Following the success of his #1 New York Times bestseller Make Your Bed, which has sold over one million copies, Admiral William H. McRaven is back with amazing stories of bravery and heroism during his career as a Navy SEAL and commander of America's Special Operations Forces. Admiral William H. McRaven is a part of American military history, having been involved in some of the most famous missions in recent memory, including the capture of Saddam Hussein, the rescue of Captain Richard Phillips, and the raid to kill Osama bin Laden.Sea Stories begins in 1963 at a French Officers' Club in France, where Allied officers and their wives gathered to have drinks and tell stories about their adventures during World War II-the place where a young Bill McRaven learned the value of a good story. Sea Stories is an unforgettable look back on one man's incredible life, from childhood days sneaking into high-security military sites to a day job of hunting terrorists and rescuing hostages.Action-packed, humorous, and full of valuable life lessons like those exemplified in McRaven's bestselling Make Your Bed, Sea Stories is a remarkable memoir from one of America's most accomplished leaders.

As the first book to call for an immediate withdrawal from Vietnam, Howard Zinn's 'Vietnam' includes a powerful speech which he believed President Lyndon Johnson should have delivered to lay out the case for ending the war. Of the many books that challenged the Vietnam War, Howard Zinn's 'Vietnam' stands out as one of the greatest - and indeed the most influential. The writings in this book helped spark a national debate on the war; few aside from Zinn could reach so many with such passion and such conciseness.

The nationally recognized credit-by-exam DSST (R) program helps students earn college credits for learning acquired outside the traditional classroom such as; learning from on-the-job training, reading, or independent study. DSST (R) tests offer students a cost-effective, time-saving way to use the knowledge they've acquired outside of the classroom to accomplish their education goals. Peterson's (R) Master the (TM) DSST (R) A History of the Vietnam War Exam provides a general overview of the subjects students will encounter on the exam such as the roots of the Vietnam War, pre-War developments (1940-1955), American involvement in the War, Tet (1968), Cambodia, Laos and lessons following the War. This valuable resource includes: Diagnostic pre-test with detailed answer explanations Assessment Grid designed to help identify areas that need focus Subject Matter Review proving a general overview of the subjects, followed by a review of the relevant topics and terminology covered on the exam Post-test offering 60 questions all with detailed answer explanations Key information about the DSST (R) such as, what to expect on test day and how to register and prepare for the DSST (R)

"A GRIPPING CLASSIC. Exhaustively researched, The Hunter Killers puts you directly into a Wild Weasel fighter cockpit during the Vietnam War. Dan Hampton lets you feel it for yourself as no one else could."--Colonel LEO THORSNESS, Wild Weasel pilot and Medal of Honor recipient At the height of the Cold War, America's most elite aviators bravely volunteered for a covert program aimed at eliminating an impossible new threat. Half never returned. All became legends. From New York Times bestselling author Dan Hampton comes one of the most extraordinary untold stories of aviation history. Vietnam, 1965: On July 24 a USAF F-4 Phantom jet was suddenly blown from the sky by a mysterious and lethal weapon-a Soviet SA-2 surface-to-air missile (SAM), launched by Russian "advisors" to North Vietnam. Three days later, six F-105 Thunderchiefs were brought down trying to avenge the Phantom. More tragic losses followed, establishing the enemy's SAMs as the deadliest anti-aircraft threat in history and dramatically turning the tables of Cold War air superiority in favor of Soviet technology. Stunned and desperately searching for answers, the Pentagon ordered a top secret program called Wild Weasel I to counter the SAM problem-fast. So it came to be that a small group of maverick fighter pilots and Electronic Warfare Officers volunteered to fly behind enemy lines and into the teeth of the threat. To most it seemed a suicide mission-but they beat the door down to join. Those who survived the 50 percent casualty rate would revolutionize warfare forever. "You gotta be sh*#@ing me!" This immortal phrase was uttered by Captain Jack Donovan when the Wild Weasel concept was first explained to him. "You want me to fly in the back of a little tiny fighter aircraft with a crazy fighter pilot who thinks he's invincible, home in on a SAM site in North Vietnam, and shoot it before it shoots me?" Based on unprecedented firsthand interviews with Wild Weasel veterans and previously unseen personal papers and declassified documents from both sides of the conflict, as well as Dan Hampton's own experience as a highly decorated F-16 Wild Weasel pilot, The Hunter Killers is a gripping, cockpit-level chronicle of the first-generation Weasels, the remarkable band of aviators who faced head-on the advanced Soviet missile technology that was decimating fellow American pilots over the skies of Vietnam.

Frances FitzGerald's landmark history of Vietnam and the Vietnam War, "a compassionate and penetrating account of the collision of two societies that remain untranslatable to one another." (New York Times Book Review) This magisterial work, based on Frances FitzGerald's many years of research and travels, takes us inside the history of Vietnam -- the traditional, ancestor-worshiping villages, the conflicts between Communists and anti-Communists, Catholics and Buddhists, generals and monks, the disruption created by French colonialism, and America's ill-fated intervention -- and reveals the country as seen through Vietnamese eyes. Originally published in 1972, Fire in the Lake was the first history of Vietnam written by an American and won the Pulitzer Prize, the Bancroft Prize, and the National Book Award. With a clarity and insight unrivaled by any author before it or since, Frances FitzGerald illustrates how America utterly and tragically misinterpreted the realities of Vietnam.

Peter Clark's year in Vietnam began in July 1966, when he was shipped out with hundreds of other young recruits, as a replacement in the 1st Infantry Division. Clark was assigned to the Alpha Company. Clark gives a visceral, vivid and immediate account of life in the platoon, as he progresses from green recruit to seasoned soldier over the course of a year in the complexities of the Vietnamese conflict. Clark gradually learns the techniques developed by US troops to cope with the daily horrors they encountered, the technical skills needed to fight and survive, and how to deal with the awful reality of civilian casualties. Fighting aside, it rained almost every day and insect bites constantly plagued the soldiers as they moved through dense jungle, muddy rice paddy and sandy roads. From the food they ate (largely canned meatballs, beans and potatoes) to the inventive ways they managed to shower, every aspect of the platoon's lives is explored in this revealing book. The troops even managed to fit in some R&Rwhilst off-duty in the bars of Tokyo. Alpha One Sixteen follows Clark as he discovers how to cope with the vagaries of the enemy and the daily confusion the troops faced in distinguishing combatants from civilians. The Viet Cong were a largely unseen enemy who fought a guerrilla war, setting traps and landmines everywhere. Clark's vigilance develops as he gets used to 'living in mortal terror,' which a brush with death in a particularly terrifying fire fight does nothing to dispel. As he continues his journey, he chronicles those less fortunate; the heavy toll being taken all round him is powerfully described at the end of each chapter.

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.

In 2012, President Obama announced that the United States would spend the next thirteen years - through November 11, 2025 - commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Vietnam War, and the American soldiers, "more than 58,000 patriots," who died in Vietnam. The fact that at least 2.1 million Vietnamese - soldiers, parents, grandparents, children - also died in that war will be largely unknown and entirely uncommemorated. And U.S. history barely stops to record the millions of Vietnamese who lived on after being displaced, tortured, maimed, raped, or born with birth defects, the result of devastating chemicals wreaked on the land by the U.S. military. The reason for this appalling disconnect of consciousness lies in an unremitting public relations campaign waged by top American politicians, military leaders, business people, and scholars who have spent the last sixty years justifying the U.S. presence in Vietnam. It is a campaign of patriotic conceit superbly chronicled by John Marciano in The American War in Vietnam: Crime or Commemoration?A devastating follow-up to Marciano's 1979 classic Teaching the Vietnam War (written with William L. Griffen), Marciano's book seeks not to commemorate the Vietnam War, but to stop the ongoing U.S. war on actual history. Marciano reveals the grandiose flag-waving that stems from the "Noble Cause principle," the notion that America is "chosen by God" to bring democracy to the world. Marciano writes of the Noble Cause being invoked unsparingly by presidents - from Jimmy Carter, in his observation that, regarding Vietnam, "the destruction was mutual," to Barack Obama, who continues the flow of romantic media propaganda: "The United States of America ...will remain the greatest force for freedom the world has ever known."The result is critical writing and teaching at its best. This book will find a home in classrooms where teachers seek to do more than repeat the trite glorifications of U.S. empire. It will provide students everywhere with insights that can prepare them to change the world.

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.

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.

Strap in alongside the Sabre pilots as they experienced the world's first large-scale jet-vs-jet combats. Brought to life with innovative tactical artwork and dramatic first-hand accounts from the pilots themselves. The F-86A Sabre had entered USAF service in 1949, and in December 1950 three squadrons were sent to South Korea. Despite primitive basing conditions and overwhelming Chinese opposition, the Sabre pilots stopped communist air forces from attacking UN ground troops and allowed Allied fighter-bombers to operate without threat of interception. The ensuing air battles between Sabres and MiG-15s were the first since World War II, and the last in recent times to involve large numbers of jet fighters in direct confrontation. In all of them the victorious F-86 pilots demonstrated the superiority of their training and tactics and the outstanding qualities of their Sabres. Contemporary photographs and specially commissioned artwork, including a dramatic battlescene, armament views, technical diagrams and ribbon diagrams illustrating step-by-step each main dogfight explored in the book, bring the experiences of the Sabre pilots and their battle tactics vividly to life.

When the U.S. Army went to war in South Vietnam in 1965, the general consensus was that counterinsurgency was an infantryman's war; if there was any role at all for armored forces, it would be strictly to support the infantry. However, from the time the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment arrived in country in September 1966, troopers of the Blackhorse Regiment demonstrated the fallacy of this assumption. By the time of Tet '68, the Army's leadership began to understand that the Regiment's mobility, firepower, flexibility, and leadership made a difference on the battlefield well beyond its numbers. Over the course of the 11th Cavalry's five-and-a-half years in combat in South Vietnam and Cambodia, over 25,000 young men served in the Regiment. Their stories - and those of their families - represent the Vietnam generation in graphic, sometimes humorous, often heart-wrenching detail. Collected by the author through hundreds of in-person, telephone, and electronic interviews over a period of 25-plus years, these "war stories" provide context for the companion volume, The Blackhorse in Vietnam. Amongst the stories of the Blackhorse troopers and their families are the tales of the wide variety of animals they encountered during their time in combat, as well as the variable landscape, from jungle to rice paddies, and weather. Blackhorse Tales concludes with a look at how the troopers have dealt with their combat experiences since returning from Vietnam. Between the chapters are combat narratives, one from each year of the Regiment's five-and-a-half years in Southeast Asia. These combat vignettes begin on 2 December 1966, when a small column of 1st Squadron vehicles and troopers were ambushed on Highway 1 and emerged victorious despite being outnumbered. They go on to describe the one-of-a-kind crossing of the Dong Nai River on 25 April 1968, as the Blackhorse Regiment rode to the rescue during Mini-Tet 1968, and the 2nd Squadron's fight to clear the Boi Loi Woods in late April 1971.

Major John L. Plaster, a three-tour veteran of Vietnam tells the story of the most highly classified United States covert operatives to serve in the war: The Studies and Observations Group, code-named SOG. Comprised of volunteers from such elite military units as the Army's Green Berets, the USAF Air Commandos, and Navy SEALs, SOG agents answered directly to the Pentagon's Joint Chiefs, with some missions requiring approval from the White House. Now for the first time, the dangerous assignments of this top-secret unit can at last be revealed

On September 11, 2001, the world looked in horror at one of the most nefarious acts of terrorism in history. Neamatollah Nojumi explains how Afghanistan became the base for radical fundamentalism and provides critical understanding of how internal divisions and the devastating effects of foreign involvement undermined the resilience of Afghanistan's communities, led to the rise of the Taliban, and now presents a unique challenge to international efforts at nation building. As the cycle of yesterday's allies becoming today's enemies turns once again, The Rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan provides crucial insight into the tangled interaction of domestic, regional, and international politics that have bedeviled outsiders, plagued Afghans, and that threaten, absent judgement based on insight, to be a quagmire for the United States in the years ahead. This is essential reading in our troubled times.

At Easter 1972, North Vietnam invaded the South, and there were almost no US ground troops left to stop it. But air power reinforcements could be rushed to the theater. Operation Linebacker's objective was to destroy the invading forces from the air and cut North Vietnam's supply routes – and luckily in 1972, American air power was beginning a revolution in both technology and tactics.

Most crucial was the introduction of the first effective laser-guided bombs, but the campaign also involved the fearsome AC-130 gunship and saw the debut of helicopter-mounted TOW missiles. Thanks to the new Top Gun fighter school, US naval aviators now also had a real advantage over the MiGs.

This is the fascinating story of arguably the world's first “modern” air campaign. It explains how this complex operation – involving tactical aircraft, strategic bombers, close air support and airlift – defeated the invasion. It also explains the shortcomings of the campaign, the contrasting approaches of the USAF and Navy, and the impact that Linebacker had on modern air warfare.

This study explains how the armies of North and South Vietnam, newly equipped with the most modern Soviet and US tanks and weaponry, fought the decisive armored battles of the Easter Offensive. Wearied by years of fighting against Viet Cong guerillas and North Vietnamese regulars, the United States had almost completely withdrawn its forces from Vietnam by early 1972. Determined to halt the expansion and improvement of South Vietnamese forces under the U.S. "Vietnamization" program, North Vietnam launched a major fourteen-division attack in March 1972 against the South that became known as the "Easter Offensive." Hanoi's assault was spearheaded by 1,200 tanks and was counteracted on the opposite side by Saigon's newly equipped armored force using U.S. medium tanks. The result was ferocious fighting between major Cold War-era U.S. and Soviet tanks and mechanized equipment, pitting M-48 medium and M-41 light tanks against their T- 54 and PT-76 rivals in a variety of combat environments ranging from dense jungle to urban terrain. Both sides employed cutting-edge weaponry for the first time, including the U.S. TOW and Soviet 9M14 Malyutk wire-guided anti-tank missiles. This volume examines the tanks, armored forces and weapons that clashed in this little-known campaign in detail, using after-action reports from the battlefield and other primary sources to analyze the technical and organizational factors that shaped the outcome. Despite the ARVN's defensive success in October 1972, North Vietnam massively expanded its armor forces over the next two years while U.S. support waned. This imbalance with key strategic misjudgments by the South Vietnamese President led to the stunning defeat of the South in 1975 when T54 tanks crashed through the fence surrounding the Presidential palace and took Saigon on 30 April 1975.

A clear-eyed view of the conflict in Afghanistan and its century-deep roots. The war in Afghanistan has consumed vast amounts of blood and treasure, causing the Western powers to seek an exit without achieving victory. Seemingly never-ending, the conflict has become synonymous with a number of issues - global jihad, rampant tribalism, and the narcotics trade - but even though they are cited as the causes of the conflict, they are in fact symptoms. Rather than beginning after 9/11 or with the Soviet "invasion" in 1979, the current conflict in Afghanistan began with the social reforms imposed by Amanullah Amir in 1919. Western powers have failed to recognize that legitimate grievances are driving the local population to turn to insurgency in Afghanistan. The issues they are willing to fight for have deep roots, forming a hundred-year-long social conflict over questions of secularism, modernity, and centralized power. The first step toward achieving a "solution" to the Afghanistan "problem" is to have a clear-eyed view of what is really driving it.

Isolated Command Post Keating - one of the most vulnerable US army bases in Afghanistan. Located at the bottom of a deep valley, soliders are exposed. The Taliban can see every move and attack is imminent. Outnumbered Just before sunrise on 3 October 2009, hundreds of Taliban insurgents open fire from all angles. Red Platoon and the Black Knight Troop are pinned down. They hear the message over the radio: Enemy in the Wire. The Taliban are inside the camp. But never outgunned. This is the heart-stopping, awe-inspiring true story of the platoon's brutal struggle for survival, told by the man who fought to defend his men, and who was awarded the Medal of Honor for his extraordinary bravery.

Here is the epic story of Vietnam and the sixties told through the events of a few gripping, passionate days of war and peace in October 1967. "They Marched Into Sunlight" brings that tumultuous time back to life while exploring questions about the meaning of dissent and the official manipulation of truth, issues as relevant today as they were decades ago.
In a seamless narrative, Maraniss weaves together the stories of three very different worlds: the death and heroism of soldiers in Vietnam, the anger and anxiety of antiwar students back home, and the confusion and obfuscating behavior of officials in Washington. To understand what happens to the people in these interconnected stories is to understand America's anguish. Based on thousands of primary documents and 180 on-the-record interviews, the book describes the battles that evoked cultural and political conflicts that still reverberate.