Military Memoirs Vietnam

While the 77-day siege of Khe Sanh in early 1968 remains one of the most highly publicized clashes of the Vietnam War, scant attention has been paid to the first battle of Khe Sanh, also known as "the Hill Fights". Although this harrowing combat in the spring of 1967 provided a grisly preview of the carnage to come at Khe Sanh, few are aware of the significance of the battles, or even their existence.

In chronicling the adventurous life of legendary CIA operative Edward Lansdale, The Road Not Taken definitively reframes our understanding of the Vietnam War. In this epic biography of Edward Lansdale (1908-1987) best-selling historian Max Boot demonstrates how Lansdale pioneered a "hearts and mind" diplomacy, first in the Philippines, then in Vietnam. It was a visionary policy that, as Boot reveals, was ultimately crushed by America's giant military bureaucracy.

Combat Talons in Vietnam is a personal account of the first use of C-130s in the Vietnam War. One night, John Gargus, a mission planner, oversaw an operation in which the aircraft - carrying 11 crew members - failed to return from a nighttime mission. For 30 years, a search for the missing aircraft remained in progress. When wartime mission records were declassified, Gargus embarked on a long journey of inquiry, research, and puzzle-solving to reconstruct the events of that mission and the fate of its crew.

American discussions of the Vietnam War tend to gloss over the period from 1972 to the final North Vietnamese offensive in 1975. But these were brutal times for America's South Vietnamese allies combined with a period of intense diplomatic negotiations conducted under the increasing reality that America had abandoned them.

The men who served with in the 1st Infantry Division with F company, 52nd Infantry (LRP), later redesignated as Company I, 75th Infantry (Ranger), engaged in some of the fiercest, bloodiest fighting during the Vietnam War, suffering a greater relative aggregate of casualties that any other LRRP/LRP/ Ranger company. Their base was Lai Khe, within hailing distance of the Vietcong central headquarters, a mile inside Cambodia, with its vast stockpiles of weapons and thousands of transient VC and NVA soldiers. Recondo-qualified Bill Goshen was there.

Lt. Col. Ed “Fast Eddie” Cobleigh flew as a fighter pilot with the US Air Force, the US Navy (TOPGUN), the Royal Air Force, the Imperial Iranian Air Force, and the French Air Force. This is his story--a prequel and a sequel to his number-one best-selling memoir, War for the Hell of It: A Fighter Pilot’s View of Vietnam.

Robert Foley had only been in Vietnam for six months when he was promoted to captain and given command of a rifle company. In November 1966, Foley led his men on a mission to rescue another company that had been pinned down by Viet Cong forces. His leadership that day inspired his men and led to a successful operation—and the Medal of Honor. His actions in Vietnam were only a small portion of a long and varied career of service in the US Army, but Foley did not always seem marked for success.

Phantom in the Sky is the story of a Radar Intercept Officer (RIO) in the back seat of the supersonic Phantom jet during the Vietnam War - a unique, tactical perspective of the “guy in back”, or GIB, absent from other published aviation accounts. During the time of Terry L. Thorsen’s service from 1966 to 1970, the RIO played an integral part in enemy aircraft interception and ordnance delivery. In Navy and Marine F-4 Phantom jets, the RIO was a second pair of eyes for the pilot, in charge of communications and navigation, and great to have during emergencies.

Trauma and Tenacity in Vietnam: A Surgeon's Story captures the defining period in the medical life of Capt. Sheldon Kushner, MD, while stationed in Vinh Long, Vietnam, from 1968-69. Through letters, reel-to-reel tape recordings, slides, and the personal interviews that recounted his experience, the story of a young surgeon is revealed.

In this gripping memoir, a former marine returns to Vietnam to try to make sense of the war. Previously published as Brothers in Arms, this edition includes a new preface by the author. When William Broyles Jr. was drafted, he was a twenty-four-year-old student at Oxford University in England, hoping to avoid military service. During his physical exam, however, he realized that he couldn't let social class or education give him special privileges. He joined the marines, and soon commanded an infantry platoon in the foothills near Da Nang.

Terry Buckler is an all-American boy from the Heartland who is selected for one of the most daring Special Operations missions in world history. See the 1970 Son Tay Raid through his eyes, with top secret planning by CIA, Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine special warfare legends in secret locations both in the US and in Southeast Asia. Twists in the story will take the listener from Hanoi, some of the most highly-defended airspace in the world, to idyllic farmlands in America to a secret CIA compound to the East Room of the White House.

In 1967, Joe Putnam, fresh out of officer training school, is shipped overseas to Vietnam as part of President Johnson’s American Adviser program. Putnam would be one of the American soldiers advising the South Vietnamese Army on how to conduct a war against the North Vietnamese Army and their allies in the south, the Viet Cong. This plan would supposedly keep the Communists at bay without actually getting the U.S. into full-fledged war in Southeast Asia.

With remarkable clarity and with great detachment, Kidder looks back at himself from across three and a half decades, confessing how, as a young lieutenant, he sought to borrow from the tragedy around him and to imagine himself a romantic hero. Unrelentingly honest, rueful, and revealing, My Detachment gives us war without heroism, while preserving those rare moments of redeeming grace in the midst of lunacy and danger.

Tex, as his comrades called him, was not the same man he once was upon returning home from 'Nam. No, that man died over there with thousands of other soldiers. He was a casualty of war, sent home with a broken mind and invisible wounds that were impossible to mend.

Following the success of Jarhead, Anthony Swofford assumed he had exorcised his military demons - but as every veteran knows, that isn't exactly how it works. In these searing, courageous pages, Swofford struggles to make sense of what his military service meant, and to decide - after nearly ending it - what his life can and should become. Consumed by drugs, booze, fast cars, and the wrong women, Swofford almost lost everything and everyone that mattered to him.

Bob Kerrey grew up outside Lincoln, Nebraska, in the 1950s, and in his trademark style - serious, sometimes wry - he tells of his journey from that heartland to the dangers of Vietnam, to the hospitals where he recovered from his grievous injuries, and finally to the Nixon White House where he was awarded the Medal of Honor.

Jeff Danziger, one of the leading political cartoonists of his generation, captures the fear, sorrow, absurdity, and unintended but inevitable consequences of war with dark humor and penetrating moral clarity.

Eighteen-year-old Marine recruit William V. Taylor, Jr. and his brother Marines are assembled into a new reaction force that is immediately tested in the fire of a bloody conflict known as Operation Beaver Cage. After a traumatic first fight, they push through back-to-back operations with little time to rest or reflect. Those who survive will return home ensnared by everlasting memories of a real but entirely surreal nightmare. Now, after more than 50 years of holding everything in, Taylor shares his experience in explicit—and often horrific—detail.

This audiobook is built around Fred Edward's journals, sent home during his first tour in Vietnam in 1966-67. His own meticulous research fits his individual experiences into a larger context, through Postscripts, extensive notes, and a thorough historical chronology

The Studies and Observations Group was a covert American military unit in Vietnam that specialized in clandestine cross-border operations in Laos and Cambodia. In September 1970, sixteen Green Berets and one-hundred-twenty Montagnard mercenaries departed on Operation Tailwind, the largest and deepest raid in SOG history.