At "zero dark thirty" on January 30, 1971, units of the U.S. Fifth Mechanized Division left their firebases along the DMZ heading west along Provincial Route 9. The mission, called Dewey Canyon II, was to reopen the road from Khe Sahn Air Base to the Laotian border, in support of a South Vietnamese invasion of Laos (doomed from the start) to cut off the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Alpha Company of U.S. 61st Infantry performed commendably in keeping Route 9 open, with just one casualty killed by friendly fire. They returned to Firebase Charlie-2 in April, exhausted but hopeful--the Fifth would be leaving Vietnam in July. They patrolled the "western hills" through May as rocket attacks fell each evening. On the 21st, a direct hit on a bunker killed 30 of the 63 men inside--18 were from Alpha Co. This is their story, as told to Specialist Lou Pepi by members of his unit.

The first account of the new Taliban-showing who they are, what they want, and how they differ from their predecessors Since the fall of Kabul in 2021, the Taliban have effective control of Afghanistan-a scenario few Western commentators anticipated. But after a twenty-year-long bitter war against the Republic of Afghanistan, reestablishing control is a complex procedure. What is the Taliban's strategy now that they've returned to power? In this groundbreaking new account, Hassan Abbas examines the resurgent Taliban as ruptures between moderates and the hardliners in power continue to widen. The group is now facing debilitating threats-from humanitarian crises to the Islamic State in Khorasan-but also engaging on the world stage, particularly with China and central Asian states. Making considered use of sources and contacts in the region, and offering profiles of major Taliban leaders, Return of the Taliban is the essential account of the movement as it develops and consolidates its grasp on Afghanistan.

In February 1968, the U.S. Army's 82nd Airborne Division was understrength, with only enough paratroopers to deploy a single brigade. The 3rd Brigade was flown 9000 miles to reinforce American units fighting the North Vietnamese Army around Hue--received a Valorous Unit Award for their actions there. James Dorn was on Brigade staff. He later led a rifle platoon with the 3rd in the rice paddies west of Saigon. In his second year with the 173rd Airborne Brigade in the Central Highlands. he again led a platoon until promoted to captain. His frank and detailed memoir recounts their diverse combat missions, inhumanity for civilians and the day-to-day life of Infantrymen in the field.

In 1968, Theodore Hammett stepped forward for a war he believed was wrong, pressured by his father's threat to disown him if he withdrew from a Marine Corps officer candidate program. He hated the Vietnam War and soon grew to hate Vietnam and its people. As a supply officer at a field hospital uncomfortably near the DMZ, he employed thievery, bargaining and lies to secure supplies for his unit and retained his sanity with the help of alcohol, music and the promise of going home. In 2008, he returned to Vietnam for a five-year "second tour" to assist in improving HIV/AIDS policies and prevention programs in Hanoi. His memoir recounts his service at the height of the war, and how the country he detested became his second home.

In 1966, Dr. Richard Carlson was just two years out of medical school and in his mid-20s. He was about to embark on a year-long tour in Vietnam to treat the many forgotten victims of the war: the civilians. During medical school he was introduced to the Los Angeles County General Hospital, the huge institution that provided medical care for LA's socially and medically deprived. Dedicated to the underserved, when drafted he applied to work in a Vietnamese civilian hospital. His tenure at the LA county hospital was the best training for what he'd experience in Vietnam. His arrival coincided with a bloody escalation of the conflict. But like many Americans, he believed South Vietnam desired a democratic future and that the U.S. was helping to achieve that goal. Armed with both his medical bag and a typewriter, Dr. Carlson diligently chronicled his efforts to save lives in the Mekong delta province of Bac Lieu. The result is a vivid recollection, detailing the inspiring stories of the AMA volunteer doctors, USAID nurses and corpsmen that he worked alongside to treat the local citizens, many of whom were Viet Cong. He gives a glimpse of the emerging understanding of post-traumatic stress disorder and his team's development of a pioneering family planning clinic. Featuring more than 80 photographs, this book relates the fighting of both exotic and common diseases and the competition among civilians for medical services. The medical facilities and equipment were primitive, and the doctors' efforts were often hampered by folk remedies and superstition.

'Soft' Counterinsurgency reviews the promise and actual achievement of Human Terrain Teams, the small groups of social scientists that were eventually embedded in every combat brigade in Iraq and Afghanistan. The book, based on interviews with both HTT personnel and their military commanders, examines the military's need for sociocultural information, the ethical issues surrounding research carried out in combat zones, and the tensions between military and social science organizational cultures. The account provides a close, detailed account of HTT activities, a critical reflection on the possibilities of creating a 'softer, ' less violent counterinsurgency, and the difficulty of attempting to make war more 'intelligent' and discriminating.

What happens when a career Marine officer stops believing in the doctrine of the Corps and the official pretexts for war? In 2006, Winston Tierney deployed to Iraq's Anbar Province with the Fourth Reconnaissance Battalion, excited and proud to serve his country in the fight against international terrorism. After several trips to Iraq over the next nine years he returned depleted by hatred, mendacity, alcohol abuse and PTSD, he felt he had "seen behind the curtain"-and didn't like what he saw. This hard-hitting memoir depicts the brutal realities of the conflict in Iraq at street level, while giving a clear-eyed treatise on the immorality of war and the catastrophe of America's failures in the Middle East.

During the first half of 1969, Bravo Troop, 3rd Squadron, 4th Cavalry, 25th Infantry Division operated northwest of Saigon in the vicinity of Go Dau Ha, fighting in 15 actions on the Cambodian border, in the Boi Loi Woods, the Hobo Woods and Michelin Rubber Plantation and on the outskirts of Tay Ninh City. In that time, Bravo Troop saw 10 percent of its average field strength killed while inflicting much heavier losses on the enemy. This memoir vividly recounts those six months of intense armored cavalry combat in Vietnam through the eyes of an artillery forward observer, highlighting his fire direction techniques and the routines and frustrations of searching for the enemy and chaos of finding him.

For Southeast Asia, the Vietnam War altered forever the history, topography, people, economy, and politics of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), the Republic of Vietnam (RVN), Cambodia, and Laos. That the war was controversial is an understatement as is the notion that the war can be understood from any one perspective. One way of understanding the Vietnam War is by marking its time with turning points, both major and minor, that involved events or decisions that helped to influence its course in the years to follow. By examining a few of these turning points, an organizational framework takes shape that makes understanding the war more possible. Historical Dictionary of the War in Vietnam emphasizes the international nature of the war, as well as provide a greater understanding of the long scope of the conflict. The major events associated with the war will serve as the foundation of the book while additional entries will explore the military, diplomatic, political, social, and cultural events that made the war unique. While military subjects will be fully explored, there will be greater attention to other aspects of the war. All of this is done through a chronology, an introductory essay, an extensive bibliography, and over 600 cross-referenced dictionary entries. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the Vietnam War.

During the Vietnam War, the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam Studies and Observations Group (MACVSOG) was a highly-classified, U.S. joint-service organization that consisted of personnel from Army Special Forces, the Air Force, Navy SEALs, Marine Corps Force Reconnaissance units, and the CIA. This secret organization was committed to action in Southeast Asia even before the major build-up of U.S. forces in 1965 and also fielded a division-sized element of South Vietnamese military personnel, indigenous Montagnards, ethnic Chinese Nungs, and Taiwanese pilots in its varied reconnaissance, naval, air, and agent operations. MACVSOG was without doubt the most unique U.S. unit to participate in the Vietnam War, since its operational mandate authorized its missions to take place "over the fence" in North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, where most other American units were forbidden to go. During its nine-year existence it managed to participate in most of the significant operations and incidents of the conflict. MACVSOG was there during the Gulf of Tonkin incidents, during air operations over North Vietnam, the Tet Offensive, the secret bombing of and ground incursion into Cambodia, Operation Lam Son 719, the Green Beret murder case, the Easter Invasion, the Phoenix Program, and the Son Tay POW Raid. The story of this extraordinary unit has never before been told in full and comes as a timely blueprint for combined-arms, multi-national unconventional warfare in the post-9/11 age. Unlike previous works on the subject, Black Ops, Vietnam is a complete chronological history of the unit drawn from declassified documents, memoirs, and previous works on the subject, which tended to focus only on particular aspects of the unit's operations.

A Times Political Book of the Year 2022 A powerful and revelatory eyewitness account of the American collapse in Afghanistan, its desperate endgame, and the war's echoing legacy. Elliot Ackerman left the American military ten years ago, but his time in Afghanistan and Iraq with the Marines and, later, as a CIA paramilitary officer marked him indelibly. When the Taliban began to close in on Kabul in August of 2021 and the Afghan regime began its death spiral, he found himself pulled back into the conflict. The official evacuation process was a bureaucratic failure that led to a humanitarian catastrophe. Ackerman was drawn into an impromptu effort to arrange flights and negotiate with both Taliban and American forces to secure the safe evacuation of hundreds. These were desperate measures taken during a desperate end to America's longest war, but the success they achieved afforded a degree of redemption: and, for Ackerman, a chance to reconcile his past with his present. The Fifth Act is an astonishing human document that brings the weight of twenty years of war to bear on a single week at its bitter end. Using the dramatic rescue efforts in Kabul as his lattice, Ackerman weaves in a personal history of the war's long progress, beginning with the initial invasion in the months after 9/11. It is a play in five acts with a tragic denouement. Any reader who wants to understand what went wrong with the war's trajectory will find a trenchant accounting here. And yet The Fifth Act is not an exercise in finger-pointing: it brings readers into close contact with a remarkable group of characters, who fought the war with courage and dedication, in good faith and at great personal cost. Understanding combatants' experiences and sacrifices demands reservoirs of wisdom and the gifts of an extraordinary storyteller. In Elliot Ackerman, this story has found that author.The Fifth Act is a first draft of history that feels like a timeless classic.

This book examines the United States neoconservative movement, arguing that its support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq was rooted in an intelligence theory shaped by the policy struggles of the Cold War. The origins of neoconservative engagement with intelligence theory are traced to a tradition of labour anti-communism that emerged in the early 20th century and subsequently provided the Central Intelligence Agency with key allies in the state-private networks of the Cold War era. Reflecting on the break-up of Cold War liberalism and the challenge to state-private networks in the 1970s, the book maps the neoconservative response that influenced developments in United States intelligence policy, counterintelligence and covert action. With the labour roots of neoconservatism widely acknowledged but rarely systematically pursued, this new approach deploys the neoconservative literature of intelligence as evidence of a tradition rooted in the labour anti-communist self-image as allies rather than agents of the American state. This book will be of great interest to all students of intelligence studies, Cold War history, United States foreign policy and international relations.

United States involvement in the Vietnam War was one of the most important events in the post-World War II period. The political, social and military consequences of US involvement and defeat in Vietnam have been keenly felt within the US and the international community, and the 'lessons' learned have continued to exert an influence to the present day. This book focuses on the effects of US propaganda on America's Western allies - particularly France, West Germany and Great Britain - from the time when the Vietnam War began to escalate in February 1965, to the American withdrawal and its immediate aftermath. One of its main aims is to assess the amount and veracity of information passed on by the US administration to allied governments and to compare this with the level of public information on the war within those countries.

More than 130,000 South Vietnamese fled their homeland at the end of the Vietnam War. Tens of thousands landed on the island of Guam on their way to the U.S. Many remained there. Guamanians and U.S. military personnel welcomed them. Funded by a $405 million Congressional appropriation, Operation New Life was among the most intensive humanitarian efforts ever accomplished by the U.S. government, with the help of the people of Guam. Without it, many evacuees would have died somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. This book chronicles a part of the first mass migration of Vietnamese "boat people," before and after the fall of Saigon in April 1975-a story still unfolding almost half a century later.

During the Korean War nearly a thousand British servicemen, along with a handful of British civilians, were captured by North Korean and Red Chinese forces. In various camps in the vicinity of Pyongyang and villages along the Yalu River these men found themselves subjected to a prolonged effort by the enemy to undermine their allegiance to the Crown and enlist them in various propaganda campaigns directed against the UN war effort. British Prisoners of the korean War is the first academic study to examine in detail exactly what happened to the major groups of British military and civilian prisoners held in different locations at various junctures between 1950 and 1953. It explores the extent to which factors such as exposure to the actions of the North Koreans as against the Red Chinese, evolving physical conditions, enemy re-education efforts, communist attempts at blackmail, British attitudes towards the Americans, and personal background and leadership qualities among captives themselves influenced the willingness and ability of the British prisoners to collaborate or resist. Thanks to the availability of hitherto classified or underutilized source materials, it is now possible to test the common popular assumption-based on official accounts and memoirs from the 1950s-that, in marked contrast to their American cousins, British captives in the Korean War were pretty much immune to communist efforts at subverting their loyalty. The results suggest that British attitudes and actions while in enemy hands were rather more nuanced and varied than previously assumed.

Based on in-depth interviews with tribal Sheiks involved in the Awakening and their American military counterparts, Confronting al Qaeda is a study of decision-making processes and the political psychology of the Sunni Awakening in al Anbar. It traces the change in American military strategy that made the Awakening collaboration between the Sunni tribes and the U.S. forces possible. It explains how the evolution of the tribal leaders' perspective and of the American military strategy led to defeat al Qaeda in al Anbar. The process of these changing mutual images is detailed as well as how the cooperation between groups led to further evolution of perceptions. Political and military realities urgently forced these perceptual and social identity shifts initially, but the process of cooperation and engagement accelerated these shifts through increasingly mutually beneficial cooperation and interaction during the battle with al Qaeda in Iraq.

During two decades of fighting in Afghanistan, U.S. service members confronted numerous challenges in their mission to secure the country from the threat of al-Qaeda and the Taliban and assist in rebuilding efforts. Because the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan occurred simultaneously, much of the American public conflated them or failed to notice the Afghanistan War; and most of the war's archival material remains classified and closed to civilian researchers. Drawing on interviews and letters home, this book relates the Afghanistan War through the experiences of American troops, with firsthand accounts of both combat and humanitarian operations, the environment, living conditions and interactions with the locals.

As a linguist with the U.S. Navy Fleet Support Detachment in Da Nang, Herb Shippey was assigned to air reconnaissance during the Vietnam War. Flying with fellow "spooks" over the Gulf of Tonkin and Laos, his duty was to protect American aircraft and ships threatened by MiG 21 fighter jet activity. Shippey's introspective memoir recounts dangerous missions aboard non-combat aircraft (EC-121 Warning Star, P-3 Orion, A-3 Sky Warrior), rocket attacks and typhoons, and the details of his service, some of them classified for forty years.

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."

On the same day the Japanese surrender ended World War II, Vietnamese nationalists declared independence from France. Within weeks, France sought to reestablish colonial rule. American merchant seamen arriving in French ports to ship GIs back to the U.S. were dismayed when French troops bound for Vietnam came aboard instead. Many merchant seamen objected to these troopship movements because American veterans awaited transport home, and because they flew in the face of Allied war aims of national self-determination. Later, with the Vietnam War effort dependent on Merchant Marine logistical support, seamen were among the first to protest U.S. involvement. With firsthand recollections, this book tells the story of the Merchant Marine in Vietnam, from deadly encounters with mines, rockets and gunfire to evacuations of refugees to rescues of "boat people" in the South China Sea.

The Viet Nam War ended almost half a century ago. This book-part history, part travelogue-reveals the war's legacy, still very much alive, in the places where it was fought and in the memories and memorials of those who survived it. The chronological story of the war is told through exploration of culture, history, popular music, and the countries who were major players: North and South Viet Nam, Laos, Cambodia, Australia and the United States. The author traverses significant sites like Dien Bien Phu-where French colonialism ended and U.S. intervention began-the DMZ, Hamburger Hill, the Rock Pile, the Cu Chi Tunnels, and Australia's most famous battlefield, Long Tan. Residual hazards of the war remain in the form of unexploded ordnance (UXO) in such places as Siem Reap, Luang Prabang, and in Quang Tri Province, where nonprofit groups like Project RENEW work to manage removal and provide victim assistance.

An advisor to the South Vietnamese Navy Mobile Riverine Forces in 1970-1971, U.S. Navy Commander Richard Kirtley was tasked with helping implement Nixon's policy of "Vietnamization"-the rapid drawdown of U.S. troops to bring an abortive end to the Vietnam War. The program called for the turnover of arms and equipment to South Vietnamese forces, while U.S. personnel trained their counterparts to continue fighting the war alone. The U.S. Navy's supporting effort, Accelerated Turnover to the Vietnamese (ACTOV), emphasized "Accelerated." Kirtley's account gives an up-close look at the futility and frustration of the advisory effort during the withdrawal, the implementation of both programs-doomed to failure yet hyped to cover a lost-cause retreat-and their disastrous outcomes.

Afghan women were at the forefront of global agendas in late 2001, fueled by a mix of media coverage, humanitarian intervention and military operations. Calls for "liberating" Afghan women were widespread. Women's roles in Afghanistan have long been politically divisive, marked by struggles between modernization and tradition. Women, politics, and the state have always been intertwined in Afghanistan, and conflicts have been fueled by attempts to challenge or change women's status. It may appear that we have come full circle twenty years later, in late 2021, when Afghanistan fell to the Taliban once more. Women's rights in Afghanistan have been stripped away, and any gains-however tenuous-now appear lost. Today, the country navigates both a humanitarian and a human rights crisis. This book measures the rhetoric of liberation and the physical and ideological occupations of Afghanistan over the twenty-year period from 2001 through 2021 through the voices, perspectives, and experiences of those who are implicated in this reality-Afghan women.