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Books > History > American history > From 1900 > Postwar, from 1945
This guide showcases knives used by America's clandestine military
in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. It provides the collector
and others interested in the period a way of identifying honest SOG
(Studies and Observations Group) specimens and separating them from
counterfeits. With beautiful color photographs that show a high
level of detail, the book identifies all known SOG specimens (over
165 knives) and includes rare personalized knives and custom combat
knives made in the United States. Sections of the book focus on
Randalls, Eks, Gerbers, and the knives made by tribal artisans in
Southeast Asia. This is the eighth in Mike Silvey's series on
military knives.
During his first tour in Vietnam - 1967-68 - Dick Taylor was a
well-trained and highly motivated amateur assigned to advise a
hard-bitten ARVN infantry battalion working in the mud and streams
of IV Corps. He became savvy in a hurry and found that he was both
brave and resourceful. He barely survived Tet 1968, then served on
an advisory team staff. For the next two years, Taylor earned a
Ranger tab, served on a division staff, and schooled on. He met a
woman, and married her days before he returned to Vietnam. Taylor's
second tour- 1970-71 - was altogether different. He immediately
assumed command of Bravo Company, 1/7 Cav, and excelled as a
commander and a leader. He was aggressive in the field, confident
in his command, and assertive with his superiors. He fought a good
war, a successful war, and when he was forced to take a staff job
it was as his battalion's intelligence officer. But the war was
winding down, its purpose lost. Taylor's spirit's flagged, but not
his fidelity. This well-written combat memoir is heartfelt,
earnest, honest, and just a little melancholy. About the Author
Colonel Richard Taylor was an original member of the first modern
Ranger battalion. He also commanded an infantry training battalion,
served with the 82nd Airborne, directed an academic department at
the Army's staff college and provided military advice to NATO
during the break up of the Warsaw Pact.
A great white angel spreading her wings across the Moreno Valley:
this is how one visitor described the memorial standing atop a
windswept prominence in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains near Taos,
New Mexico. A de-facto national Vietnam veterans memorial, built by
one family more than a decade before the Wall in Washington, DC,
and without aid or recognition from the US government, the chapel
at Angel Fire is a testament to one young American's sacrifice -
but also to the profound determination of his family to find
meaning in their loss. In The Vietnam Veterans Memorial at Angel
Fire, Steven Trout tells the story of Marine Lieutenant David
Westphall, who was killed near Con Thien on May 22, 1968, and of
the Westphall family's subsequent struggle to create and maintain a
one-of-a-kind memorial chapel dedicated to the memory of all
Americans lost in the Vietnam War and to the cause of world peace.
Focused primarily on a life lost amid our nation's most
controversial conflict and on the Westphalls' desperate battle to
keep their chapel open between 1971 and 1982, the book's brisk and
moving narrative traces the memorial's evolution from a personal
act of family remembrance to its emergence as an iconic pilgrimage
destination for thousands of Vietnam veterans. Documenting the
chapel's shifting messages over time, which include a momentary
(and controversial) recognition of the dead on both sides of the
war, The Vietnam Veterans Memorial at Angel Fire spotlights one
American soldier's tragic story and the monument to hope and peace
that it inspired.
"An overwhelmingly eloquent book of the purest and most simple writing on Vietnam."—David Halberstam
More than twenty-five years after the official end of the Vietnam War, Dear America allows us to witness the war firsthand through the eyes of the men and women who served in Vietnam. In this collection of more than 200 letters, they share their first impressions of the rigors of life in the bush, their longing for home and family, their emotions over the conduct of the war, and their ache at the loss of a friend in battle. Poignant in their rare honesty, the letters from Vietnam are "riveting,...extraordinary by [their] very ordinariness...for the most part, neither deep nor philosophical, only very, very human" (Los Angeles Times). Revealing the complex emotions and daily realities of fighting in the war, these close accounts offer a powerful, uniquely personal portrait of the many faces of Vietnam's veterans. Over 100,000 copies sold.
"Not a history book, not a war novel....Dear America is a book of truth."—Boston Globe
Why did the USA become involved in Vietnam? What led US policy
makers to become convinced that Vietnam posed a threat to American
interests? In The Road to Vietnam, Pablo de Orellana traces the
origins of the US-Vietnam War back to 1945-1948 and the diplomatic
relations fostered in this period between the US, France and
Vietnam, during the First Vietnam War that pitted imperial France
against the anti-colonial Vietminh rebel alliance. With specific
focus on the representation of the parties involved through the
processes of diplomatic production, the book examines how the
groundwork was laid for the US-Vietnam War of the 60's and 70's.
Examining the France-Vietminh conflict through poststructuralist
and postcolonial lenses, de Orellana reveals the processes by which
the US and France built up the perception of Vietnam as a communist
threat. Drawing on archival diplomatic texts, the representation of
political identity between diplomatic actors is examined as a cause
leading up to American involvement in the First Vietnam War, and
will be sure to interest scholars in the fields of fields of
diplomatic studies, international relations, diplomatic history and
Cold War history.
Following the Text Offensive, a shift in U.S. naval strategy in
1967-1968 saw young men fresh out of high school policing the
canals and tributaries of South Vietnam aboard PBRs (patrol boat,
riverine)--unarmored yet heavily armed and highly maneuverable
vessels designed to operate in shallow, weedy waterways. This
memoir recounts the experiences of the author and his shipmates as
they cruised the Viet Cong-occupied backwaters of the Mekong Delta,
and their emotional metamorphosis as wartime events shaped the men
they would be for the remainder of their lives.
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Our Vietnam
Langguth
Paperback
R698
R611
Discovery Miles 6 110
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