Military Vietnam

Dereliction of Duty is a stunning analysis of how and why the United States became involved in an all-out and disastrous war in Southeast Asia. Fully and convincingly researched, based on transcripts and personal accounts of crucial meetings, confrontations, and decisions, it is the only book that fully re-creates what happened and why. McMaster pinpoints the policies and decisions that got the United States into the morass and reveals who made these decisions and the motives behind them, disproving the published theories of other historians and excuses of the participants.

For decades, the soldiers who served in Vietnam were shunned by the American public and ignored by their government. Many were vilified or had their struggles to reintegrate into society magnified by distorted depictions of veterans as dangerous or demented. Even today, Vietnam veterans have not received their due. Until now. These profiles are touching and courageous, and often startling.

In the wake of her mother's death, Jessica Pearce Rotondi uncovers boxes of letters, declassified CIA reports, and newspaper clippings that bring to light a family ghost: her uncle Jack, who disappeared during the CIA-led "Secret War" in Laos in 1972. The letters lead her across Southeast Asia in search of the truth that has eluded her family for decades. On the night of March 29, 1972, Jack's plane vanishes over the mountains bordering Vietnam. The crash eerily echoes the one Jack's father, Ed Pearce, survived in World War II, when Ed parachuted out of the plane before being captured.

Many books have been written on the tragic decisions regarding Vietnam made by the stars of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Yet despite many words of analysis and reflection, no historian has been able to explain why such decent and previously successful men stumbled so badly. That changes with Road to Disaster. Historian Brian VanDeMark draws upon decades of archival research, his own interviews with many of those involved, and a wealth of previously unheard recordings by Robert McNamara and Clark Clifford, who served as Defense Secretaries for Kennedy and Johnson.

On June 13, 1966, men of the 1st Recon Battalion, 1st Marine Division were stationed on Hill 488. Before the week was over, they would fight the battle that would make them the most highly decorated small unit in the entire history of the US military, winning a Congressional Medal of Honor, four Navy Crosses, 13 Silver Stars, and 18 Purple Hearts - some of them posthumously.

In War for the Hell of It, Cobleigh shares his perspectives in a deeply personal account of a fighter pilot's life, one filled with moral ambiguity and military absurdities offset by the undeniable thrill of flying a fighter plane. With well-crafted prose that puts you into his Phantom's cockpit, Cobleigh vividly recounts the unexplainable loss of his wingman, the useless missions he flew, the need to trust his reflexes, eyesight, aggressiveness, and his survival instincts in the heat of combat.

History for busy people. Listen to a concise history of the Vietnam War in just one hour. War, what is it good for? The Vietnam War: History In an Hour gives a gripping account of the most important Cold War-era conflict, fought between the United States and the Viet Cong, the Vietnam People’s Army and their Communist allies. It was one of the most traumatic military conflicts America has ever been involved in – and provoked a backlash of anti-war protests at home.

A gripping chronicle of the band of maverick aviators who signed on for the suicidal, dangerous top-secret "Wild Weasel" missions during the Vietnam War - which used controversial and revolutionary tactics to combat Soviet missile technology - from New York Times best-selling author Dan Hampton.

In the latest from Nelson DeMille (author of The Lion's Game), Paul Brenner is called out of CID retirement to investigate the murder 30 years ago of an army lieutenant in Vietnam. Brenner's trip up country, with a beautiful American expatriate for company, will lead him to uncover an explosive, long-buried secret.

In 1968 James T. Gillam was a poorly focused college student at Ohio University who was dismissed and then drafted into the Army. Unlike most African-Americans who entered the Army then, he became a Sergeant and an instructor at the Fort McClellan Alabama School of Infantry.

Glamour, danger, liberation: in a Mad Men–era of commercial flight, Pan Am World Airways attracted the kind of young woman who wanted out, and wanted up. Required to have a college education, speak two languages, and possess the political savvy of a Foreign Service officer, a jet-age stewardess serving on iconic Pan Am between 1966 and 1975 also had to be between 5′3" and 5′9", between 105 and 140 pounds, and under 26 years of age at the time of hire.

In Legend, acclaimed best-selling author Eric Blehm takes as his canvas the Vietnam War as seen through a single mission that occurred on May 2, 1968. A 12-man Special Forces team had been covertly inserted into a small clearing in the jungles of neutral Cambodia - where US forces were forbidden to operate. Their objective, just miles over the Vietnam border, was to collect evidence that proved the North Vietnamese Army was using the Cambodian sanctuary as a major conduit for supplying troops and materiel to the south via the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

In April 1975, Ralph White was asked by his boss to transfer from the Bangkok branch of the Chase Manhattan Bank to the Saigon Branch. He was tasked with closing the branch if and when it appeared that Saigon would fall to the North Vietnamese army and ensure the safety of the senior Vietnamese employees. But when he arrived, he realized the situation in Saigon was far more perilous than he had imagined. The senior staff members there urged him to evacuate the entire staff of the branch and their families, which was far more than he was authorized to do.

A shocking expos of the covert CIA program of widespread torture, rape, and murder of civilians during America’s war in Vietnam, with a new introduction by the author. In the darkest days of the Vietnam War, America’s Central Intelligence Agency secretly initiated a sweeping program of kidnap, torture, and assassination devised to destabilize the infrastructure of the National Liberation Front (NLF) of South Vietnam, commonly known as the “Viet Cong.”

As the 1960s drew to a close, the United States was coming apart at the seams. From August 1969 to August 1970, the nation witnessed 9,000 protests and 84 acts of arson or bombings at schools across the country. It was the year of the My Lai massacre investigation, the Cambodia invasion, Woodstock, and the Moratorium to End the War. The American death toll in Vietnam was approaching 50,000, and the ascendant counterculture was challenging nearly every aspect of American society.

A factual novel of combat, disease, corruption, and survival. Little is written about 1970–1972 Vietnam. The country lost interest, and apathy replaced anti-war sentiment now that the US was rapidly withdrawing troops.

Donut Dolly puts you in the Vietnam War face down in the dirt under a sniper attack, inside a helicopter being struck by lightning, at dinner next to a commanding general, and slogging through the mud along a line of foxholes. You see the war through the eyes of one of the first women officially allowed in the combat zone.

By the spring of 1970, American troops were ordered to pull out of Vietnam. The Marines of First Reconnaissance Battalion, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel "Wild Bill" Drumright, were assigned to cover the withdrawal of First Marine Division. The Marines of First RECON Bn operated in teams of six or seven men. Heavily armed, the teams fought a multitude of bitter engagements with a numerically superior and increasingly aggressive enemy. Michael C. Hodgins served in Company C, First RECON Bn (Rein), as a platoon leader. In powerful, graphic prose, he chronicles his experience.

Relive six decades of flying helicopters, including an extended tour in Vietnam and the mountains of Afghanistan, with a little Iraq, Kuwait, and National Guard thrown in. This is Minuteman: Two, Three…Go! recounts Wayne Chasson’s times, from the early, young, and dumb days to becoming a more seasoned pilot of Huey and other helicopters in three American wars and the National Guard here at home. Chasson relives it all for us in this gritty and honest memoir — with humility, humor, and gratitude — as he himself is still trying to figure out how he made it through alive.

This volume of Combat Veterans' Stories of the Vietnam War contains stories told by 14 men that fought in the Vietnam War in branches of the US military and the Australian Army. The first begins in February 1962, with a US Air Force pilot that trained South Vietnamese flyers and flew covert air support for South Vietnam’s military. The final story is told by a US civilian, previously a non-combat US Army Armor officer.