietnam and the resettlement of 130,000 of these refugees in the United States and focuses on the process by which Vietnamese went from refugees to immigrants.

Chemical Warfare during the Vietnam War documents the use of antipersonnel chemical weapons throughout the Vietnam War, and explores their effectiveness under the wide variety of circumstances in which they were employed. The short, readable account follows the US program as it progressed from a focus on the humanitarian aspects of non-lethal weapons to their use as a means of augmenting and enhancing the lethality of traditional munitions. It also presents the efforts of the North Vietnamese to both counter US chemical operations and to develop a chemical capability of their own. Chemical Warfare during the Vietnam War is a comprehensive and thoroughly fascinating examination of riot-control agents during the Vietnam War.

#1 New Release in Military & Wars Follow the Coming of Age Adventures of a U.S. Military Brat During the Early Vietnam War Years in Saigon.The early Vietnam war years through the eyes of a U.S. military brat: In May of 1962, Naval Chief Petty Officer Bryant Arbuckle flew to Saigon to establish a new Armed Forces radio station. Next to follow were his wife and three boys, Leslie among them. Saigon Kids is the candid, recondite slice of fourteen-year-old military brat Les Arbuckle's experience at the American Community School (ACS) during the critical months of the Vietnam War when events would, quite literally, ignite in downtown Saigon. In 1963, Saigon was beautiful, violent, and dirty and the most exciting place a fourteen-year-old American boy could live. Saigon offered a rich array of activities, and much to the consternation of their parents and teachers, Les and his fellow military brats explored the dangers with reckless abandon running from machine gun fire, watching a Buddhist monk burn to death, visiting brothels late at night or, trading currency on the black market. Coming of age in the streets of Vietnam War torn Saigon: When Les first arrives in Vietnam, he is a stranger in a strange land, expecting boredom in a country he doesn't know. But the American social scene is more vibrant than he expected. The American Community School is a blend of kids from all over the globe who arrived in Saigon as the fuse on Saigon was about to ignite. As the ACS students continue their American lifestyle behind barbed wire, Saigon unravels in chaos and destruction. In spite of this ugliness an ever-present feature of everyday life Les tells his story of teenage angst with humor and precocity. Coming of age tale with a twist: The events leading up to the Vietnam War provide an unusual backdrop for this coming-of-age tale with a twist. Saigon Kids will also make a perfect companion to the documentary film (sponsored by the New York Foundation for the Arts) currently in production. The film chronicles the lives of "military brats" living in Saigon in the volatile years from 1958 to 1964.

This book picks up where Passing Time: A Vietnam Veteran Against the War left off, and completes the trilogy begun with Vietnam-Perkasie: A Combat Marine Memoir. It begins with the Coast Guard raid on Ehrhart's oil tanker and ends with the conclusion of his trial for possession of "controlled substances," a span of time that corresponds almost exactly with the opening of the House Judiciary Committee's hearings on the impeachment of Richard Nixon and Nixon's resignation and pardon by Gerald Ford. Along the way, Ehrhart encounters a wise and sympathetic lawyer, an MG Midget, a local New Jersey cop who thinks he's Wyatt Earp, New York City detectives who arrest him for armed robbery of a liquor store, a forklift that can turn on a dime, a Coast Guard prosecutor who wants to teach Ehrhart a lesson, the Carranza Memorial, and three ghosts who are as real as you and me.

Developed specifically for the Vietnam War (and made famous by the 2004 presidential campaign), Swift Boats were versatile craft "big enough to outrun anything they couldn't outfight" but too small to handle even a moderate ocean chop, too loud to sneak up on anyone, and too flimsy to withstand the mildest of rocket attacks. This made more difficult an already tough mission: navigating coastal waters for ships and sampans smuggling contraband to the Viet Cong, disrupting enemy supply lines on the rivers and canals of the Mekong Delta, and inserting SEALs behind enemy lines. The stories in this book cover the Swift Boats' early years, which saw search-and-inspect operations in Vietnam's coastal waters, and their later years, when the Swift Boats' mission shifted to the Mekong Delta's labyrinth of 3,000 miles of rivers, streams, and canals. This is an intimate, exciting oral history of Swift Boats at war in Vietnam.

Running Toward the Guns is an autobiographical story and an accounting of Chanty Jong's personal inner self-healing journey that lead to a successfully unexpected discovery. Jong survived the Cambodian genocide during the Khmer Rouge regime of 1975-1979, witnessing the horrors of the killing fields, torture, starvation and much more. His vivid narrative recounts the suffering under the Khmer Rouge, his perseverance to survive physically and emotionally and his perilous escape to America. His memoir relives the traumatic memories of his experiences and traces his arduous personal transformation toward a life of inner peace through intensive meditation.

Now in its second edition, Grunts: The American Combat Soldier in Vietnam provides a fresh approach to understanding the American combat soldier's experience in Vietnam by focusing on the day-to-day experiences of front-line troops. The book delves into the Vietnam combat soldier's experience, from the decision to join the army, life in training and combat, and readjusting to civilian life with memories of war. By utilizing letters, oral histories, and memoirs of actual veterans, Kyle Longley and Jacqueline Whitt offer a powerful insight into the minds and lives of the 870,000 "grunts" who endured the controversial war. Important topics such as class, race, and gender are examined, enabling students to better analyze the social dynamics during this divisive period of American history. In addition to an updated introduction and epilogue, the new edition includes expanded sections on military chaplains, medics, and the moral injury of war. A new timeline provides details of major events leading up to, during, and after the war. A truly comprehensive picture of the Vietnam experience for soldiers, this volume is a valuable and unique addition to military history courses and classes on the Vietnam War and 1960s America.

The Vietnam War has had many long-reaching, traumatic effects, not just on the veterans of the war, but on their children as well. In this book, Weber examines the concept of the war as a social monad, a confusing array of personal stories and public histories that disrupt traditional ways of knowing the social world for the second generation.

Like many other young men during the Vietnam War, Ed Corlew enlisted in hopes of having some influence regarding assignment-safety and training. Instead he found himself in the dangerous door gunner position and, soon after, the crew chief aboard a CH-47 Chinook, 15 miles from the DMZ in 1967 and 1968. Assigned to the famed 1st Cavalry Division, Corlew was shot down three times: in the Battle of Hue, the Battle of Quang Tri, and the A Shau Valley. This memoir began both as a journal and as counselor-recommended therapy for PTSD. He earned four bronze service stars for his service (an estimated 1000 flying hours) during the war's bloodiest year, enduring enemy mortar and rocket attacks. Engaging, frank, and full of action, Corlew describes his many combat experiences as well as the emotional effects-all through the lens of his Christian faith.

Cold War Friendships explores the plight of the Asian ally of the American wars in Korea and Vietnam. Enlisted into proxy warfare, this figure is not a friend but a "friendly," a wartime convenience enlisted to serve a superpower. It is through this deeply unequal relation, however, that the Cold War friendly secures her own integrity and insists upon her place in the neocolonial imperium. This study reads a set of highly enterprising wartime subjects who make their way to the US via difficult attachments. American forces ventured into newly postcolonial Korea and Vietnam, both plunged into civil wars, to draw the dividing line of the Cold War. The strange success of containment and militarization in Korea unraveled in Vietnam, but the friendly marks the significant continuity between these hot wars. In both cases, the friendly justified the fight: she was also a political necessity who redeployed cold war alliances, and, remarkably, made her way to America. As subjects in process-and indeed, proto-Americans-these figures are prime literary subjects, whose processes of becoming are on full display in Asian American novels and testimonies of these wars. Literary writings on both of these conflicts are presently burgeoning, and Cold War Friendships performs close analyses of key texts whose stylistic constraints and contradictions-shot through with political and historical nuance-present complex gestures of alliance.

American discussions of the Vietnam War tend to gloss over the period from 1972 to the final North Vietnamese offensive in 1975. But on the battlefields, these were brutal times for America's South Vietnamese allies combined with a period of intense diplomatic negotiations conducted under the increasing reality that America had abandoned them. In Peace and Prisoners of War, written in "real-time" as events occurred, Phan Nhat Nam provides a unique window into the harsh combat that followed America's withdrawal and the hopelessness of South Vietnam's attempt to stave off an eventual communist victory. Few others could have written this book. Phan Nhat Nam saw the war for years as a combat soldier in one of South Vietnam's most respected airborne divisions, then as the country's most respected war reporter, and for fourteen years after the war as a prisoner in Hanoi's infamous "re-education" camps, including eight years in solitary confinement. In the war's aftermath anonymity became his fate both inside Vietnam and here in America. But now one of his important works is available, enhanced by an introduction by Senator James Webb, one of the most decorated Marines in the Vietnam War. Webb describes this revealing work as "an unvarnished observation frozen in time, devoid of spin or false retrospective wisdom." Phan's reporting makes clear the sense of doom that foretold the tragic events to come, on the battlefields and in the frustration of negotiating with an implacable enemy while abandoned by its foremost ally. Readers will find this book both enlightening and disturbing, its observations until now overlooked in most histories of the Vietnam War.

As a 26-year old Marine radar intercept officer (RIO), Fleet Lentz flew 131 combat missions in the back seat of the supersonic F-4 B Phantom II during the wind-down of the Vietnam War. Overcoming military regulations, he and his fellow Marines at The Rose Garden (Royal Thai Air Base Nam Phong) kept sorely needed supplies moving in while moving combat troops out of Southeast Asia. His personal and accessible memoir describes how pilots and RIOs executed dangerous air-to-ground bombing missions in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos--quite different from the air-to-air warfare for which they had trained--and kept themselves mission-capable (and human) while surviving harsh circumstances.

Martin Bowman's revealing narrative of the aerial conflict in South-East Asia, 1965-1972, which had its beginnings in 1 November 1955, engulfed Vi tnam, Laos, and Cambodia and only ended with the fall of S ig n on 30 April 1975 has resulted from decades of painstaking fact-finding as well as detailed correspondence with surviving aircrew incorporating a wealth of first-hand accounts, some never told before, supported by dozens of rare and unusual photographs. Together they describe in adrenalin-pumping accuracy the furious aerial battles of a long suffering and bitter war in South-East Asia and in particular the frontline action in the skies over Vietnam that will keep readers on the edge of their seats. They too will find a new and useful perspective on a conflict that cost the Americans 58,022 dead and brought the USA worldwide condemnation for its role in Southeast Asia. Nearly 2,500 Americans remained missing'. This work serves as a tribute to the courageous pilots who flew the F-104 Starfighter in the Widowmakers' war and B-52 bomber crews on Arc Light' Linebacker II' strikes and the eleven days of Christmas which ultimately ended the aerial campaign against North Vi tnam. And as well, strike aircraft such as the USAF F-4 Phantom and the F-105 Thud' and the US Navy carrier-borne jet and propeller-driven strike aircraft and the Americans' sworn enemy, the North Vi?tnamese MiG fighters, feature large, from Rolling Thunder' onwards. Equally, the Hueys and Chinooks and other notable work horses that participated on combat assaults or Ash & Trash missions and transports like the C-130 Herky-Bird', C-123 Provider, Caribou and Vi tnamese C-47 - the Haulers On Call' - that performed sterling service during the gruelling air campaign are not forgotten either. Here, at first hand, are their stories which also include some of the less publicised American forces like the pilots and crewmen who flew the Bird Dogs and all manner of helicopters as well as the largely forgotten Australian and New Zealand Air Force units and the Anzac Battalions whose valuable contributions are too often overlooked. So too is the cost in human misery, death and destruction.

This book revisits the American canon of novels, memoirs, and films about the war in Vietnam, in order to reassess critically the centrality of the discourse of American victimization in the country's imagination of the conflict, and to trace the strategies of representation that establish American soldiers and veterans as the most significant victims of the war. By investigating in detail the imagery of the Vietnamese landscape recreated by American authors and directors, the volume explores the proposition that Vietnam has been turned into an American myth, demonstrating that the process resulted in a dehistoricization and mystification of the conflict that obscured its historical and political realities. Against this background, representations of the war's victims-Vietnamese civilians and American soldiers-are then considered in light of their ideological meanings and uses. Ultimately, the book seeks to demonstrate how, in a relation of power, the question of victimhood can become ideologized, transforming into both a discourse and a strategy of representation-and in doing so, to demythologize something of the "Vietnam" of American cultural narrative.

When his electronic warfare plane--call sign Bat 21--was shot down on 2 April 1972, fifty-three-year-old Air Force navigator Iceal "Gene" Hambleton parachuted into the middle of a North Vietnamese invasion force and set off the biggest and most controversial air rescue effort of the Vietnam War. Now, after twenty-five years of official secrecy, the story of that dangerous and costly rescue is revealed for the first time by a decorated Air Force pilot and Vietnam veteran. Involving personnel from all services, including the Coast Guard, the unorthodox rescue operation claimed the lives of eleven soldiers and airmen, destroyed or damaged several aircraft, and put hundreds of airmen, a secret commando unit, and a South Vietnamese infantry division at risk. The book also examines the thorny debates arising from an operation that balanced one man's life against mounting U.S. and South Vietnamese casualties and material losses, the operation's impact on one of the most critical battles of the war, and the role played by search and rescue as America disengaged from that war.

Poems by Nguyen Phan Que Mai

Translated from the Vietnamese by Bruce Weigl and Nguyen Phan Que Mai

Nguyen Phan Que Mai is among the most exciting writers to emerge from post-war Vietnam. Bruce Weigl, driven by his personal experiences as a soldier during the war in Vietnam, has spent the past 20 years translating contemporary Vietnamese poetry. These penetrating poems, published in bilingual English and Vietnamese, build new bridges between two cultures bound together by war and destruction. "The Secret of Hoa Sen," Que Mai's first full-length U.S. publication, shines with craft, art, and deeply felt humanity.

"I cross the Lam River to return to my homeland
where my mother embraces my grandmother's tomb in the rain,
the soil of Nghe An so dry the rice plants cling to rocks.
My mother chews dry corn; hungry, she tries to forget."

The "Silent Majority" Speech treats Richard Nixon's address of November 3, 1969, as a lens through which to examine the latter years of the Vietnam War and their significance to U.S. global power and American domestic life. The book uses Nixon's speech - which introduced the policy of "Vietnamization" and cited the so-called bloodbath theory as a justification for continued U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia - as a fascinating moment around which to build an analysis of the last years of the war. For Nixon's strategy to be successful, he requested the support of what he called the "great silent majority," a term that continues to resonate in American political culture. Scott Laderman moves beyond the war's final years to address the administration's hypocritical exploitation of moral rhetoric and its stoking of social divisiveness to achieve policy aims. Laderman explores the antiwar and pro-war movements, the shattering of the liberal consensus, and the stirrings of the right-wing resurgence that would come to define American politics. Supplemental primary sources make this book an ideal tool for introducing students to historical research. The "Silent Majority" Speech is critical reading for those studying American political history and U.S.-Asian/Southeast Asian relations.