A groundbreaking new history of how the Vietnam War thwarted U.S. liberal ambitions in the developing world and at home in the 1960s At the start of the 1960s, John F. Kennedy and other American liberals expressed boundless optimism about the ability of the United States to promote democracy and development in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. With U.S. power, resources, and expertise, almost anything seemed possible in the countries of the Cold War's "Third World"-developing, postcolonial nations unaligned with the United States or Soviet Union. Yet by the end of the decade, this vision lay in ruins. What happened? In The End of Ambition, Mark Atwood Lawrence offers a groundbreaking new history of America's most consequential decade. He reveals how the Vietnam War, combined with dizzying social and political changes in the United States, led to a collapse of American liberal ambition in the Third World-and how this transformation was connected to shrinking aspirations back home in America. By the middle and late 1960s, democracy had given way to dictatorship in many Third World countries, while poverty and inequality remained pervasive. As America's costly war in Vietnam dragged on and as the Kennedy years gave way to the administrations of Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon, America became increasingly risk averse and embraced a new policy of promoting mere stability in the Third World. Paying special attention to the U.S. relationships with Brazil, India, Iran, Indonesia, and southern Africa, The End of Ambition tells the story of this momentous change and of how international and U.S. events intertwined. The result is an original new perspective on a war that continues to haunt U.S. foreign policy today.

Inside the Pentagon Papers addresses legal and moral issues that resonate today as debates continue over government secrecy and democracy's requisite demand for truthfully informed citizens. In the process, it also shows how a closer study of this signal event can illuminate questions of government responsibility in any era. When Daniel Ellsberg leaked a secret government study about the Vietnam War to the press in 1971, he set off a chain of events that culminated in one of the most important First Amendment decisions in American legal history. That affair is now part of history, but the story behind the case has much to tell us about government secrecy and the public's right to know. Commissioned by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, ""the Pentagon Papers"" were assembled by a team of analysts who investigated every aspect of the war. Ellsberg, a member of the team, was horrified by the government's public lies about the war - discrepancies with reality that were revealed by the report's secret findings. His leak of the report to the New York Times and Washington Post triggered the Nixon administration's heavy-handed attempt to halt publication of their stories, which in turn led to the Supreme Court's ruling that Nixon's actions violated the Constitution's free speech guarantees. Inside the Pentagon Papers reexamines what happened, why it mattered, and why it still has relevance today. Focusing on the ""back story"" of the Pentagon Papers and the resulting court cases, it draws upon a wealth of oral history and previously classified documents to show the consequences of leak and litigation both for the Vietnam War and for American history. Included here for the first time are transcripts of previously secret White House telephone tapes revealing the Nixon administration's repressive strategies, as well as the government's formal charges against the newspapers presented by Solicitor General Erwin Griswold to the Supreme Court. Coeditor John Prados's point-by-point analysis of these charges demonstrates just how weak the government's case was - and how they reflected Nixon's paranoia more than legitimate national security issues.

Hailed as a "pithy and compelling account of an intensely relevant topic" (Kirkus Reviews), this wide-ranging volume offers a superb account of a key moment in modern U.S. and world history. Drawing upon the latest research in archives in China, Russia, and Vietnam, Mark Lawrence creates an extraordinary, panoramic view of all sides of the war. His narrative begins well before American forces set foot in Vietnam, delving into French colonialism's contribution to the 1945 Vietnamese revolution, and revealing how the Cold War concerns of the 1950s led the United States to back the French. The heart of the book covers the "American war," ranging from the overthrow of Ngo Dinh Diem and the impact of the Tet Offensive to Nixon's expansion of the war into Cambodia and Laos, and the final peace agreement of 1973. Finally, Lawrence examines the aftermath of the war, from the momentous liberalization-"Doi Moi"-in Vietnam to the enduring legacy of this infamous war in American books, films, and political debate.

This memoir of the Vietnam War is structured as a series of short stories that convey the emotional and physical landscape of the Vietnam War. It is a window into the war from the perspective of the author, who served in a rapid response assault force, as 'the Marine'. The reader shares the Marine's experience through a year of combat that tested his character and shaped his destiny. Small joined the Marine Corps in 1969 at 19 years old, coming from a small Vermont farming community. After boot camp and speciality training he landed in Da Nang as a private first class. With three battlefield promotions in 8 months, he soon became a platoon sergeant. Small did not talk of his experiences in Vietnam over the next forty years, but has now written this book, for veterans' families, including his own, to understand what their loved ones experienced. It is a unique and powerful text that is that it is written in such a way it brings you inside the marine; you see what he sees, feel what he feels. You know him; his back story; what he is thinking; why he made the decisions he needed to make. No names are mentioned throughout the book. Memories Unleashed is an assemblage of memories, consisting of stories that stand alone to create a whole greater than the sum of its parts. It addresses the warrior, the lives of innocent people caught up in the war, and the American and Vietnamese families impacted by those who fought.

This book assesses the emergence and transformation of global protest movements during the Vietnam War era. It explores the relationship between protest focused on the war and other emancipatory and revolutionary struggles, moving beyond existing scholarship to examine the myriad interlinked protest issues and mobilisations around the globe during the Indochina Wars. Bringing together scholars working from a range of geographical, historiographical and methodological perspectives, the volume offers a new framework for understanding the history of wartime protest. The chapters are organised around the social movements from the three main geopolitical regions of the world during the 1960s and early 1970s: the core capitalist countries of the so-called first world, the socialist bloc and the Global South. The final section of the book then focuses on international organisations that explicitly sought to bridge and unite solidarity and protest around the world. In an era of persistent military conflict, the book provides timely contributions to the question of what war does to protest movements and what protest movements do to war.

"Fulbright was erudite and eloquent in all the books he wrote, but this one is his masterpiece. Within its pages lie his now historic remonstrations against a great nation's overreach, his powerful argument for dissent, and his thoughtful propositions for a new way forward . . . lessons and cautions that resonate just as strongly today." - From the foreword by Bill Clinton J. William Fulbright (1905-1995), a Rhodes scholar and lawyer, began his long career in public service when he was elected to serve Arkansas's Third District in Congress in 1942. He quickly became a prominent member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, where he introduced the Fulbright Resolution calling for participation in an organization that became the United Nations. Elected to the Senate in 1944, he promoted the passage of legislation establishing the Fulbright exchange program, and he served as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from 1959 to 1974, longer than any senator in American history. Fulbright drew on his extensive experience in international relations to write The Arrogance of Power, a sweeping critique of American foreign policy, in particular the justification for the Vietnam War, Congress's failure to set limits on it, and the impulses that gave rise to it. The book-with its solid underpinning the idea that "the most valuable public servant, like the true patriot, is one who gives a higher loyalty to his country's ideals than to its current policy"-was published in 1966 and sold 400,000 copies. The New York Times called it "an invaluable antidote to the official rhetoric of government." Enhanced by a new forward by President Bill Clinton, this eloquent treatise will resonate with today's readers pondering, as Francis O. Wilcox wrote in the original preface, the peril of nations whose leaders lack ""the wisdom and the good judgment to use their power wisely and well.

Pham Xuan An was one of the twentieth century's greatest spies. While working as a correspondent for Time during the Vietnam War, he sent intelligence reports - written in invisible ink or hidden inside spring rolls in film canisters - to Ho Chi Minh and his generals in North Vietnam. Only after Saigon fell in 1975 did An's colleagues learn that the affable raconteur in their midst, acclaimed as ""dean of the Vietnamese press corps,"" was actually a general in the North Vietnamese Army. In recognition of his tradecraft and his ability to spin military losses - such as the Tet Offensive of 1968 - into psychological gains, An was awarded sixteen military medals. After the book's original publication, WikiLeaks revealed that Thomas A. Bass's account of An's career was distributed to CIA agents as a primer in espionage. Now available in paper with a new preface, An's story remains one of the most gripping to emerge from the era.

The F-105D Thunderchief was originally designed as a low-altitude nuclear strike aircraft, but the outbreak of the Vietnam War led to it being used instead as the USAF's primary conventional striker against the exceptionally well-defended targets in North Vietnam and Laos. F-105 crews conducted long-distance missions from bases in Thailand, refuelling in flight several times and carrying heavy external bombloads.

The MiG-17 was the lightweight, highly manoeuvrable defending fighter it encountered most often in 1965-68 during Operation Rolling Thunder. A development of the MiG-15, which shocked UN forces during the Korean War, its emphasis was on simplicity and ease of maintenance in potentially primitive conditions.

Fully illustrated with stunning artwork, this book shows how these two aircraft, totally different in design and purpose, fought in a series of duels that cost both sides dearly.

From Andrew Wiest, the bestselling author of The Boys of '67: Charlie Company's War in Vietnam and one of the leading scholars in the study of the Vietnam War, comes a frank exploration of the human experience during the conflict. Vietnam allows the reader a grunt's-eye-view of the conflict - from the steaming rice paddies and swamps of the Mekong Delta, to the triple-canopy rainforest of the Central Highlands and the forlorn Marine bases that dotted the DMZ. It is the definitive oral history of the Vietnam War told in the uncompromising, no-holds barred language of the soldiers themselves.

"'I never got a chance to be a girl, ' Kate O'Hare Palmer lamented, thirty-four years after her tour as an army nurse in Vietnam. Although proud of having served, she felt that the war she never understood had robbed her of her innocence and forced her to grow up too quickly. As depicted in a photograph taken late in her tour, long hours in the operating room exhausted her both physically and mentally. Her tired eyes and gaunt face reflected th e weariness she felt after treating countless patients, some dying, some maimed, all, like her, forever changed. Still, she learned to work harder and faster than she thought she could, to trust her nursing skills, and to live independently. She developed a way to balance the dangers and benefits of being a woman in the army and in the war. Only fourteen months long, her tour in Vietnam profoundly affected her life and her beliefs."

Such vivid personal accounts abound in historian Kara Dixon Vuic's compelling look at the experiences of army nurses in the Vietnam War. Drawing on more than 100 interviews, Vuic allows the nurses to tell their own captivating stories, from their reasons for joining the military to the physical and emotional demands of a horrific war and postwar debates about how to commemorate their service.

Vuic also explores the gender issues that arose when a male-dominated army actively recruited and employed the services of 5,000 nurses in the midst of a growing feminist movement and a changing nursing profession. Women drawn to the army's patriotic promise faced disturbing realities in the virtually all-male hospitals of South Vietnam. Men who joined the nurse corps ran headlong into the army's belief that women should nurse and men should fight.

"Officer, Nurse, Woman" brings to light the nearly forgotten contributions of brave nurses who risked their lives to bring medical care to soldiers during a terrible--and divisive--war.

A Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist in History Winner of the 2018 Marine Corps Heritage Foundation Greene Award for a distinguished work of nonfiction. The first battle book from Mark Bowden since his #1 New York Times bestseller Black Hawk Down, Hue 1968, "an instantly recognizable classic of military history" (Christian Science Monitor), was published to massive critical acclaim and became a New York Times bestseller. In the early hours of January 31, 1968, the North Vietnamese launched over one hundred attacks across South Vietnam in what would become known as the Tet Offensive. The lynchpin of Tet was the capture of Hue, Vietnam's intellectual and cultural capital, by 10,000 National Liberation Front troops who descended from hidden camps and surged across the city of 140,000. Within hours the entire city was in their hands save for two small military outposts. American commanders refused to believe the size and scope of the Front's presence, ordering small companies of marines against thousands of entrenched enemy troops. After several futile and deadly days, Lieutenant Colonel Ernie Cheatham would finally come up with a strategy to retake the city in some of the most intense urban combat since World War II. With unprecedented access to war archives in the U.S. and Vietnam and inter-views with participants from both sides, Bowden narrates each stage of this crucial battle through multiple viewpoints. Played out over twenty-four days and ultimately costing 10,000 lives, the Battle of Hue was the bloodiest of the entire war. When it ended, the American debate was never again about winning, only about how to leave. Hue 1968 is a gripping and moving account of this pivotal moment.

In the Cambodian proverb, "when broken glass floats" is the time when evil triumphs over good. That time began in 1975, when the Khmer Rouge took power in Cambodia and the Him family began their trek through the hell of the "killing fields." In a mesmerizing story, Him vividly recounts a Cambodia where rudimentary labor camps are the norm and technology, such as cars and electricity, no longer exists. Death becomes a companion at the camps, along with illness. Yet through the terror, Chanrithy's family remains loyal to one another despite the Khmer Rouge's demand of loyalty only to itself. Moments of inexpressible sacrifice and love lead them to bring what little food they have to the others, even at the risk of their own lives. In 1979, "broken glass" finally sinks. From a family of twelve, only five of the Him children survive. Sponsored by an uncle in Oregon, they begin their new lives in a land that promises welcome to those starved for freedom.

The book describes my first seven months in Viet Nam, as a platoon leader in Bravo Company of the Third Battalion, 187th Infantry. I wanted to make it about the men I led and served with, and in some measure my reaction to the events of those seven months. The first part of the book deals with the routine tactics, unending work, misery and occasional hilarity of infantry life. The bulk of the book, however, deals with two events, within three weeks of each other: The battle of Dong Ngai and the battle of Dong Ap Bia - Hamburger Hill. The Rakkasans - the 3/187th - are the most highly decorated unit in the history of the United States Army, and two of those decorations were awarded for those two battles. By happenstance, I was in the middle of both. These are truly historical events. I wanted to convey the real face of war, both its mindless carnage and its nobility of spirit. Above all, I want to convey what happened to both the casual reader and the military historian and make them aware of the extraordinary spirit of the men of First Platoon, Bravo Company. They were ordinary men doing extraordinary things.

Few historians of the Vietnam War have covered the post-1975 era or engaged comprehensively with refugee politics, humanitarianism, and human rights as defining issues of the period. After Saigon's Fall is the first major work to uncover this history. Amanda C. Demmer offers a new account of the post-War normalization of US-Vietnam relations by centering three major transformations of the late twentieth century: the reassertion of the US Congress in American foreign policy; the Indochinese diaspora and changing domestic and international refugee norms; and the intertwining of humanitarianism and the human rights movement. By tracing these domestic, regional, and global phenomena, After Saigon's Fall captures the contingencies and contradictions inherent in US-Vietnamese normalization. Using previously untapped archives to recover a riveting narrative with both policymakers and nonstate advocates at its center, Demmer's book also reveals much about US politics and society in the last quarter of the twentieth century.

By now the world knows well the exploits of World War II admirals Ernest King, Chester Nimitz, and "Bull" Halsey. These brilliant strategists and combat commanders--backed by a powerful Allied coalition, a nation united, gifted civilian leaders, and abundant war-making resources--led U.S. and allied naval forces to victory against the Axis powers. Leadership during the Vietnam War was another story. The Vietnam War and its aftermath sorely tested the professional skill of four-star admirals Harry D. Felt, Ulysses S. Grant Sharp, Thomas H. Moorer, Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr., and James L. Holloway III. Unlike their World War II predecessors, these equally battle-tested leaders had to cope with a flawed American understanding of U.S. and Vietnamese Communist strengths and weaknesses, distrustful and ill-focused Washington leaders, an increasingly discontented American populace, and an ultimately failing war effort. Like millions of other Americans, these five admirals had to come to terms with America's first lost war, and what that loss meant for the future of the nation and the U.S. armed forces. The challenges were both internal and external. A destabilized U.S. Navy was troubled by racial discord, drug abuse, anti-war and anti-establishment sentiment, and a host of personnel and material ills. At the same time, increasingly serious global threats to US interests, such as the rise of Soviet nuclear-missile and naval power, were shaping confrontations on the postwar stage. Critical to the story is how these naval leaders managed their relationships with Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter, and Secretaries of Defense McNamara, Laird, and Schlesinger. Based on prodigious research into many formerly classified sources, Edward J. Marolda relates in dramatic detail how America's top naval leaders tackled their responsibilities, their successes, and their failures. This is a story of dedication to duty, professionalism, and service by America's top admirals during a time of great national and international adversity.

North and South Vietnamese youths had very different experiences of growing up during the Vietnamese War. The book gives a unique perspective on the conflict through the prism of adult-youth relations. By studying these relations, including educational systems, social organizations, and texts created by and for children during the war, Olga Dror analyzes how the two societies dealt with their wartime experience and strove to shape their futures. She examines the socialization and politicization of Vietnamese children and teenagers, contrasting the North's highly centralized agenda of indoctrination with the South, which had no such policy, and explores the results of these varied approaches. By considering the influence of Western culture on the youth of the South and of socialist culture on the youth of the North, we learn how the youth cultures of both Vietnams diverged from their prewar paths and from each other.

Even if you don't know much about the war in Vietnam, you've probably heard of "The Hanoi Hilton," or Hoa Lo Prison, where captured U.S. soldiers were held. What they did there and whether they were treated well or badly by the Vietnamese became lasting controversies. As military personnel returned from captivity in 1973, Americans became riveted by POW coming home stories. What had gone on behind these prison walls? Along with legends of lionized heroes who endured torture rather than reveal sensitive military information, there were news leaks suggesting that others had denounced the war in return for favorable treatment. What wasn't acknowledged, however, is that U.S. troop opposition to the war was vast and reached well into Hoa Loa Prison. Half a century after the fact, Dissenting POWs emerges to recover this history, and to discover what drove the factionalism in Hoa Lo. Looking into the underlying factional divide between prowar "hardliners" and antiwar "dissidents" among the POWs, authors Wilber and Lembcke delve into the postwar American culture that created the myths of the HeroPOW and the dissidents blamed for the loss of the war. What they found was surprising: It wasn't simply that some POWs were for the war and others against it, nor was it an officers versus enlisted men standoff. Rather, it was the class backgrounds of the captives and their precaptive experience that drew the lines. After the war, the hardcore hero holdouts-like John McCain-moved on to careers in politics and business, while the dissidents faded from view as the antiwar movement, that might otherwise have championed them, disbanded. Today, Dissenting POWs is a necessary myth buster, disabusing us of the revisionism that has replaced actual GI resistance with images of suffering POWs - ennobled victims that serve to suppress the fundamental questions of America's drift to endless war.

Speaking to an advisor in 1966 about America's escalation of forces in Vietnam, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara confessed: 'We've made mistakes in Vietnam ... I've made mistakes. But the mistakes I made are not the ones they say I made'. In 'I Made Mistakes', Aurelie Basha i Novosejt provides a fresh and controversial examination of Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara's decisions during the Vietnam War. Although McNamara is remembered as the architect of the Vietnam War, Novosejt draws on new sources - including the diaries of his advisor and confidant John T. McNaughton - to reveal a man who resisted the war more than most. As Secretary of Defense, he did not want the costs of the war associated with a new international commitment in Vietnam, but he sacrificed these misgivings to instead become the public face of the war out of a sense of loyalty to the President.

By January 1968 the fighting in Vietnam seemed to be at a stalemate. Yet General William Westmoreland, commander of American forces, announced a new phase of the war in which 'the end begins to come into view.' The North Vietnamese had different ideas. In mid-1967, the leadership in Hanoi had started planning an offensive intended to win the war in a single stroke. Part military action and part popular uprising, the Tet Offensive included attacks across South Vietnam, but the most dramatic and successful would be the capture of Hue, the country's cultural capital. At 2:30 a.m. on January 31, 10,000 National Liberation Front troops descended from hidden camps and surged across the city of 140,000. By morning, all of Hue was in Front hands save for two small military outposts. The commanders in country and politicians in Washington refused to believe the size and scope of the Front's presence. After several futile and deadly days, Lieutenant Colonel Ernie Cheatham would finally come up with a strategy to retake the city, block by block and building by building, in some of the most intense urban combat since World War II. With unprecedented access to war archives in the U.S. and Vietnam and interviews with participants from both sides, Bowden narrates each stage of this crucial battle through multiple points of view. Played out over twenty-four days of terrible fighting and ultimately costing 10,000 combatant and civilian lives, the Battle of Hue was by far the bloodiest of the entire war. When it ended, the American debate was never again about winning, only about how to leave. In Hue 1968, Bowden masterfully reconstructs this pivotal moment in the American war in Vietnam.

How the Vietnam War changed American art By the late 1960s, the United States was in a pitched conflict in Vietnam, against a foreign enemy, and at home-between Americans for and against the war and the status quo. This powerful book showcases how American artists responded to the war, spanning the period from Lyndon B. Johnson's fateful decision to deploy U.S. Marines to South Vietnam in 1965 to the fall of Saigon ten years later. Artists Respond brings together works by many of the most visionary and provocative artists of the period, including Asco, Chris Burden, Judy Chicago, Corita Kent, Leon Golub, David Hammons, Yoko Ono, and Nancy Spero. It explores how the moral urgency of the Vietnam War galvanized American artists in unprecedented ways, challenging them to reimagine the purpose and uses of art and compelling them to become politically engaged on other fronts, such as feminism and civil rights. The book presents an era in which artists struggled to synthesize the turbulent times and participated in a process of free and open questioning inherent to American civic life. Beautifully illustrated, Artists Respond features a broad range of art, including painting, sculpture, printmaking, performance and body art, installation, documentary cinema and photography, and conceptualism. Published in association with the Smithsonian American Art Museum Exhibition Schedule Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC March 15-August 18, 2019 Minneapolis Institute of Art September 28, 2019-January 5, 2020

The March 1965 landing of the US Marine Corps at Da Nang, South Vietnam, marked the first large-scale deployment of US forces to the region. From then on, the Marine Corps fought continuously until May 1975, when two Marines became the last US servicemen killed in that war during the Mayaguez battle. With over 200 archival photos, many never before published, the weapons, vehicles, and equipment of the Marines in theater are documented in this volume. Small arms, mortars and artillery, tanks, amphibious, armored and soft-skinned vehicles, helicopters, uniforms, and personal and specialist equipment are featured in superb-quality photos and detailed captions, including photos from such legendary Marine Corps battles as Hue and Khe Sanh.

While the F 105 Thunderchief was the USAF's principal strike weapon during the Rolling Thunder campaign, the US Navy relied on the Douglas A-4 Skyhawk for the majority of its strikes on North Vietnam. The Skyhawk entered service in 1956 and remained in continuous production for 26 years. Throughout Operation Rolling Thunder it was the US Navy's principal day time light strike bomber, remaining in use after its replacement, the more sophisticated A-7 Corsair II, began to appear in December 1967. During the 1965-68 Rolling Thunder period, up to five attack carriers regularly launched A-4 strike formations against North Vietnam. These formations faced an ever-expanding and increasingly coordinated Soviet-style network of anti-aircraft artillery missiles and fighters. Skyhawk pilots were often given the hazardous task of attacking anti-aircraft defences and to improve accuracy, they initially dropped ordnance below 3000 ft in a 30-degree dive in order to bomb visually below the persistent low cloud over North Vietnam, putting the aircraft within range of small-arms fire. The defenders had the advantage of covering a relatively small target area, and the sheer weight of light, medium and heavy gunfire directed at an attacking force brought inevitable casualties, and a single rifle bullet could have the same effect as a larger shell. This illustrated title examines both the A-4 Skyhawk and the Vietnamese AAA defences in context, exploring their history and analysing their tactics and effectiveness during the conflict.

Jerry Rose, a young journalist and photographer in Vietnam, exposed the secret beginnings of America's Vietnam War in the early 1960s. Putting his life in danger, he interviewed Vietnamese villagers in a countryside riddled by a war of terror and intimidation and embedded himself with soldiers on the ground, experiences that he distilled into the first major article to be written about American troops fighting in Vietnam. His writing was acclaimed as "war reporting that ranks with the best of Ernest Hemingway and Ernie Pyle," and in the years to follow, Time, The New York Times, The Reporter, New Republic, and The Saturday Evening Post regularly published his stories and photographs. In spring 1965, Jerry's friend and former doctor, Phan Huy Quat, became the new Prime Minister of Vietnam, and he invited Jerry to become an advisor to his government. Jerry agreed, hoping to use his deep knowledge of the country to help Vietnam. In September 1965, while on a trip to investigate corruption in the provinces of Vietnam, he died in a plane crash in Vietnam, leaving behind a treasure trove of journals, letters, stories, and a partially completed novel. The Journalist is the result of his sister, Lucy Rose Fischer, taking those writings and crafting a memoir in "collaboration" with her late brother-giving the term "ghostwritten" a whole new meaning.

From the defeat of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam at Ap Bac to the battles of the Ia Drang Valley, Khe Sanh, and more, Storms over the Mekong offers a reassessment of key turning points in the Vietnam War. Award-winning historian William P. Head not only reexamines these pivotal battles but also provides a new interpretation on the course of the war in Southeast Asia. In considering Operation Rolling Thunder, for example-which Head dubs as "too much rolling and not enough thunder"-readers will grasp the full scope of the campaign, from specifically targeted bridges in North Vietnam to the challenges of measuring success or failure, the domestic political situation, and how over time, Head argues, "slowly, but surely, Rolling Thunder dug itself into a hole." Likewise, Head shows how the battles for Saigon and Hue during the Tet Offensive of 1968 were tactical defeats for the Communist forces with as many as 40,000 killed and no real gains. At the same time, however, Tet made it clear to many in Washington that victory in Vietnam would require a still greater commitment of men and resources, far more than the American people were willing to invest. Storms over the Mekong is a blow-by-blow account of the key military events, to be sure. But beyond that, it is also a measured reconsideration of the battles and moments that Americans thought they already knew, adding up to a new history of the Vietnam War.