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Any time Vietnam veterans get together--whether it's two or twenty
of them--war stories follow. The tales they relate about the
paddies, the jungles, the highlands, the waterways, and the airways
provide the vets a greater understanding of the war they survived
and gives nonparticipants a glimpse into the dangerous intensity of
firefights, the often hilarious responses to inexplicable
situations, and the strong bonds only they can share. These stories
from soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines have never been
captured or compiled in a meaningful way--until now. These stories
are the "real meat" of the Vietnam experience. In brief narratives,
the veterans themselves relate the valor, hardship, fear, and humor
of the war in Vietnam.
Eleven years before Rosa Parks resisted going to the back of the
bus, a young black second lieutenant, hungry to fight Nazis in
Europe, refused to move to the back of a U.S. Army bus in Texas and
found himself court-martialed. The defiant soldier was Jack
Roosevelt Robinson, already in 1944 a celebrated athlete in track
and football and in a few years the man who would break Major
League Baseball's color barrier. This was the pivotal moment in
Jackie Robinson's pre-MLB career. Had he been found guilty, he
would not have been the man who broke baseball's color barrier. Had
the incident never happened, he would've gone overseas with the
Black Panther tank battalion-and who knows what after that. Having
survived this crucible of unjust prosecution as an American
soldier, Robinson-already a talented multisport athlete-became the
ideal player to integrate baseball. This is a dramatic story,
deeply engaging and enraging. It's a Jackie Robinson story and a
baseball story, but it is also an army story as well as an American
story.
During World War II, some 10,000 American bombers and fighters were
shot down over Europe. Of the crews aboard, 26,000 men were killed,
while 30,000 survived being shot down only to be captured and made
prisoners of war. Against the longest of odds, nearly 3,000 airmen
made it to the ground alive, evaded capture, and escaped to safety.
These men proudly called themselves the Blister Club. Drawing on
tens of thousands of pages of mostly untapped documents in the
National Archives, Michael Lee Lanning tells the story of these
courageous airmen. They had received escape-and-evasion (E & E)
training, and some were lucky enough to land with their E-&-E
kits-but all bets were off once they hit the ground. They landed
after an air catastrophe. The geography was usually unfamiliar.
Civilians might or might not be trustworthy. German soldiers and
Gestapo agents hunted down airmen as well as civilians who dared
help them. If an airman abandoned his uniform for civilian garb, he
forfeited Geneva Convention protections. Most faced the daunting
task of escaping on foot across hundreds of miles. The fortunate
connected with one of the established escape routes to Spain or
Switzerland or across the English Channel, or they hooked up with
the underground resistance or friendly civilians. Upon return to
friendly lines, these men were often able to provide valuable
intelligence about enemy troop dispositions and civilian morale.
Many volunteered to fly again even though regulations prohibited
it. The Blister Club is history with a punch. With a historian's
eye, Lanning covers the hows and whys of escape-and-evasion and
aerial combat in the European theater, but the book also vividly
captures the stories of the airmen who did the escaping and
evading, including that of a young pilot named Chuck Yeager, who,
during his own escape, aided the French Resistance and helped
another downed airman to safety-and then begged to fly again,
eventually securing Eisenhower's approval to return to the air,
where he achieved ace status. Stories of escape are popular,
especially those set during World War II, as are stories of the war
in the air. Combining both of these, The Blister Club should find
an enthusiastic audience.
Had Lieutenant George S. Patton not served on the southern border
during the Mexican Expedition of 1916, there might never have been
a General George S. Patton who took the world by storm as a bold
and daring commander during World War II. Relying on Patton’s
detailed personal journals of his eight months in Mexico, Michael
Lee Lanning describes the young officer’s exploits during the
hunt for Pancho Villa. As an aide to General John Pershing, Patton
learned leadership and logistics from the man who would soon
command American forces in World War I. Begging for a field
command, he received it—and led the first motorized attack in
U.S. military history and may or may not have killed two of
Villa’s lieutenants. The press ate it up, and Patton learned not
only how much he loved attention, but how to promote himself. In
Mexico are the roots of Patton the World War II general, and
Lanning tells the story deftly, focusing on Patton the man as well
Patton the commander, and always casting an eye forward to
Patton’s future career. This is how Patton became Patton.
From the War for Independence to the War on Terror, American
military intelligence has often failed, costing needless casualties
and squandering money and materiel as well as prestige - and all
too often it has failed to learn from its mistakes. Senseless
Secrets covers more than 200 years of intelligence breakdowns in
every American war, including not only how intelligence has been
wrong, but also how good intel has failed to make it to battlefield
commanders, how spies and traitors have infiltrated the military
intelligence community, and more. Here are stories of Benedict
Arnold's turn in the Revolution, George McClellan's reliance on the
Pinkertons' inflated estimates of enemy strengths in the Civil War,
Custer's flawed intelligence prior to the Little Bighorn, the
controversy over Pearl Harbor, the surprise German attack that
started the Battle of the Bulge, the failure to convey useful
intelligence to small-unit commanders in Vietnam, overestimates of
Iraqi strength during Operation Desert Storm, the bad intelligence
about Saddam Hussein's supposed nuclear arsenal in 2002-03, and the
chaos surrounding the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021.
Senseless Secrets is a military history of the United States
through its intelligence operations. It should be required reading
inside the U.S. military and beyond.
Texas, home to more than 1.7 million living veterans (the second
largest number of any state), is also home to six nationally run
and four state-run veterans cemeteries. Each year, more than 12,000
veterans are laid to rest in these hallowed grounds. The Veterans
Cemeteries of Texas recounts the stories of these ten official
final resting places for Texas veterans, creating-for the first
time-a complete guide to these solemn bivouacs of the dead. Author
Michael Lee Lanning, a US Army veteran, has not only reconstructed
the history of these cemeteries as a tribute to the fallen but has
also compiled a useful resource for the living. Lanning details the
exact locations, eligibility requirements, and contact information
throughout the state for those veterans and their families who
might choose to make use of these important public services. Richly
illustrated, the book also provides moving descriptions of military
burial traditions, such as "Taps" and the 21-gun salute, as well as
information about the various types of military headstones
(including sixty authorized religious symbols). In the author's
words, "A walk through these burial grounds is a journey across the
history of Texas and of the United States." Lanning's use of more
than 100 captivating photographs, along with his compelling text,
allows readers to take that walk through veterans cemeteries in
Texas. For lovers of Texas history and military history, The
Veterans Cemeteries of Texas is a gripping tribute to past,
present, and future Texas veterans and the solemn places where they
rest in their last formation and final parade.
Any time Vietnam veterans get together--whether it's two or twenty
of them--war stories follow. The tales they relate about the
paddies, the jungles, the highlands, the waterways, and the airways
provide the vets a greater understanding of the war they survived
and gives nonparticipants a glimpse into the dangerous intensity of
firefights, the often hilarious responses to inexplicable
situations, and the strong bonds only they can share. These stories
from soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines have never been
captured or compiled in a meaningful way--until now. These stories
are the "real meat" of the Vietnam experience. In brief narratives,
the veterans themselves relate the valor, hardship, fear, and humor
of the war in Vietnam.
When diagnosed with Stage IV kidney cancer, LTC (Ret) Michael Lee
Lanning faced a new and fearsome enemy that the doctors said would
kill him in 6-18 months. Instead of accepting this as his fate,
Lanning, with the help of his wife Linda, pursued strategies--both
conventional and alternative--to battle his disease and fight for
his life. This book tracks the Lannings' war with cancer from
diagnosis to survival, from exploring traditional treatments at M.
D. Anderson Cancer Center to transitioning to a raw vegan lifestyle
learned at Hippocrates Health Institute, from enduring the depths
of despair to embracing the heights of hope. Their experiences and
insights shared here is the information they sought for themselves
when Lanning was first diagnosed.
SOLDIERS OF $$
Privateers, contract killers, ""corporate warriors. Contract
soldiers go by many names, but they all have one thing in common:
They fight for money and plunder rather than liberty, God, or
country. Now acclaimed author and war vet Michael Lee Lanning
traces the compelling history of these fighting machines-from the
"Sea Peoples" who fought for the pharaohs' greater glory to today's
soldiers for hire from private military companies (PMCs) in Iraq
and Afghanistan.
What emerges is a fascinating account of the men who fight other
people's wars-the Greeks who built an empire for Alexander the
Great, the Nubians who accompanied Hannibal across the Alps, the
Irish who became the first to go global in their search for work.
Soldiers of fortune have always had the power to change the course
of war, and Lanning examines their pivotal roles in individual
battles and in the rise and fall of empires.
As the employment of contract soldiers spreads in Iraq and
America's War on Terrorism-the U.S. paid $30 billion to PMCs in
2003 alone-Mercenaries offers a valuable inside look at a system
that appears embedded in our nation's future.
Includes eight pages of photographs
"An intimate, candid portrait of the Viet Cong/North Vietnamese
Army...An absolute necessity for Vietnamese-studies
collections."
During the war in Vietnam, the North Vietnamese communists had to
place their trust in the oldest and most reliable tool of warfare:
the individual soldier; America believed that firepower, lgoistics,
and technology would be sufificent for victory. The North
Vietnamese won. INSIDE THE VC AND THE NVA, written by two veterans
with six-and-a-half years combined experience, shows how.
A Dual Main Selection of the Military Book Club
In my year in Vietnam, I walked the booby-trapped rice paddies of
the Delta, searching for the elusive Viet Cong, and later macheted
my way through the triple-canopy jungle, fighting the North
Vietnamese Regulars...I sweated, thirsted, hunted, killed.
Somewhere in all my experiences, I overlapped the situations of
nearly every infantryman and many others who served. Michael Lee
Lanning's journal of his first tour of duty in Vietnam provides an
unvarnished daily account of life in the field - the blood, fear,
camaraderie, and tedium of combat and maneuver. Fleshed out with
narrative and detail years later, the pages of this memorable book,
first published in 1987, show an eager young recruit growing before
the reader's eyes into a proud but bloodied combat veteran.
Subsequent volumes in his ""Vietnam Trilogy"" will detail Lanning's
tour as a company commander and his postwar investigation into the
mind of the enemy. Through his eyes, readers see the reality of a
war that did not always receive glory but was, in his words, ""the
only war we had.
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