This book revisits the American canon of novels, memoirs, and films about the war in Vietnam, in order to reassess critically the centrality of the discourse of American victimization in the country's imagination of the conflict, and to trace the strategies of representation that establish American soldiers and veterans as the most significant victims of the war. By investigating in detail the imagery of the Vietnamese landscape recreated by American authors and directors, the volume explores the proposition that Vietnam has been turned into an American myth, demonstrating that the process resulted in a dehistoricization and mystification of the conflict that obscured its historical and political realities. Against this background, representations of the war's victims-Vietnamese civilians and American soldiers-are then considered in light of their ideological meanings and uses. Ultimately, the book seeks to demonstrate how, in a relation of power, the question of victimhood can become ideologized, transforming into both a discourse and a strategy of representation-and in doing so, to demythologize something of the "Vietnam" of American cultural narrative.

With more than 1,200 photos, the second volume of this series gets into the heart of the USAF uniforms and equipment used during the Vietnam War. Focusing on hundreds of Air Force named items, the book offers precise insight and references covering a selection of 70+ units. Flight suits, helmets, utility shirts, jungle jackets, plaques, and souvenir lighters are featured together to illustrate the history of these flying and ground units. From the air bases to the mighty B-52s, from the secret missions to the POWs, many aspects of USAF involvement in Southeast Asia are covered in this second volume.

Beyond Combat investigates how the Vietnam War both reinforced and challenged the gender roles that were key components of American Cold War ideology. While popular memory of the Vietnam War centers on the combat moment, refocusing attention onto women and gender paints a more complex and accurate picture of the war's far-reaching impact beyond the battlefields. Encounters between Americans and Vietnamese were shaped by a cluster of intertwined images used to make sense of and justify American intervention and use of force in Vietnam. These images included the girl next door, a wholesome reminder of why the United States was committed to defeating Communism; the treacherous and mysterious dragon lady, who served as a metaphor for Vietnamese women and South Vietnam; the John Wayne figure, entrusted with the duty of protecting civilization from savagery; and the gentle warrior, whose humanitarian efforts were intended to win the favor of the South Vietnamese. Heather Stur also examines the ways in which ideas about masculinity shaped the American GI experience in Vietnam and, ultimately, how some American men and women returned from Vietnam to challenge homefront gender norms.

The "Silent Majority" Speech treats Richard Nixon's address of November 3, 1969, as a lens through which to examine the latter years of the Vietnam War and their significance to U.S. global power and American domestic life. The book uses Nixon's speech - which introduced the policy of "Vietnamization" and cited the so-called bloodbath theory as a justification for continued U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia - as a fascinating moment around which to build an analysis of the last years of the war. For Nixon's strategy to be successful, he requested the support of what he called the "great silent majority," a term that continues to resonate in American political culture. Scott Laderman moves beyond the war's final years to address the administration's hypocritical exploitation of moral rhetoric and its stoking of social divisiveness to achieve policy aims. Laderman explores the antiwar and pro-war movements, the shattering of the liberal consensus, and the stirrings of the right-wing resurgence that would come to define American politics. Supplemental primary sources make this book an ideal tool for introducing students to historical research. The "Silent Majority" Speech is critical reading for those studying American political history and U.S.-Asian/Southeast Asian relations.

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.

The antiDVietnam War movement marked the first time in American history that record numbers marched and protested to an antiwar tune_on college campuses, in neighborhoods, and in Washington. Although it did not create enough pressure on decision-makers to end U.S. involvement in the war, the movement's impact was monumental. It served as a major constraint on the government's ability to escalate, played a significant role in President Lyndon B. Johnson's decision in 1968 not to seek another term, and was a factor in the Watergate affair that brought down President Richard Nixon.

At last, the story of the entire antiwar movement from its advent to its dissolution is available in Antiwarriors: The Vietnam War and the Battle for America's Hearts and Minds . Author Melvin Small describes not only the origins and trajectory of the antiDVietnam War movement in America, but also focuses on the way it affected policy and public opinion and the way it in turn was affected by the government and the media, and, consequently, events in Southeast Asia.

Leading this crusade were outspoken cultural rebels including Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, as passionate about the cause as the music that epitomizes the period. But in addition to radical protestors whose actions fueled intense media coverage, Small reveals that the anti-war movement included a diverse cast of ordinary citizens turned war dissenter: housewives, politicians, suburbanites, clergy members, and the elderly.

The antiwar movement comes to life in this compelling new book that is sure to fascinate all those interested in the Vietnam War and the turbulent, tumultuous 1960s.

This book offers a dispassionate strategic examination of the Vietnam conflict that challenges the conventional wisdom that South Vietnam could not survive as an independent non-communist entity over the long term regardless of how the United States conducted its military- political effort in Indochina.

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.

To grasp the complicated causes and consequences of the Vietnam War, one must understand the extraordinary life of Ho Chi Minh, the man generally recognized as the father of modern Vietnam. Duiker provides startling insights into Ho's true motivation, as well as into the Soviet and Chinese roles in the Vietnam War.

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.

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.

Frances FitzGerald's landmark history of Vietnam and the Vietnam War, "a compassionate and penetrating account of the collision of two societies that remain untranslatable to one another." (New York Times Book Review) This magisterial work, based on Frances FitzGerald's many years of research and travels, takes us inside the history of Vietnam -- the traditional, ancestor-worshiping villages, the conflicts between Communists and anti-Communists, Catholics and Buddhists, generals and monks, the disruption created by French colonialism, and America's ill-fated intervention -- and reveals the country as seen through Vietnamese eyes. Originally published in 1972, Fire in the Lake was the first history of Vietnam written by an American and won the Pulitzer Prize, the Bancroft Prize, and the National Book Award. With a clarity and insight unrivaled by any author before it or since, Frances FitzGerald illustrates how America utterly and tragically misinterpreted the realities of Vietnam.

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.

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."

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.

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

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

Between 1964 and 1975, 2.6 million American personnel served within the borders of South Vietnam during the Vietnam War, of whom an estimated 1-1.6 million actually fought in combat. At the tip of the spear were the infantry, the "grunts" who entered an extraordinary tropical combat zone completely alien to the world they had left behind in the United States. In South Vietnam, and occasionally spilling over into neighboring Laos and Cambodia, they fought a relentless counterinsurgency and conventional war against the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and Viet Cong (VC). The terrain was as challenging as the enemy - soaring mountains or jungle-choked valleys; bleached, sandy coastal zones; major urban centers; riverine districts. Their opponents fought them with relentless and terrible ingenuity, on a daily basis with ambushes, booby traps, and mines, then occasionally with full-force offensives on a scale to rival the campaigns of World War II. This pocket manual draws its content not only from essential U.S. military field manuals of the Vietnam era, but also a vast collection of declassified primary documents, including rare after-action reports, intelligence analysis, first-hand accounts, and combat studies. Through these documents the pocket manual provides a deep insight into what it was like for infantry to live, survive, and fight in Vietnam, whether conducting a major airmobile search-and-destroy operation or conducting endless hot and humid small-unit patrols from jungle firebases. The book includes infantry intelligence documents about the NVA and VC threats, plus chapters explaining hard-won lessons about using weaponry, surviving and moving through the jungle, tactical maneuvers, and applications of the ubiquitous helicopter for combat and support.

1970 - the height of the Vietnam War. A group of young Forward Air Controllers based in Thailand are assigned with supporting the Truck War and the People's War in southern Laos, where the fate of the Vietnam War, and Laos' very future, is being decided. Tasked with shutting down the Ho Chi Minh Trail - the North Vietnamese supply lines running into South Vietnam - literally stopping the constant stream of trucks in their tracks, these American airmen, call sign "Nail," fly missions 24 hours a day. Daily they run the gauntlet of intense anti-aircraft fire to bring in accurate attacks by American fighter bombers. At night, streams of red tracers scream up from the ground, seeking the metallic flesh of their fragile craft. During the day, they search the skies for the telltale black puffs of smoke that reveal the self-destructive warheads of the North Vietnamese gunners. Even when tragedy befalls the group, they perserve with their mission. But will courage and dedication be enough?

First published in 1915, Towards International Government considers the consequences of war for global diplomacy and the alliance system. Hobson argues that, to reduce armaments and the possibility of another world war, an organisational structure of international government must be put into place. An extension of the League of Nations, Hobson proposes that this council would need to hold legislative powers enabling it to impose economic sanctions and, if necessary, the ability to deploy an international force. This is a fascinating and exceptionally forward-thinking work, of great importance to economic and political historians of the twentieth century.