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Books > Humanities > History > Asian / Middle Eastern history > From 1900 > Postwar, from 1945 > Vietnam War
No experience etched itself more deeply into Air Force thinking
than the air campaigns over North Vietnam. Two decades later in the
deserts of Southwest Asia, American airmen were able to avoid the
gradualism that cost so many lives and planes in the jungles of
Southeast Asia. Readers should come away from this book with a
sympathetic understanding of the men who bombed North Vietnam.
Those airmen handled tough problems in ways that ultimately
reshaped the Air Force into the effective instrument on display in
the Gulf War. This book is a sequel to Jacob Van Staaveren's
Gradual Failure: The Air War over North Vietnam, 1965-1966, which
we have also declassified and are publishing. Wayne Thompson tells
how the Air Force used that failure to build a more capable
service-a service which got a better opportunity to demonstrate the
potential of air power in 1972. Dr. Thompson began to learn about
his subject when he was an Army draftee assigned to an Air Force
intelligence station in Taiwan during the Vietnam War. He took time
out from writing To Hanoi and Back to serve in the Checkmate group
that helped plan the Operation Desert Storm air campaign against
Iraq. Later he visited Air Force pilots and commanders in Italy
immediately after the Operation Deliberate Force air strikes in
Bosnia. During Operation Allied Force over Serbia and its Kosovo
province, he returned to Checkmate. Consequently, he is keenly
aware of how much the Air Force has changed in some respects-how
little in others. Although he pays ample attention to context, his
book is about the Air Force. He has written a well-informed account
that is both lively and thoughtful.
This is the third volume in a planned 10-volume operational and
chronological series covering the Marine Corps' participation in
the Vietnam War. This volume details the continued buildup in 1966
of the III Marine Amphibious Force in South Vietnam's northernmost
corps area, I Corps, and the accelerated tempo of fighting during
the year. The result was an "expanding war."
In the decades since the Vietnam War, veteran memoirs have
influenced Americans' understanding of the conflict. Yet few
historians or literary scholars have scrutinized how the genre has
shaped the nation's collective memory of the war and its aftermath.
Instead, veterans' accounts are mined for colorful quotes and then
dropped from public discourse; are accepted as factual sources with
little attention to how memory, no matter how authentic, can
diverge from events; or are not contextualized in terms of the
race, gender, or class of the narrators. Veteran Narratives and the
Collective Memory of the Vietnam War is a landmark study of the
cultural heritage of the war in Vietnam as presented through the
experience of its American participants. Crossing disciplinary
borders in ways rarely attempted by historians, John A. Wood
unearths truths embedded in the memoirists' treatments of combat,
the Vietnamese people, race relations in the United States
military, male-female relationships in the war zone, and veterans'
postwar troubles. He also examines the publishing industry's
influence on collective memory, discussing, for example, the
tendency of publishers and reviewers to privilege memoirs critical
of the war. Veteran Narratives is a significant and original
addition to the literature on Vietnam veterans and the conflict as
a whole.
A work of creative nonfiction inspired by the true story of two
South Dakota teenagers, Mark St. Pierre's Of Uncommon Birth draws
upon extensive interviews and exhaustive research in military
archives to present a harrowing story of two young men - one white,
one Indian - caught in the vortex of the Vietnam War. Dale, a young
middle-class white American from South Dakota, joins the army
during the Vietnam War and dreams of serving his country. Frank, a
young Lakota Indian, joins the army in an effort to flee the
seemingly inescapable circumstances of his life and to follow his
people's warrior tradition. Mark St. Pierre intimately weaves
together the lives of these two men from different worlds, as each
struggles with issues of loyalty, responsibility, sacrifice, and
personal identity through his experiences in Vietnam. Of Uncommon
Birth presents the ironic story of an American Indian soldier who
lets himself become stereotyped as the Native ""good luck charm,""
even if the brave Indian scout stereotype carries with it the smell
of death.
In the decades since the Vietnam War, veteran memoirs have
influenced Americans' understanding of the conflict. Yet few
historians or literary scholars have scrutinized how the genre has
shaped the nation's collective memory of the war and its aftermath.
Instead, veterans' accounts are mined for colorful quotes and then
dropped from public discourse; are accepted as factual sources with
little attention to how memory, no matter how authentic, can
diverge from events; or are not contextualized in terms of the
race, gender, or class of the narrators. Veteran Narratives and the
Collective Memory of the Vietnam War is a landmark study of the
cultural heritage of the war in Vietnam as presented through the
experience of its American participants. Crossing disciplinary
borders in ways rarely attempted by historians, John A. Wood
unearths truths embedded in the memoirists' treatments of combat,
the Vietnamese people, race relations in the United States
military, male-female relationships in the war zone, and veterans'
postwar troubles. He also examines the publishing industry's
influence on collective memory, discussing, for example, the
tendency of publishers and reviewers to privilege memoirs critical
of the war. Veteran Narratives is a significant and original
addition to the literature on Vietnam veterans and the conflict as
a whole.
A book of the life of a Navy Seals while in Vietnam. The book is
faction half fact and half fiction. All things might of and could
of happened. It tells us how we never go to war alone. All things
in this book have either been declassified or never classified to
start with.
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