A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Duong Van Mai Elliott's The Sacred Willow illuminates recent Vietnamese history by weaving together the stories of the lives of four generations of her family. Beginning with her great-grandfather, who rose from rural poverty to become an influential landowner, and continuing to the present, Mai Elliott traces her family's journey through an era of tumultuous change. She tells us of childhood hours in her grandmother's silk shop, and of hiding while French troops torched her village, watching while blossoms torn by fire from the trees flutter "like hundreds of butterflies" overhead. She makes clear the agonizing choices that split Vietnamese families: her eldest sister left her staunchly anti-communist home to join the Viet Minh, and spent months sleeping in jungle camps with her infant son, fearing air raids by day and tigers by night. And she follows several family members through the last, desperate hours of the fall of Saigon-including one nephew who tried to escape by grabbing the skid of a departing American helicopter. Based on family papers, dozens of interviews, and a wealth of other research, this is not only a memorable family saga but a record of how the Vietnamese themselves have experienced their times.

In the 77 days from 20 January to 18 March of 1968, two divisions of the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) surrounded a regiment of U.S. Marines on a mountain plateau in the northwest corner of South Vietnam known as Khe sanh. The episode was no accident; it was in fact a carefully orchestrated meeting in which both sides got what they wanted. The north Vietnamese succeeded in surrounding the Marines in a situation in many ways similar to Dien Bien Phu, and may have been seeking similar tactical, operational, and strategic results. General William C. Westmoreland, the commander of the joint U.S. Military Assistance Command Vietnam (COMUSMACV), meanwhile, sought to lure the NVA into the unpopulated terrain around the 26th Marines in order to wage a battle of annihilation with air power. In this respect Khe Sanh has been lauded as a great victory of air power, a military instrument of dubious suitability to much of the Vietnam conflict. The facts support the assessment that air power was the decisive element at Khe Sanh, delivering more than 96 percent of the ordnance used against the NVA. This work focuses mainly on fixed-wing close air support, or the support provided by jet and propeller-driven conventional aircraft, to the general exclusion of rotary-wing aircraft, also known as helicopters. There are several reasons for this, none of which are meant to belittle the contributions or heroism of the Marine, Army, and Air Force helicopter pilots who fought in the hills around Khe Sanh. First, until the arrival of the AH-1G Cobra in April 1969, there was no helicopter designed for dedicated close air support of Marines in Vietnam. The primary gunship during the battle of Khe Sanh was the UH-1E outfitted with machine guns and rocket launchers for the escort of unarmed helicopters. These helicopters were sometimes used for the direct support of ground troops with suppressive fires and were frequently used as forward air controllers, spotting and marking targets for fixed-wing aircraft with heavier ordnance. These roles are appropriately discussed alongside the contributions of the fixed-wing aircraft, but as a general rule, analysis remains focused on the heavier attack aircraft.

The Vietnamese stole their land. The NVA raped their daughters. The Green Berets knew them as the most fearless and loyal warriors in the land.... They were the Montagnards, who called themselves "Sons of the Mountains" and always fought to the death. In this incredible memoir of wall-to-wall combat in the jungle near the Laotian border, Special Forces Lieutenant Don Bendell recounts the saga of the A camp of Dak Pek, 242. On those death-strewn hilltops in 1969-70, a handful of Green Berets and an army of 'Yards held off the entire might of North Vietnamese regulars-until even their courage and fighting skill could not staunch the flow of blood and tears.

For the conscripts of who experienced the Vietnam 'police action', the way the world was seen, shaped, and understood was irretrievably changed by war. In his gentle, humorous and moving memoir, Ted George gives voice to the experience that changed the course of his life - and the lives of so many men - forever.

The Marines in Vietnam, 1954 - 1973, an anthology and Annotated Bibliography, based on articles that appeared in the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, Naval Review, and Marine Corps Gazette, has served well for 14 years as an interim reference on the Vietnam War. In 1974, events in Vietnam and the appearance of additional significant articles in the three periodicals have made both the anthology and bibliography somewhat dated. This expanded edition extends the coverage of the anthology to 1975 and the entries in the bibliography to 1984.

This is the eighth volume in a planned 10-volume operational and chronological series covering the Marine Corps' participation in the Vietnam War. A separate topical series will complement the operational histories. This particular volume details the gradual withdrawl in 1970-1971 of Marine combat forces from South Vietnam's northernmost corps area, I Corps, as part of an overall American strategy of turning the ground was against the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong over to the Armed Forces of the Republic of Vietnam.