That America was drawn into the Vietnam War by the French has been recognized, but rarely explored. This book analyzes the years from 1945 with the French military reconquest of Vietnam until 1963 with the execution of the French-endorsed dictator, Ngo Dinh Diem, demonstrating how the US should not have followed the French into Vietnam. It shows how the Korean War triggered the flow of American military hardware and finances to underpin France's war against the Marxist-oriented Vietnam Republic led by Ho Chi Minh.

The body of work assembled in this collection falls within the tradition of how wars are remembered, and written of, by their surviving veterans. The War I Survived Was Vietnam, and my writing about it, excepting a few poems, has been confined to the staples of non-fiction: memoir, reporting, criticism and commentary. Among the articles reproduced here, criticism is by far the dominant voice in which I have processed my post-war reflections. A good deal of this work also ventures into the exploratory realm of the American veteran identity, to include my personal struggle to outdistance the demons of PTSD. As print has evolved into digital media, my criticism has migrated increasingly to the blogosphere permitting the restrictive boundaries of the book review to blossom over the more far ranging horizons of the essay. Several of these works are of relevance to how the Vietnam experience is being archived by scholars for historical interpretation. Prior to my career in the writing life, I was a political activist advocating for the welfare of GIs and veterans, notably around the health effects of exposure during active service to deadly radiation and poisonous herbicides. Selected material on these topics has also been included in this collection.

Nicky Venditti, a U.S. Army helicopter pilot with a love of fast cars and practical jokes, went to Vietnam in 1969 and was dead after 11 days, killed by an explosion during Americal Division training for new arrivals at Chu Lai. The full story of the incident did not come out until the author, David Venditta (a different spelling), Venditti's cousin, made a chance discovery that began a decades-long effort to find out exactly what happened, what the Army did about it and who was held responsible. This book documents the Army's mishandling of the incident and the effects on the families and friends of Venditti and of the two other young soldiers who died with him.

As a GI reporter for the 1st Air Cavalry Division in Vietnam, the author-""an enlisted man writing primarily for enlisted men""-chronicled the experiences of combat soldiers in newspaper and magazine articles. His stories gave the Army's version of events, sprinkled with human interest and humor. They include his observations and photos of jungle missions, life on firebases, struggles in the rear and his own survival as a harried frontline journalist. He also wrote almost daily letters home to his parents-personal dispatches filled with frank commentary and poignant, at times disturbing anecdotes. His stories and letters are combined here in chronological order, providing a richly detailed narrative of combat in Vietnam.

Through readings of literature, canonical history texts, studies of museum displays and media analysis, this work explores the historical formation of myths of Canadian national identity and then how these myths were challenged (and affirmed during the 1990 standoff at Oka. It draws upon history, literary criticism, anthropology, studies in nationalism and ethnicity and post-colonial theory.

Operation Hump, the first major battle between the U.S. Army and the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces, took place November 5-9, 1965, in South Vietnam's War Zone D. Known as ""The Hump,"" it would change the nature of the war, escalating it from a hit-and-run guerrilla conflict to a bloody contest between Communist main force units and American commands of battalion size or larger. This memoir of an Operation Hump survivor begins with sequence of events leading up to the battle, from the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Drawing on official Army documents and the recollections of fellow combatants, the author not only describes the battle in detail but explains the war's basis in fabrications at the highest levels of the U.S. government. His experiences with post-traumatic stress disorder after the war and his eventual return to Vietnam in the 1990s are included.

On 16 March 1968, two US infantry companies entered a Vietnamese village and in the course of a single morning killed over 400 of its unarmed, unresisting inhabitants . . . This is the first book to examine the response of American society to the My Lai massacre and its ambiguous place in American national memory. Kendrick Oliver argues that the massacre revelations left many Americans untroubled. It was only when the soldiers most immediately responsible came to be tried that opposition to the conflict grew, for these prosecutions were regarded by supporters of the war as evidence that the national leaders no longer had the will to do what was necessary to win. Oliver goes on to show that, contrary to interpretations of the Vietnam conflict as an unhealed national trauma or wound, many Americans have assimilated the war and its violence rather too well, and they were able to do so even when that violence was most conspicuous and current. US soldiers have been presented as the conflict's principal victims, and this was true even in the case of My Lai. It was the American perpetrators of the massacre and not the Vietnamese they brutalized who became the central object of popular concern. Both the massacre and its reception reveal the problem of human empathy in conditions of a counter-revolutionary war - a war, moreover, that had always been fought for geopolitical credibility, not for the sake of the Vietnamese. This incisive enquiry into the moral history of the Vietnam war should be essential reading for all students of the conflict, as well as others interested in the war and its cultural legacies. -- .

Why did the US make a commitment to an independent South Vietnam? Could a major war have been averted? Fredrik Logevall provides a concise, comprehensive and accessible introduction to the origins of the Vietnam War from the end of the Indochina War in 1954 to the eruption of full-scale war in 1965, and places events against their full international background.

Fidel Castro has ruled Cuba for over 40 years, yet he remains one of the world's most complex leaders. Rebellious at an early age, he attemped to organize a strike of sugar workers against his father as a teenager. By his early twenties, he made it clear that he was an opponent of the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista and wanted a social change for Cuba. His leadership of the successful revolution in 1959 led him to political power behind the support of the Cuban people. For decades critics have predicted his fall from power, but he remains the uncontested leader. Castro's life and career are described in this biography, including his childhood, family, education, and political endeavors. Readers will learn of his attendance at Havana Law School, his imprisonment, his rise to political power, along with history topics and events such as communism, the Bay of Pigs invasion, and the Cuban missile crisis. A timeline provides a comprehensive list of important events in his life, and a bibliography covers print and electronic sources for further research.

The Redcatcher Express is the author's Vietnam War memoirs. Drafted and sent to fight in the war, the author, a musician by trade, is thwarted in his attempt to get into an Army band. He ends up in a Recon Platoon of the 199th Light Infantry Brigade, where he endures the adversity of war. The situation worsens when he is assigned to be point man for Recon. At the forefront of battle, the author feels that he is losing his senses. His prayers are answered when a reporter for the Stars and Stripes writes a story about his musical past. The Commanding General of the 199th reads the story and requests that the author assemble a combo to entertain the troops and raise the morale. The author organizes the Redcatcher Express and the band, made up of American GIs, becomes popular with the troops. He later discovers that raising the morale is instrumental in increasing the enemy body count in the 199th's war campaign. The body count of Vietcong was the centerpiece of the American approach to waging the war, conducted through search and destroy missions in remote jungle regions. Federation of American Scientists Military Analysis Network

First published in 1978. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In November 1963, the president of South Vietnam and his brother were brutally executed in a coup that was sanctioned and supported by the American government. President Kennedy later explained to his close friend Paul "Red" Fay that the reason the United States made the fateful decision to get rid of the Ngos was in no small part because of South Vietnam's first lady, Madame Nhu. "That goddamn bitch," Fay remembers President Kennedy saying, "She's responsible ... that bitch stuck her nose in and boiled up the whole situation down there."
The coup marked the collapse of the Diem government and became the US entry point for a decade-long conflict in Vietnam. Kennedy's death and the atrocities of the ensuing war eclipsed the memory of Madame Nhu--with her daunting mixture of fierceness and beauty. But at the time, to David Halberstam, she was "the beautiful but diabolic sex dictatress," and Malcolm Browne called her "the most dangerous enemy a man can have."
By 1987, the once-glamorous celebrity had retreated into exile and seclusion, and remained there until young American Monique Demery tracked her down in Paris thirty years later. Finding the Dragon Lady is Demery's story of her improbable relationship with Madame Nhu, and--having ultimately been entrusted with Madame Nhu's unpublished memoirs and her diary from the years leading up to the coup--the first full history of the Dragon Lady herself, a woman who was feared and fantasized over in her time, and who singlehandedly frustrated the government of one of the world's superpowers.

This international and interdisciplinary volume examines the Vietnam War from new perspectives including those of the Vietnamese diaspora, and explores the ways in which perceptions of the war have altered in recent years. It differs from other titles on the Vietnam War in that it acknowledges the South Vietnamese experience of the war, and encompasses the perspectives of the Vietnamese diaspora in the US, Australia and France, as well as the work of American, Australian and French historians. The war is reinterpreted and reassessed through the lens of history, politics, biography and literature. The effects of the Vietnam War outside the boundaries of the Vietnamese state are ongoing. The presence of substantial Vietnamese communities in countries that participated in the conflict is contributing to changing interpretations of the war. This volume provides new insights into the reconstruction and memorialization of the war by Vietnamese, American, Australian and French scholars, and contains twelve chapters grouped under "War and Politics", "Memorials and Commemoration", "War and Women's Writing", and "Identities and Legacies", covering South Vietnamese leadership and policies, women and civilians, veterans overseas, the involvement of smaller allies in the war such as Australia, accounts by US, Australian and South Vietnamese servicemen as well as those of Indigenous soldiers in the US and Australia, memorials and commemoration, and the legacy of war on individual lives, contemporary memories, and government policy.

First published in 1915, Towards International Government considers the consequences of war for global diplomacy and the alliance system. Hobson argues that, to reduce armaments and the possibility of another world war, an organisational structure of international government must be put into place. An extension of the League of Nations, Hobson proposes that this council would need to hold legislative powers enabling it to impose economic sanctions and, if necessary, the ability to deploy an international force. This is a fascinating and exceptionally forward-thinking work, of great importance to economic and political historians of the twentieth century.

In 2014, the US marks the 50th anniversary of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, the basis for the Johnson administration s escalation of American military involvement in Southeast Asia and war against North Vietnam. "Vietnam War Slang "outlines the context behind the slang used by members of the United States Armed Forces during the Vietnam War.

Troops facing and inflicting death display a high degree of linguistic creativity. Vietnam was the last American war fought by an army with conscripts, and their involuntary participation in the war added a dimension to the language. War has always been an incubator for slang; it is brutal, and brutality demands a vocabulary to describe what we don t encounter in peacetime civilian life. Furthermore, such language serves to create an intense bond between comrades in the armed forces, helping them to support the heavy burdens of war.

The troops in Vietnam faced the usual demands of war, as well as several that were unique to Vietnam a murky political basis for the war, widespread corruption in the ruling government, untraditional guerilla warfare, an unpredictable civilian population in Vietnam, and a growing lack of popular support for the war back in the US. For all these reasons, the language of those who fought in Vietnam was a vivid reflection of life in wartime.

"

Vietnam War Slang "lays out the definitive record of the lexicon of Americans who fought in the Vietnam War. Assuming no prior knowledge, it presents around 2000 headwords, with each entry divided into sections giving parts of speech, definitions, glosses, the countries of origin, dates of earliest known citations, and citations. It will be an essential resource for Vietnam veterans and their families, students and readers of history, and anyone interested in the principles underpinning the development of slang. "

This book recounts the experiences of a young US Marine officer during the Vietnam War as he fights that war over a nineteen month period in three different geographical areas of South Vietnam. He graphically explains to the reader what it was like to perform three distinct combat missions: long-range ground reconnaissance in the Annamite Mountains of I Corps, infantry operations in the rice paddies and mountains of Quang Nam Province, and special police operations for the CIA in Tay Ninh Province. The author describes in rich detail each of these distinct military activities and provides powerful and explicit examples of each. Using primary sources, such has US Marine Corps official unit histories, CIA documents, and his weekly letters home to his parents, the author relies almost exclusively on primary sources to convey to the reader a story that is devoid of hyperbole and focused on providing an accurate and honest account of combat at the small unit level. Of particular interest to students of the war is his description of his assignment to the CIA as a Provincial Reconnaissance Unit (PRU) advisor in Tay Ninh Province, where he participated in several secret missions as part of the controversial Phoenix Program. He also reveals the name and contribution of the CIA's most valuable spy during the war, the famous "Tay Ninh Source".

In 2014, the US marks the 50th anniversary of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, the basis for the Johnson administration s escalation of American military involvement in Southeast Asia and war against North Vietnam. "Vietnam War Slang "outlines the context behind the slang used by members of the United States Armed Forces during the Vietnam War.

Troops facing and inflicting death display a high degree of linguistic creativity. Vietnam was the last American war fought by an army with conscripts, and their involuntary participation in the war added a dimension to the language. War has always been an incubator for slang; it is brutal, and brutality demands a vocabulary to describe what we don t encounter in peacetime civilian life. Furthermore, such language serves to create an intense bond between comrades in the armed forces, helping them to support the heavy burdens of war.

The troops in Vietnam faced the usual demands of war, as well as several that were unique to Vietnam a murky political basis for the war, widespread corruption in the ruling government, untraditional guerilla warfare, an unpredictable civilian population in Vietnam, and a growing lack of popular support for the war back in the US. For all these reasons, the language of those who fought in Vietnam was a vivid reflection of life in wartime.

"

Vietnam War Slang "lays out the definitive record of the lexicon of Americans who fought in the Vietnam War. Assuming no prior knowledge, it presents around 2000 headwords, with each entry divided into sections giving parts of speech, definitions, glosses, the countries of origin, dates of earliest known citations, and citations. It will be an essential resource for Vietnam veterans and their families, students and readers of history, and anyone interested in the principles underpinning the development of slang. "

When Peter Scott began a 1968 tour in Vietnam advising ethnic Cambodian Khmer Krom paramilitaries, they shared only an earnest desire to check the spread of communism. It took nearly thirty years and a chance reunion for Scott to realize just how much they had become a part of him. This fascinating chronicle of Scott's experiences with the secret army of brave, disciplined warriors is by far the most moving and richly detailed account ever published of the deep bonds forged in war between Americans and our Asian allies.

Successfully blending intense combat narrative and stirring emotional drama, Scott vividly captures both the unique village culture of a little-known, highly spiritual people and their complex relationship with Special Forces soldiers, who found it increasingly difficult to match their charges' commitment to the costly conflict. With a novelist's powers of description and reflection and a professional soldier's keen insight and analysis, Scott raises the standard for literature about the Vietnam War with this searing portrait of promise and betrayal.

Building on his experiences as a Phoenix Program adviser near the Cambodian border, extensive interviews with Khmer Krom survivors, hundreds of hours of research in government archives, and requests for Freedom of Information Act disclosures, Scott seamlessly reconstructs the six-thousand-strong mercenary force's final crusade against communism, beginning in their ancestral home in 1970 and ending on the U.S. West Coast in 1995. Such a hauntingly evocative and highly readable book will both entertain and shock, and it is assured of a place among the classics on Vietnam.

Set as deeply in his mind as in the depths of the Southeast-Asian jungle, a young American soldier embarks on an evocative journey to a war that, for him, will never be over. I am that American soldier. It's 1969. 18 and living in New York City the world was a playground for Mickey, a naive Irish-American kid bored with his life who felt he was ready for the adventures of war. His father served in World War II, his brother a Marine in Vietnam it was now his turn. His 365 days, in the hell that was Vietnam, builds in torment until an attack on a bunker complex in Cambodia where everything goes terribly wrong. Wounded, his friend captured, he becomes a tormented survivor knowing he is always just a heartbeat away from death. His adventure turned nightmare brings a visceral understanding of the words penned by Thoreau, those very same words with which his father imparted enduring wisdom throughout his youth: ""Most men live lives of quiet desperation,"" especially those at war. This emotional journey of self-realisation chronicles the key perspective-shaping experiences of a U.S. Army grunt fighting in Vietnam.

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.

Eighteen nurses who served in the United States military nurse corps during the Vietnam War present their personal accounts in this book. They represent all military branches and both genders. They served in the theater of combat, in the United States, and in countries allied with the U.S. They served in front line hospitals, hospital ships, large medical centers and small clinics. They speak of caring for casualties during a conflict filled with controversy. They speak of patriotism, belief in a greater power, the gaining of knowledge about the nursing profession and about themselves, of persecution and discrimination, of travel and the adventure of friendship and love.

On November 8, 1967, the author arrived at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in San Diego, ill-prepared for the training and abuse that awaited him in boot camp. At the time, he would have done anything to escape; only upon reflection years later did he realize that the self-confidence instilled in him by his drill instructors had probably saved his life in Vietnam. A few months after boot camp, Private Ball was shipped out to Vietnam, joining F Company, 2nd Battalion, 3rd Marines, near Khe Sanh. As an infantryman, a grunt in the vernacular of the Corps, Ball, like the other youths of F Company, did a very difficult and deadly job in such places as the A Shau Valley, Leatherneck Square, the DMZ and other obscure but critical I Corps locales. His--their--fear of death mingled with homesickness. Little did they realize that the horrors of the Vietnam War--horrors that while in-country they often claimed did not even exist--would haunt them for the rest of their lives.

This book narrates the history of the different peoples who have lived in the three major regions of Viet Nam over the past 3,000 years. It brings to life their relationships with these regions' landscapes, water resources, and climatic conditions, their changing cultures and religious traditions, and their interactions with their neighbors in China and Southeast Asia. Key themes include the dramatic impact of changing weather patterns from ancient to medieval and modern times, the central importance of riverine and maritime communications, ecological and economic transformations, and linguistic and literary changes. The country's long experience of regional diversity, multi-ethnic populations, and a multi-religious heritage that ranges from local spirit cults to the influences of Buddhism, Confucianism and Catholicism, makes for a vividly pluralistic narrative. The arcs of Vietnamese history include the rise and fall of different political formations, from chiefdoms to Chinese provinces, from independent kingdoms to divided regions, civil wars, French colonies, and modern republics. In the twentieth century anticolonial nationalism, the worldwide depression, Japanese occupation, a French attempt at reconquest, the traumatic American-Vietnamese war, and the 1975 communist victory all set the scene for the making of contemporary Viet Nam. Rapid economic growth in recent decades has transformed this one-party state into a global trading nation. Yet its rich history still casts a long shadow. Along with other members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, Viet Nam is now involved in a tense territorial standoff in the South China Sea, as a rival of China and a "partner" of the United States. If its independence and future geographical unity seem assured, Viet Nam's regional security and prospects for democracy remain clouded.

Hanoi's Road to the Vietnam War opens in 1954 with the signing of the Geneva accords that ended the eight-year-long Franco-Indochinese War and created two Vietnams. In agreeing to the accords, Ho Chi Minh and other leaders of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam anticipated a new period of peace leading to national reunification under their rule; they never imagined that within a decade they would be engaged in an even bigger feud with the United States. Basing his work on new and largely inaccessible Vietnamese materials as well as French, British, Canadian, and American documents, Pierre Asselin explores the communist path to war. Specifically, he examines the internal debates and other elements that shaped Hanoi's revolutionary strategy in the decade preceding U.S. military intervention, and resulting domestic and foreign programs. Without exonerating Washington for its role in the advent of hostilities in 1965, Hanoi's Road to the Vietnam War demonstrates that those who directed the effort against the United States and its allies in Saigon were at least equally responsible for creating the circumstances that culminated in arguably the most tragic conflict of the Cold War era.

With FULL COLOR maps and illustrations. CMH 91-7-1. United States Army in Vietnam. 2nd of two volumes that examine the Vietnam conflict from the perspective of the theater commander and his headquarters. Traces the story of the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV), from the Communist Tet offensive of early 1968 through the disestablishment of MACV in March 1973. Deals with theater-level command relationships, strategy, and operations.