'Gripping ... A terrific action narrative' Max Hastings 'Reads like a Tom Clancy thriller, yet every word is true ... This is modern warfare close-up and raw' Andrew Roberts Bestselling and Orwell Prize-winning author Toby Harnden tells the gripping and incredible story of the six-day battle that began the War in Afghanistan and how it set the scene for twenty years of conflict. The West is in shock. Al-Qaeda has struck the US on 9/11 and thousands are dead. Within weeks, UK Special Forces enter the fray in Afghanistan alongside the CIA's Team Alpha and US troops. Victory is swift, but fragile. Hundreds of jihadists surrender and two operatives from Team Alpha enter Qala-i Jangi - the 'Fort of War' - to interrogate them. The prisoners revolt, one CIA man falls, and the other is trapped inside the fort. Seven members of the SBS - elite British Special Forces - volunteer for the rescue force and race into danger and the unknown. The six-day battle that follows proves to be one of the bloodiest of the Afghanistan war as the SBS and their American comrades face an enemy determined to die in the mud citadel. Superbly researched, First Casualty is based on unprecedented access to the CIA, SBS, and US Special Forces. Orwell Prize-winning author Toby Harnden recounts the gripping story of that first battle in Afghanistan and how the haunting foretelling it contained - unreliable allies, ethnic rivalries, suicide attacks, and errant bombs - was ignored, fueling the twenty-year conflict to come.

This book delivers on two analytical levels. First, it is a broad study of Sweden as an international actor, an actor that at least for a brief period tried to play a different international role than that to which it was accustomed. Second, the book problematizes the role of international military missions as drivers for change in the security and defence field. Several perspectives and levels of analysis are covered, from the macro level of strategic discourse to the micro level of the experiences of individual commanders. The book focuses upon Sweden and its participation in the international military mission in Afghanistan during 2002-2012 and also contributes to the growing literature evaluating the mission in Afghanistan, the security practice which has dominated the security and defence discourse of Western Europe for the last decade.

Harry S. Truman Book Award In The War for Korea, 1945-1950: A House Burning, one of our most distinguished military historians argued that the conflict on the Korean peninsula in the middle of the twentieth century was first and foremost a war between Koreans that began in 1948. In the second volume of a monumental trilogy, Allan R. Millett now shifts his focus to the twelve-month period from North Korea's invasion of South Korea on June 25, 1950, through the end of June 1951-the most active phase of the internationalized "Korean War." Moving deftly between the battlefield and the halls of power, Millett weaves together military operations and tactics without losing sight of Cold War geopolitics, strategy, and civil-military relations. Filled with new insights on the conflict, his book is the first to give combined arms its due, looking at the contributions and challenges of integrating naval and air power with the ground forces of United Nations Command and showing the importance of Korean support services. He also provides the most complete, and sympathetic, account of the role of South Korea's armed forces, drawing heavily on ROK and Korea Military Advisory Group sources. Millett integrates non-American perspectives into the narrative-especially those of Mao Zedong, Chinese military commander Peng Dehuai, Josef Stalin, Kim Il-sung, and Syngman Rhee. And he portrays Walton Walker and Matthew Ridgway as the heroes of Korea, both of whom had a more profound understanding of the situation than Douglas MacArthur, whose greatest flaw was not his politics but his strategic and operational incompetence. Researched in South Korean, Chinese, and Soviet as well as American and UN sources, Millett has exploited previously ignored or neglected oral history collections-including interviews with American and South Korean officers-and has made extensive use of reports based on interrogations of North Korean and Chinese POWs. The end result is masterful work that provides both a gripping narrative and a greater understanding of this key conflict in international and American history.

As the recent presidential campaign revealed, the Vietnam War remains a political lightning rod. In the 1980s, even as a Gallup poll listed Fonda as one of the most admired women in the country, "Hanoi Jane" had become a reviled figure among conservatives for her highly publicized trip to North Vietnam in 1972. Today, according to a recent poll, millions of Americans continue to link Fonda's name to Vietnam--yet the true history of her antiwar work has been largely obscured.

One of the most popular movie actresses of the 1960s and 1970s, Fonda was also among the most committed and visible antiwar activists of the era. Coming on the heels of Jane Fonda's own memoir, this is the first book to document one of the most interesting (and least known) chapters in Fonda's life--including the first comprehensive account of her controversial trips to Hanoi, as well as her extensive efforts on behalf of American GIs.

Based on unprecedented access to Fonda's twenty-foot-thick FBI files, interviews with the former POWs Fonda met with in Hanoi in 1972, and a broad range of contemporary press reports, "Jane Fonda's War" is a fascinating and little-understood chapter in the extraordinary life of an American icon.

The Korean War in Britain explores the social and cultural impact of the Korean War (1950-53) on Britain. Coming just five years after the ravages of the Second World War, Korea was a deeply unsettling moment in post-war British history. From allegations about American use of 'germ' warfare to anxiety over Communist use of 'brainwashing' and treachery at home, the Korean War precipitated a series of short-lived panics in 1950s Britain. But by the time of its uneasy ceasefire in 1953, the war was becoming increasingly forgotten. Using Mass Observation surveys, letters, diaries and a wide range of under-explored contemporary material, this book charts the war's changing position in British popular imagination and asks how it became known as the 'Forgotten War'. It explores the war in a variety of viewpoints - conscript, POW, protester and veteran - and is essential reading for anyone interested in Britain's Cold War past. -- .

In the summer of 1967, the Marines in I Corps, South Vietnam's northernmost military region, were doing everything they could to lighten the pressure on the besieged Con Thien Combat Base. Still fresh after months of relatively light action around Khe Sanh, the 3d Battalion, 26th Marines, was sent to the Con Thien region to secure the combat bases' endangered main supply route. On 7 September 1967, its first full day in the new area of operations, separate elements of the battalion were attacked by at least two battalions of North Vietnamese infantry, and both were nearly overrun in night-long battles. On 10 September, while advancing to a new sector near Con Thien, the 3d Battalion, 26th Marines, was attacked by at least a full North Vietnamese regiment, the same NVA unit that had attacked it two days earlier. Divided into two separate defensive perimeters, the Marines battled through the afternoon and evening against repeated assaults by waves of NVA regulars intent upon achieving a major victory. In a battle described as 'Custer's Last Stand-With Air Support', the Americans prevailed by the narrowest of margins. Ambush Valley is an unforgettable account of bravery and survival under impossible conditions. It is told entirely in the words of the men who faced the ordeal together - an unprecedented mosaic of action and emotion woven into an incredibly clear and vivid combat narrative by one of today's most effective military historians. Ambush Valley achieves a new standard for oral history. It is a war story not to be missed.

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.

International lawyers and distinguished scholars consider the question: Is it legally justifiable to treat the Vietnam War as a civil war or as a peculiar modern species of international law? Originally published in 1968. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

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.

Winner, 2020 Peter C Rollins Prize, given by the Northeast Popular & American Culture Association Enables a reckoning with the legacy of the Forgotten War through literary and cinematic works of cultural memory Though often considered "the forgotten war," lost between the end of World War II and the start of the Cold War, the Korean War was, as Daniel Y. Kim argues, a watershed event that fundamentally reshaped both domestic conceptions of race and the interracial dimensions of the global empire that the United States would go on to establish. He uncovers a trail of cultural artefacts that speaks to the trauma experienced by civilians during the conflict but also evokes an expansive web of complicity in the suffering that they endured. Taking up a range of American popular media from the 1950s, Kim offers a portrait of the Korean War as it looked to Americans while they were experiencing it in real time. Kim expands this archive to read a robust host of fiction from US writers like Susan Choi, Rolando Hinojosa, Toni Morrison, and Chang-rae Lee, and the Korean author Hwang Sok-yong. The multiple and ongoing historical trajectories presented in these works testify to the resurgent afterlife of this event in US cultural memory, and of its lasting impact on multiple racialized populations, both within the US and in Korea. The Intimacies of Conflict offers a robust, multifaceted, and multidisciplinary analysis of the pivotal-but often unacknowledged-consequences of the Korean War in both domestic and transnational histories of race.

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.

In Helmand province in July 2006, Major Adam Jowett was given command of Easy Company, a hastily assembled and under-strength unit of Paras and Royal Irish rangers. Their mission was to hold the District Centre of Musa Qala at any cost. Easy Company found themselves in a ramshackle compound, cut off and heavily outnumbered by the Taliban in the town.

In No Way Out, Adam evokes the heat and chaos of battle as the Taliban hit Easy Company with wave after wave of brutal attack. He describes what it was like to have responsibility for the lives of his men as they fought back heroically over twenty-one days and nights of relentless, nerve-shredding combat. Finally, as they came down to their last rounds and death stared Easy Company in the face, the siege took an extraordinary turn . . .

Powerful, highly-charged and moving, No Way Out is Adam’s tribute to the men of Easy Company who paid a heavy price for serving their country.

Featuring the testimony of close to seventy Iraqis from all walks of life, "Voices from Iraq" builds a riveting chronological history unmatched for its insight and revelations. Here is a history of the war in Iraq as told entirely by Iraqis living through the U.S. invasion and occupation.

Beginning in 2003, this intimate narrative includes the experiential accounts of civilians, politicians, former dissidents, insurgents, and militiamen. Iraqis offering firsthand stories range from onetime Prime Minister Ayad Allawi to resistance fighters speaking on the condition of anonymity. Divided into five parts, these interviews recount the 2003 invasion; Iraq's gradual slide into chaos from 2004 to 2005; the start of a new order in 2006; the rise of open sectarian violence over the next two years; and the effort since 2008 to reconstruct a society from relative calm. Each section includes interviews grouped into themes, with brief epilogues for the participants. Not since Studs Terkel's "The Good War" has a book captured so acutely the human consequences of a conflict we are still struggling to understand. "Voices from Iraq" makes utterly vivid the meaning and legacy of America's campaign in Iraq.

The Iraq War is a visual record of the American-led Operation Iraqi Freedom of 2003, which resulted in the dramatic overthrow of dictator Saddam Hussein. In a striking sequence of photographs Anthony Tucker-Jones shows how this was achieved by the American and British armed forces in a lightning campaign of just two weeks. But the photographs also show the disastrous aftermath when the swift victory was undermined by the outbreak of the Iraqi insurgency - in the Shia south, in Baghdad and the Sunni Triangle, and in Fallujah where two ferocious battles were fought. The author, who is an expert on the Iraqi armed forces and has written extensively on the Iran-Iraq War and the Gulf War, gives a fascinating insight into the Iraqi army and air force and into the multitude of weapons systems Saddam purchased from around the world. He also looks at the failures on the American and British side - the flaws in the tactics that were used, the poor performance of some of the armoured fighting vehicles - and at the reformed Iraqi armed forces who have now taken responsibility for security in the country. The Iraq War is a vivid photographic introduction to a conflict that has only just passed into history.

Sheehan's tragic biography of John Paul Vann is also a sweeping history of America's seduction, entrapment and disillusionment in Vietnam.

As the routed North Korean People's Army (NKPA) withdrew into the mountainous reaches of their country and the People's Republic of China (PRC) funneled in its massive infantry formations in preparation for a momentous counter-offensive, both lacked adequate air power to challenge US and UN. Reluctantly, Josef Stalin agreed to provide the requisite air cover, introducing the superior swept-wing MiG-15 to counter the American's straight-wing F-80 jets. This in turn prompted the USAF to deploy its very best - the F-86A Sabre - to counter this threat. Thus began a two-and-a-half-year struggle in the skies known as "MiG Alley." In this period, the unrelenting campaign for aerial superiority witnessed the introduction of successive models of these two revolutionary jets into combat. This meticulously researched study not only provides technical descriptions of the two types and their improved variants, complete with a "fighter pilot's assessment" of these aircraft, but also chronicles the entire scope of their aerial duel in "MiG Alley" by employing the recollections of the surviving combatants - including Russian, Chinese, and North Korean pilots - who participated.

Why has the Taliban been so much more effective in presenting messages that resonate with the Afghan population than the United States, the Afghan Government and their allies? This book, based on years of field research and the assessment of hundreds of original source materials, examines the information operations and related narratives of Afghan insurgents, especially the Afghan Taliban, and investigates how the Taliban has won the information war. Taliban messaging, wrapped in the narrative of jihad, is both to the point and in tune with the target audiences it wishes to influence. On the other hand, the United States and its Kabul allies committed a basic messaging blunder, failing to present narratives that spoke to or, often, were even understood by their target audiences. Thomas Johnson systematically explains why the United States lost this "battle of the story" in Afghanistan, and argues that this defeat may have lost the U.S. the entire war, despite its conventional and technological superiority.

Following his prizewinning studies of the Vietnam War, renowned anthropologist Heonik Kwon presents this ground-breaking study of the Korean War's enduring legacies seen through the realm of intimate human experience. Kwon boldly reclaims kinship as a vital category in historical and political enquiry and probes the grey zone between the modern and the traditional (and between the civil and the social) in the lived reality of Korea's civil war and the Cold War more broadly. With captivating historical detail and innovative conceptual frames, Kwon's moving, creative analysis provides fresh insights into the Korean conflict, civil war and reconciliation, history and memory and critical political theory.

The combat history of the 1st Battalion, 5th Marines--or One Five (1/5)--is long and illustrious, but there are many periods of their combat operations during the Vietnam War about which there is little in print. This history is drawn from many years of research, from the author's personal memories, and from careful study of the battalion's Command Chronologies and Combat After-action Reports and other historical records. Most importantly it includes a collection of true stories told to the author by dozens of U.S. Marines who served in and fought with 1/5 during the Vietnam War, at all levels of the Chain of Command. This book hunkers down with the Mud Marines of Charlie One Five, a small but determined band of American fighting men, and their very human and often painful stories of combat cover a wide range of scenarios and situations. Follow the Marines of 1/5 as they are lulled by the exotic and beautiful countryside, trudge through swamps, jungles, mountains, and rice paddies for seemingly endless days, and struggle to stay alert during their cautious passage through the extreme terrain and weather conditions of this incredibly scenic but deceptive land, only to be shattered by sudden and deadly attacks from Viet Cong snipers, ambushes, and command-detonated bombs. Despite the overwhelming odds against them, the Marines of Charlie One Five always emerge victorious in every battle they fight.

What happens when competing assertions of validity collide? This question stands at the center of 22 projects being undertaken in various fields as part of the interdisciplinary research project Transcendence and Shared Meaning. Drawing on empirical examples, the contributions show how transcendence is founded or, alternatively, challenged."

This is an account of the battle of Kham Duc, one of the least known and most misunderstood battles in the American Phase of the Second Indochina War (1959 to 1975). At the time it was painted as a major American defeat, but this new history tells the full story. The authors have a unique ability to reassess this battle - one was present at the battle, the other was briefed on it prior to re-taking the site two years later. The book is based on exhaustive research, revisiting Kham Duc, interviewing battle veterans, and reading interview transcripts and statements of other battle participants, including former North Vietnamese Army (NVA) officers. Based on their research, the authors contend that Kham Duc did not 'fall' and was not 'overrun'. In fact, it was a successful effort to inflict mass attrition on a major NVA force with minimum American losses by voluntarily abandoning an anachronistic little trip-wire border camp serving as passive bait for General Westmoreland's 'lure and destroy' defensive tactics, as at Khe Sanh.