The first comprehensive treatment of the air wars in Vietnam. Filling a substantial void in our understanding of the history of airpower in Vietnam, this book provides the first comprehensive treatment of the air wars in Vietnam. Brian Laslie traces the complete history of these air wars from the beginning of American involvement until final withdrawal. Detailing the competing roles and actions of the air elements of the United States Army, Navy, and Air Force, the author considers the strategic, operational, and tactical levels of war. He also looks at the air war from the perspective of the North Vietnamese Air Force. Most important for understanding the US defeat, Laslie illustrates the perils of a nation building a one-dimensional fighting force capable of supporting only one type of war.

This work takes place during the bloodiest years of the Vietnam War, when the author served as a Marine scout with 1st Force Recon, one of the most secretive and elite combat units ever to operate in Vietnam. Dropped deep into enemy held territory, Force Recon Marines relied on stealth, surprise, and their training to complete their missions. They were truly the ghosts of the jungle. The "Tales" here are a gritty mix of deadly firefights, prisoner "snatches", parachute jumps, punji pits, tiger attacks, and even a murder! The book follows the transformation of the author as he first arrives in Nam as an idealistic young man determined to serve his country, into a cynical combat hardened bush Marine whose perspective of the war changed as friends were lost and the missions became ever more dangerous.

Based on new archival research in many countries, this volume broadens the context of the U.S. intervention in Vietnam. Its primary focus is on relations between China and Vietnam in the mid-twentieth century; but the book also deals with China's relations with Cambodia, U.S. dealings with both China and Vietnam, French attitudes toward Vietnam and China, and Soviet views of Vietnam and China. Contributors from seven countries range from senior scholars and officials with decades of experience to young academics just finishing their dissertations. The general impact of this work is to internationalize the history of the Vietnam War, going well beyond the long-standing focus on the role of the United States.

Extraordinary Valor is the true story of American Special Forces officer John Duffy, and South Vietnamese paratrooper, Le Van Me, as they fight to defend Charlie Hill, a key to holding Vietnam's Central Highlands during North Vietnam's 1972 Easter Offensive. John Joseph Duffy was born in Brooklyn, New York; Le Van Me in a small village outside the old imperial capital of Hue in South Vietnam. Living on opposite sides of the globe, they come together in the heat of war in Southeast Asia when Major Duffy is assigned as the American advisor to the elite South Vietnamese 11th Airborne Battalion where Me is second in command. The battalion receives the order to "Fight to the death" on Charlie Hill. After two weeks of intense combat, hundreds lay dead and those still standing are out of food, water, and medical supplies. Their ammunition is nearly gone. Duffy and Me draw on their bond of friendship and trust to make a selfless two-man last stand against the final North Vietnamese human wave assault. Both are badly wounded, Duffy multiple times. Their heroic action allows 36 members of the 471-man battalion to escape and be rescued. The rest are killed, captured, or missing in action. This is their story.

Named by Studs Turkel as ""the poet of the Vietnam War,"" W.D. Ehrhart has written and lectured on a wide variety of topics and has been a preeminent voice on the Vietnam War for decades. Revered in academia, he has been the subject of many master's theses, doctoral dissertations, journals and books for which he was interviewed. Yet only two major interviews have been published to date. This complete collection of unpublished interviews from 1991 through 2016 presents Ehrhart's developing views on a range of subjects over three decades.

It took courage and a certain sense of wild adventure to be a combat medic during the Vietnam War, and William 'Doc' Osgood exemplified their daring attitude. Serving in the 101st Airborne Division, Osgood would see combat in the deadly A Shau Valley and all along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Hawk Recon is a story of what arguably was the most dangerous job in the deadliest part of Vietnam as told by a US Special Forces Green Beret. This is the tale of paratrooper combat medics of the 101st Airborne Air Cavalry fighting in the largest NVA base camp in South Vietnam-the A Shau Valley. Their war was was fought mostly in the mountains and on the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

The Vietnam War lasted twenty years and resulted in the deaths of over 58,000 American soldiers, with many more Vietnamese victims. But the roots of the American-led conflict lay in the complex colonial history of Vietnam itself. Here, Pablo de Orellana uses recently declassified material to provide a new interpretation of the diplomatic failures and processes that lead to the outbreak and continuation of the conflict. Through a focus on the first Vietnam War, de Orellana shows how and why a Southeast Asian French colony already devastated by two wars came to be seen as an existential threat by policymakers in the United States, and how an attempt to stem the influence of the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China spiraled out of control. The Road to Vietnam features new archival documents, including diplomatic notes and briefing material, to construct a new history of America's descent into conflict. This will be an essential resource for scholars and students of the Vietnam War and 20th Century diplomatic history.

SELECTED BY MILITARY TIMES AS A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR * SELECTED BY THE SOCIETY OF MIDLAND AUTHORS' AS THE BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR The New York Times bestselling author of In Harm's Way and Horse Soldiers shares the powerful account of an American army platoon fighting for survival during the Vietnam War in "an important book....not just a battle story--it's also about the home front" (The Today show). On January 31, 1968, as many as 100,000 guerilla fighters and soldiers in the North Vietnamese Army attacked thirty-six cities throughout South Vietnam, hoping to dislodge American forces during one of the vital turning points of the Vietnam War. Alongside other young American soldiers in an Army reconnaissance platoon (Echo Company, 1/501) of the 101st Airborne Division, Stanley Parker, the nineteen-year-old son of a Texan ironworker, was suddenly thrust into savage combat, having been in-country only a few weeks. As Stan and his platoon-mates, many of whom had enlisted in the Army, eager to become paratroopers, moved from hot zone to hot zone, the extreme physical and mental stresses of Echo Company's day-to-day existence, involving ambushes and attacks, grueling machine-gun battles, and impossibly dangerous rescues of wounded comrades, pushed them all to their limits and forged them into a lifelong brotherhood. The war became their fight for survival. When they came home, some encountered a bitterly divided country that didn't understand what they had survived. Returning to the small farms, beach towns, and big cities where they grew up, many of the men in the platoon fell silent, knowing that few of their countrymen wanted to hear the stories they lived to tell--until now. Based on interviews, personal letters, and Army after-action reports, The Odyssey of Echo Company recounts the searing tale of wartime service and homecoming of ordinary young American men in an extraordinary time and confirms Doug Stanton's prominence as an unparalleled storyteller of our age.

VIETNAM By Nicole Smith Copyright 2007 Erin Nicole Smith Used by permission Raging war In a foreign land U.S. Soldiers Made a stand Many died In Vietnam Was it right? Or was it wrong? Violent protest In the street American citizens Saw defeat Nightly news Brought the pictures home Radio listeners Heard the songs Love and hate War and peace 60's chaos Never ceased Battered Soldiers Fought and died The cost of freedom Oh so high Strong emotions In the USA Sounds familiar A lot like today http: //www.authorhouse.com/BookStore/BookStoreSearchResults.aspx?SearchType=smpl&SearchTerm=Dr]Art+Schmitt The book chronicles stories of truly Invincible Warriors. A woman Black Hawk pilot with two tours in Iraq tells the story how she thought that she was in A Star Wars Movie. The story of a Navy Corpman who served with Marines. His son is also a Navy Corpsman in Iraq. Harrison H (Jack) Schmitt, Apollo 17, one of the last men on the moon. I was his instructor to get him checked out in Helicopters. He tells his invincible story about a three hour hold on the mission and he took a nap in the rocket before launching to the moon. Stories of many Vietnam veterans. Pilots, Door gunners, River Patrol Gun Boat warriors (River Rats) and Navy SEALS. Admiral James Flatley, The former Executive Director of Patriots Point tells his story of his invincible story of flying a i130 Hercules off of an aircraft carrier. Other Invincible stories of CTF-116 River Rats, River Patrol gun boats in Vietnam. A tribute to Helicopter Attack Light Squadron Three, door gunners, crew and Pilots. A Vietnam Poem written by Nicole Smith, 14 years old, My wife's Grand Daughter. We were all truly Invincible.

First Published in 1990. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

That America was drawn into the Vietnam War by the French has been recognized, but rarely explored. This book analyzes the years from 1945 with the French military reconquest of Vietnam until 1963 with the execution of the French-endorsed dictator, Ngo Dinh Diem, demonstrating how the US should not have followed the French into Vietnam. It shows how the Korean War triggered the flow of American military hardware and finances to underpin France's war against the Marxist-oriented Vietnam Republic led by Ho Chi Minh.

With the knowledge born of firsthand experience, James H. Willbanks tells the story of the 60-day siege of An Loc. In 1972, late in the Vietnam War, a small group of South Vietnamese held off three North Vietnamese divisions and helped prevent a direct attack on Saigon. The battle can be considered one of the major events during the gradual American exit from Vietnam. An advisor to the South Vietnamese during the battle, Willbanks places the battle in the context of the shifting role of the American forces and a policy decision to shift more of the burden of fighting the war onto the Vietnamese troops. He presents an overview of the 1972 North Vietnamese Easter Offensive, a plan to press forward the attack on U.S. and ARVN positions throughout the country, including Binh Long province and Saigon. The North Vietnamese hoped to strike a decisive blow at a time when most American troops were being withdrawn. The heart of Willbanks's account concentrates on the fighting in Binh Long province, Saigon, and the siege of An Loc. It concludes with a discussion of the Paris peace talks, the significance of the fighting at An Loc, and the eventual fall of South Vietnam.

The body of work assembled in this collection falls within the tradition of how wars are remembered, and written of, by their surviving veterans. The War I Survived Was Vietnam, and my writing about it, excepting a few poems, has been confined to the staples of non-fiction: memoir, reporting, criticism and commentary. Among the articles reproduced here, criticism is by far the dominant voice in which I have processed my post-war reflections. A good deal of this work also ventures into the exploratory realm of the American veteran identity, to include my personal struggle to outdistance the demons of PTSD. As print has evolved into digital media, my criticism has migrated increasingly to the blogosphere permitting the restrictive boundaries of the book review to blossom over the more far ranging horizons of the essay. Several of these works are of relevance to how the Vietnam experience is being archived by scholars for historical interpretation. Prior to my career in the writing life, I was a political activist advocating for the welfare of GIs and veterans, notably around the health effects of exposure during active service to deadly radiation and poisonous herbicides. Selected material on these topics has also been included in this collection.

Nicky Venditti, a U.S. Army helicopter pilot with a love of fast cars and practical jokes, went to Vietnam in 1969 and was dead after 11 days, killed by an explosion during Americal Division training for new arrivals at Chu Lai. The full story of the incident did not come out until the author, David Venditta (a different spelling), Venditti's cousin, made a chance discovery that began a decades-long effort to find out exactly what happened, what the Army did about it and who was held responsible. This book documents the Army's mishandling of the incident and the effects on the families and friends of Venditti and of the two other young soldiers who died with him.

As a GI reporter for the 1st Air Cavalry Division in Vietnam, the author-""an enlisted man writing primarily for enlisted men""-chronicled the experiences of combat soldiers in newspaper and magazine articles. His stories gave the Army's version of events, sprinkled with human interest and humor. They include his observations and photos of jungle missions, life on firebases, struggles in the rear and his own survival as a harried frontline journalist. He also wrote almost daily letters home to his parents-personal dispatches filled with frank commentary and poignant, at times disturbing anecdotes. His stories and letters are combined here in chronological order, providing a richly detailed narrative of combat in Vietnam.

Through readings of literature, canonical history texts, studies of museum displays and media analysis, this work explores the historical formation of myths of Canadian national identity and then how these myths were challenged (and affirmed during the 1990 standoff at Oka. It draws upon history, literary criticism, anthropology, studies in nationalism and ethnicity and post-colonial theory.

"Hunt deliciously complicates the history of the 1960s by introducing a protest element not bound to college campuses or the counterculture. . . . It is a disturbing story, one that Hunt tells well."
--"Choice"

"All students of the concluding years of America's longest war should be grateful to Andrew Hunt for the clarity and grace with which he has told V.V.A.W.'s story."
--"Canadian Journal of History"

"This extraordinary and deeply moving history explodes all the encrusted stereotypes of GIs on one side of the barricades and anti-war protestors on the other. At along last we can again hear the voices of the thousands of courageous veterans who refused to be silent about the immoral war in Indochina."
"--Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz"

"A splendid addition to the growing literature on Vietnam veterans and their experiences during and after the war. Hunt's complex and moving history is a vital corrective to accounts which equate the anti-war movement with student activists as well as to those who persist in seeing veterans as passive victims."
"--Marilyn B. Young, author of The Vietnam Wars"

"Explodes one of the most persistent and pernicious myths attached to the 1960s: that the anti-war movement was anti-GI and anti-veteran. How could that be, when, as Hunt shows, many of the most committed and eloquent opponents of the Vietnam war were themselves veterans of the conflict in Southeast Asia. The Vietnam Veterans Against the War were heroes then, and they deserve to be remembered as heroes today."
"--Maurice Isserman, Hamilton College"

"For all kinds of veterans of the Sixties era, this book offers powerful testimony on the meaning of patriotismand moral courage. For younger people, whose images of the Sixties are often caught in the caricatures of the mass media, Hunt's sophisticated account of veterans' anti-war protest evokes new understanding, and I think, hard questions about a difficult time."
"--David Farber, author of The Age of Great Dreams"

The anti-Vietnam War movement in the United States is perhaps best remembered for its young, counterculture student protesters. However, the Vietnam War was the first conflict in American history in which a substantial number of military personnel actively protested the war while it was in progress.

In The Turning, Andrew Hunt reclaims the history of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), an organization that transformed the antiwar movement by placing Vietnam veterans in the forefront of the nationwide struggle to end the war. Misunderstood by both authorities and radicals alike, VVAW members were mostly young men who had served in Vietnam and returned profoundly disillusioned with the rationale for the war and with American conduct in Southeast Asia. Angry, impassioned, and uncompromisingly militant, the VVAW that Hunt chronicles in this first history of the organization posed a formidable threat to America's Vietnam policy and further contributed to the sense that the nation was under siege from within.

Based on extensive interviews and in-depth primary research, including recently declassified government files, The Turning is a vivid history of the men who risked censures, stigma, even imprisonment for a cause they believed to be "an extended tour of duty."

Operation Hump, the first major battle between the U.S. Army and the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces, took place November 5-9, 1965, in South Vietnam's War Zone D. Known as ""The Hump,"" it would change the nature of the war, escalating it from a hit-and-run guerrilla conflict to a bloody contest between Communist main force units and American commands of battalion size or larger. This memoir of an Operation Hump survivor begins with sequence of events leading up to the battle, from the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Drawing on official Army documents and the recollections of fellow combatants, the author not only describes the battle in detail but explains the war's basis in fabrications at the highest levels of the U.S. government. His experiences with post-traumatic stress disorder after the war and his eventual return to Vietnam in the 1990s are included.

With specially commissioned artworks and dynamic combat ribbon diagrams, this volume reveals how the 'last of the gunfighters', as the F-8 was dubbed by its pilots, prevailed against the growing MiG threat of the Vietnamese People's Air Force. When the Vietnam War began, the F-8 was already firmly established as a fighter and reconnaissance aircraft. It entered combat as an escort for Alpha strike packages, braving the anti-aircraft artillery and surface-to-air missiles alongside the A-4 Skyhawk bombers and meeting MiGs for the first time on 3 April 1965. Although the Crusader was nicknamed 'last of the gunfighters', its pilots employed 'secondary' AIM-9D Sidewinder missiles in all but one of their MiG kills, with guns also used as back-up in three. Its 20 mm guns were unreliable as they often jammed during strenuous manoeuvres, although they were responsible for damaging a number of MiGs. However, in combat the F-8 had the highest 'exchange ratio' (kills divided by losses) at six-to-one of any US combat aircraft involved in the Vietnam War. Through the copious use of first-hand accounts, highly detailed battlescene artwork, combat ribbon diagrams and armament views, Osprey's Vietnam air war specialist Peter E. Davies charts the successful career of the F-8 Crusader over Vietnam.

On 16 March 1968, two US infantry companies entered a Vietnamese village and in the course of a single morning killed over 400 of its unarmed, unresisting inhabitants . . . This is the first book to examine the response of American society to the My Lai massacre and its ambiguous place in American national memory. Kendrick Oliver argues that the massacre revelations left many Americans untroubled. It was only when the soldiers most immediately responsible came to be tried that opposition to the conflict grew, for these prosecutions were regarded by supporters of the war as evidence that the national leaders no longer had the will to do what was necessary to win. Oliver goes on to show that, contrary to interpretations of the Vietnam conflict as an unhealed national trauma or wound, many Americans have assimilated the war and its violence rather too well, and they were able to do so even when that violence was most conspicuous and current. US soldiers have been presented as the conflict's principal victims, and this was true even in the case of My Lai. It was the American perpetrators of the massacre and not the Vietnamese they brutalized who became the central object of popular concern. Both the massacre and its reception reveal the problem of human empathy in conditions of a counter-revolutionary war - a war, moreover, that had always been fought for geopolitical credibility, not for the sake of the Vietnamese. This incisive enquiry into the moral history of the Vietnam war should be essential reading for all students of the conflict, as well as others interested in the war and its cultural legacies. -- .

Why did the US make a commitment to an independent South Vietnam? Could a major war have been averted? Fredrik Logevall provides a concise, comprehensive and accessible introduction to the origins of the Vietnam War from the end of the Indochina War in 1954 to the eruption of full-scale war in 1965, and places events against their full international background.

The Redcatcher Express is the author's Vietnam War memoirs. Drafted and sent to fight in the war, the author, a musician by trade, is thwarted in his attempt to get into an Army band. He ends up in a Recon Platoon of the 199th Light Infantry Brigade, where he endures the adversity of war. The situation worsens when he is assigned to be point man for Recon. At the forefront of battle, the author feels that he is losing his senses. His prayers are answered when a reporter for the Stars and Stripes writes a story about his musical past. The Commanding General of the 199th reads the story and requests that the author assemble a combo to entertain the troops and raise the morale. The author organizes the Redcatcher Express and the band, made up of American GIs, becomes popular with the troops. He later discovers that raising the morale is instrumental in increasing the enemy body count in the 199th's war campaign. The body count of Vietcong was the centerpiece of the American approach to waging the war, conducted through search and destroy missions in remote jungle regions. Federation of American Scientists Military Analysis Network

First published in 1978. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In November 1963, the president of South Vietnam and his brother were brutally executed in a coup that was sanctioned and supported by the American government. President Kennedy later explained to his close friend Paul "Red" Fay that the reason the United States made the fateful decision to get rid of the Ngos was in no small part because of South Vietnam's first lady, Madame Nhu. "That goddamn bitch," Fay remembers President Kennedy saying, "She's responsible ... that bitch stuck her nose in and boiled up the whole situation down there."
The coup marked the collapse of the Diem government and became the US entry point for a decade-long conflict in Vietnam. Kennedy's death and the atrocities of the ensuing war eclipsed the memory of Madame Nhu--with her daunting mixture of fierceness and beauty. But at the time, to David Halberstam, she was "the beautiful but diabolic sex dictatress," and Malcolm Browne called her "the most dangerous enemy a man can have."
By 1987, the once-glamorous celebrity had retreated into exile and seclusion, and remained there until young American Monique Demery tracked her down in Paris thirty years later. Finding the Dragon Lady is Demery's story of her improbable relationship with Madame Nhu, and--having ultimately been entrusted with Madame Nhu's unpublished memoirs and her diary from the years leading up to the coup--the first full history of the Dragon Lady herself, a woman who was feared and fantasized over in her time, and who singlehandedly frustrated the government of one of the world's superpowers.

This international and interdisciplinary volume examines the Vietnam War from new perspectives including those of the Vietnamese diaspora, and explores the ways in which perceptions of the war have altered in recent years. It differs from other titles on the Vietnam War in that it acknowledges the South Vietnamese experience of the war, and encompasses the perspectives of the Vietnamese diaspora in the US, Australia and France, as well as the work of American, Australian and French historians. The war is reinterpreted and reassessed through the lens of history, politics, biography and literature. The effects of the Vietnam War outside the boundaries of the Vietnamese state are ongoing. The presence of substantial Vietnamese communities in countries that participated in the conflict is contributing to changing interpretations of the war. This volume provides new insights into the reconstruction and memorialization of the war by Vietnamese, American, Australian and French scholars, and contains twelve chapters grouped under "War and Politics", "Memorials and Commemoration", "War and Women's Writing", and "Identities and Legacies", covering South Vietnamese leadership and policies, women and civilians, veterans overseas, the involvement of smaller allies in the war such as Australia, accounts by US, Australian and South Vietnamese servicemen as well as those of Indigenous soldiers in the US and Australia, memorials and commemoration, and the legacy of war on individual lives, contemporary memories, and government policy.