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Books > History > Asian / Middle Eastern history > From 1900 > Postwar, from 1945 > Vietnam War
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.
On March 16, 1968, American soldiers killed as many as five
hundred Vietnamese men, women, and children in a village near the
South China Sea. In "My Lai" William Thomas Allison explores and
evaluates the significance of this horrific event. How could such a
thing have happened? Who (or what) should be held accountable? How
do we remember this atrocity and try to apply its lessons, if
any?
My Lai has fixed the attention of Americans of various political
stripes for more than forty years. The breadth of writing on the
massacre, from news reports to scholarly accounts, highlights the
difficulty of establishing fact and motive in an incident during
which confusion, prejudice, and self-preservation overwhelmed the
troops.
Son of a Marine veteran of the Vietnam War--and aware that the
generation who lived through the incident is aging--Allison seeks
to ensure that our collective memory of this shameful episode does
not fade.
Well written and accessible, Allison's book provides a clear
narrative of this historic moment and offers suggestions for how to
come to terms with its aftermath.
Throughout the Vietnam War, one focal point persisted where the
Viet Cong guerrillas and ARVN were not a major factor, but where
the trained professionals of the North Vietnamese and United States
armies repeatedly fought head-to-head. A Shau Valor is a thoroughly
documented study of nine years of American combat operations
encompassing the crucial frontier valley and a 15-mile radius
around it-the most deadly killing ground of the entire Vietnam War.
Beginning in 1963 Special Forces A-teams established camps along
the valley floor, followed by a number of top-secret Project Delta
reconnaissance missions through 1967. Then, U.S. Army and Marine
Corps maneuver battalions engaged in a series of sometimes
controversial thrusts into the A Shau designed to disrupt NVA
infiltrations and to kill enemy soldiers, part of what came to be
known as Westmoreland's "war of attrition." The various campaigns
included Operation Pirous in 1967, 1968's Operations Delaware and
Somerset Plain, 1969's Operations Dewey Canyon, Massachusetts
Striker, and Apache Snow-which included the infamous battle for
Hamburger Hill-culminating with Operation Texas Star and the
vicious fight for and humiliating evacuation of Fire Support Base
Ripcord in the summer of 1970, the last major U.S. battle of the
war. By 1971 the fighting had once again shifted to the realm of
small Special Forces reconnaissance teams assigned to the
ultra-secret Studies and Observations Group-SOG. Other works have
focused on individual battles or units, but A Shau Valor is the
first to study the nine-year campaign-for all its courage,
sacrifice and valor-chronologically and within the context of other
historical, political, and cultural events. In addition to covering
the strictly military aspects of the various campaigns in the A
Shau, Tom Yarborough, author of the renowned Da Nang Diary, shows
how events in both Vietnam and the United States became inexorably
linked, as domestic dissent and a lack of realistic military
strategy ultimately led to America's first lost war.
During the Vietnam War, the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam
Studies and Observations Group (MACVSOG) was a highly-classified,
U.S. joint-service organization that consisted of personnel from
Army Special Forces, the Air Force, Navy SEALs, Marine Corps Force
Reconnaissance units, and the CIA. This secret organization was
committed to action in Southeast Asia even before the major
build-up of U.S. forces in 1965 and also fielded a division-sized
element of South Vietnamese military personnel, indigenous
Montagnards, ethnic Chinese Nungs, and Taiwanese pilots in its
varied reconnaissance, naval, air, and agent operations. MACVSOG
was without doubt the most unique U.S. unit to participate in the
Vietnam War, since its operational mandate authorized its missions
to take place "over the fence" in North Vietnam, Laos, and
Cambodia, where most other American units were forbidden to go.
During its nine-year existence it managed to participate in most of
the significant operations and incidents of the conflict. MACVSOG
was there during the Gulf of Tonkin incidents, during air
operations over North Vietnam, the Tet Offensive, the secret
bombing of and ground incursion into Cambodia, Operation Lam Son
719, the Green Beret murder case, the Easter Invasion, the Phoenix
Program, and the Son Tay POW Raid. The story of this extraordinary
unit has never before been told in full and comes as a timely
blueprint for combined-arms, multi-national unconventional warfare
in the post-9/11 age. Unlike previous works on the subject, Black
Ops, Vietnam is a complete chronological history of the unit drawn
from declassified documents, memoirs, and previous works on the
subject, which tended to focus only on particular aspects of the
unit's operations.
This is an account of the battle of Kham Duc, one of the least
known and most misunderstood battles in the American Phase of the
Second Indochina War (1959 to 1975). At the time it was painted as
a major American defeat, but this new history tells the full story.
The authors have a unique ability to reassess this battle - one was
present at the battle, the other was briefed on it prior to
re-taking the site two years later. The book is based on exhaustive
research, revisiting Kham Duc, interviewing battle veterans, and
reading interview transcripts and statements of other battle
participants, including former North Vietnamese Army (NVA)
officers. Based on their research, the authors contend that Kham
Duc did not 'fall' and was not 'overrun'. In fact, it was a
successful effort to inflict mass attrition on a major NVA force
with minimum American losses by voluntarily abandoning an
anachronistic little trip-wire border camp serving as passive bait
for General Westmoreland's 'lure and destroy' defensive tactics, as
at Khe Sanh.
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