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Books > History > American history > From 1900 > Postwar, from 1945 > Vietnam War
During the Vietnam war 3500 officers and men served in the Swift
Boat program in a fleet of 130 boats with no armor plating. The
boats patrolled the coast and rivers of South Vietnam, with the
average age of the crew being twenty-four. Their days consisted of
deadly combat, intense lightning firefights, storms and many hidden
dangers. This action-packed story of combat written by Dan Daly, a
Vietnam combat veteran who was the Officer in Charge of PCF 76
makes you part of the Swift Boat crew. The six man crew of PCF 76
were volunteers from all over the United States, eager to serve
their country in a highly unique type of duty not seen since the PT
boats of WWII. This inexperienced and disparate group of men would
meld into a combat team - a team that formed an unbreakable,
lifelong bond. After training they were plunged into a 12 month
tour of duty. Combat took place in the closest confines imaginable,
where the enemy were hidden behind a passing sand dune or a single
sniper could be concealed in an onshore bunker, mines might be
submerged at every fork in the river. The enemy was all around you,
hiding, waiting, while your fifty-foot Swift Boat works its way
upriver. In many cases the rivers became so narrow there was barely
room to maneuver or turn around. The only way out might be into a
deadly ambush. Humor and a touch of romance relieve the tension in
this thrilling ride with America's finest.
This detailed, highly-illustrated study presents a unique and
comprehensive collection of uniforms, insignia, and equipment used
by the French Foreign Legion in Indochina from 1946 to 1956. More
than 400 original pieces are shown in over 1,000 high-quality,
color photographs. Over 200 rare war-era photographs of the Legion
in Indochina show the vast variety of uniforms and equipment in
use. Much of the information included here is presented for the
first time in English. This book will become a standard reference
for Foreign Legion collectors and historians.
During the Vietnam war, the United States sought to undermine
Hanoi's subversion of the Saigon regime by sending Vietnamese
operatives behind enemy lines. A secret to most Americans, this
covert operation was far from secret in Hanoi: all of the commandos
were killed or captured, and many were turned by the Communists to
report false information.
"Spies and Commandos" traces the rise and demise of this secret
operation-started by the CIA in 1960 and expanded by the Pentagon
beginning in1964-in the first book to examine the program from both
sides of the war. Kenneth Conboy and Dale Andrade interviewed CIA
and military personnel and traveled in Vietnam to locate former
commandos who had been captured by Hanoi, enabling them to tell the
complete story of these covert activities from high-level decision
making to the actual experiences of the agents.
The book vividly describes scores of dangerous
missions-including raids against North Vietnamese coastal
installations and the air-dropping of dozens of agents into enemy
territory-as well as psychological warfare designed to make Hanoi
believe the "resistance movement" was larger than it actually was.
It offers a more complete operational account of the program than
has ever been made available-particularly its early years-and ties
known events in the war to covert operations, such as details of
the "34-A Operations" that led to the Tonkin Gulf incidents in
1964. It also explains in no uncertain terms why the whole plan was
doomed to failure from the start.
One of the remarkable features of the operation, claim the
authors, is that its failures were so glaring. They argue that the
CIA, and later the Pentagon, was unaware for years that Hanoi had
compromised the commandos, even though some agents missed radio
deadlines or filed suspicious reports. Operational errors were not
attributable to conspiracy or counterintelligence, they contend,
but simply to poor planning and lack of imagination.
Although it flourished for ten years under cover of the wider
war, covert activity in Vietnam is now recognized as a disaster.
Conboy and Andrade's account of that episode is a sobering tale
that lends a new perspective on the war as it reclaims the lost
lives of these unsung spies and commandos.
At the height of the Vietnam conflict, a complex system of secret
underground tunnels sprawled from Cu Chi Province to the edge of
Saigon. In these burrows, the Viet Cong cached their weapons,
tended their wounded, and prepared to strike. They had only one
enemy: U.S. soldiers small and wiry enough to maneuver through the
guerrillas' narrow domain.
The brave souls who descended into these hellholes were known as
"tunnel rats." Armed with only pistols and K-bar knives, these men
inched their way through the steamy darkness where any number of
horrors could be awaiting them-bullets, booby traps, a tossed
grenade. Using firsthand accounts from men and women on both sides
who fought and killed in these underground battles, authors Tom
Mangold and John Penycate provide a gripping inside look at this
fearsome combat. The Tunnels of Cu Chi" "is a war classic of
unbearable tension and unforgettable heroes.
The American war in Vietnam was concluded in 1973 under the terms
of a truce that were effectively identical to what was offered to
the Nixon administration four years earlier. Those four years cost
America billions of dollars and over 35,000 war deaths and
casualties, and resulted in the deaths of over 300,000 Vietnamese.
And those years were the direct result of the supposed master plan
of the most important voice in the Nixon White House on American
foreign policy: Henry Kissinger. Using newly available archival
material from the Nixon Presidential Library and Kissinger's
personal papers, Robert K. Brigham shows how Kissinger's approach
to Vietnam was driven by personal political rivalries and strategic
confusion, while domestic politics played an outsized influence on
Kissinger's so-called strategy. There was no great master plan or
Bismarckian theory that supported how the US continued the war or
conducted peace negotiations. As a result, a distant tragedy was
perpetuated, forever changing both countries. Now, perhaps for the
first time, we can see the full scale of that tragedy and the
machinations that fed it.
A Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist in History Winner of the
2018 Marine Corps Heritage Foundation Greene Award for a
distinguished work of nonfiction The first battle book from Mark
Bowden since his #1 New York Times bestseller Black Hawk Down, Hue
1968 is the story of the centerpiece of the Tet Offensive and a
turning point in the American War in Vietnam. In the early hours of
January 31, 1968, the North Vietnamese launched over one hundred
attacks across South Vietnam in what would become known as the Tet
Offensive. The lynchpin of Tet was the capture of Hue, Vietnam's
intellectual and cultural capital, by 10,000 National Liberation
Front troops who descended from hidden camps and surged across the
city of 140,000. Within hours the entire city was in their hands
save for two small military outposts. American commanders refused
to believe the size and scope of the Front's presence, ordering
small companies of marines against thousands of entrenched enemy
troops. After several futile and deadly days, Lieutenant Colonel
Ernie Cheatham would finally come up with a strategy to retake the
city, block by block and building by building, in some of the most
intense urban combat since World War II. With unprecedented access
to war archives in the U.S. and Vietnam and interviews with
participants from both sides, Bowden narrates each stage of this
crucial battle through multiple viewpoints. Played out over 24 days
and ultimately costing 10,000 lives, the Battle of Hue was by far
the bloodiest of the entire war. When it ended, the American debate
was never again about winning, only about how to leave. Hue 1968 is
a gripping and moving account of this pivotal moment.
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.
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