Military Vietnam

In his two decades as a reporter, author Eric Poole racked up more than 30 regional and national awards while interviewing presidents and other luminaries. Here Poole recounts the experiences of a band of US soldiers in Vietnam, including the heroics of Leslie Sabo, Jr., who died saving his comrades and finally received his Medal of Honor some 42 years after his act of breathtaking courage.

He was a young American soldier - and the most powerful man in a remote rural District of Vietnam.

In the spring of 1969, First Lieutenant David Donovan arrived in the Mekong Delta of South Vietnam to work as military advisor with village chiefs and local militia to win the war.

But as he was the highest-ranking person in the entire district, his life there was far more complex than anyone could have imagined.

Westmoreland's War is a landmark reinterpretation of one of America's most divisive wars, outlining the multiple, interconnected aspects of American military strategy in Vietnam-combat operations, pacification, nation building, and the training of the South Vietnamese armed forces. Gregory Daddis offers a critical reassessment of one of the defining moments in American history.

More than anything, however, Barnes' story is one of loss - of morale lost to alcoholism, teammates lost to friendly fire, missions aborted, and missions endlessly and futilely repeated. And yet against this dark background, Barnes graciously honors the quiet professionals whose service, overshadowed by the outsized story of Vietnam, nonetheless carried the day.

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 post-war investigation into the mind of the enemy.

1980, Vietnam, and the war is over. The shooting has stopped, and the so-called ‘liberated’ nation is at peace. They say. Ben Smith recalls his flight home in 1973, watching Tan Son Nhut disappear beneath the clouds. A veteran of an SF Rapid Reaction Force, he’s seen his share of fighting and come close to getting killed. Now it's over. Never again. So he thinks.

The Kennedy Withdrawal offers an inside look at presidential decision-making in this liminal period of the Vietnam War and makes clear that portrayals of Kennedy as a dove are overdrawn. His proposed withdrawal was in fact a cagey strategy for keeping the United States involved in the fight—a strategy the country adopted decades later in Afghanistan.

This “funny, biting, thoughtful, and wholly original” Vietnam War memoir captures the fear, sorrow, and absurdities of combat (Tim O'Brien, author of The Things They Carried). “A must-read war memoir . . . related by one of the most incisive observers of the American political scene."...

Newlywed Bev Marshall was following her dream when she married her high school sweetheart. She would earn her English degree in three years and find a teaching job to help send her husband to law school at Ole Miss. After less than two months of married life, Butch, her husband, changed their plans when he signed up to be a pilot in the USAF. In less than two years' time he was headed to Vietnam. Bev was headed back home to live with her parents for the year Butch would be in Southeast Asia.

Vietnam, 1966. A US Airborne platoon is pinned down in Phuc Tuy Province. A deadly ambush leaves multiple casualties, forcing a desperate withdrawal. With bullets slamming into the Hueys, one is forced down only for the soldiers salvation to be a convoy of Australian APCs. As the dust clears from the battlefield, the ruthless Viet Cong local officer, Lieutenant Vu Van Thinh hunts for intelligence on his enemies. Amidst the debris of war is one man, a mortally wounded soldier desperate for help.

My memoir traces the events of my early life from 1962 to 1974 when my family found itself in the epicenter of the Vietnam War. When I was eleven years old my father, then Commander James Stockdale, was shot down and declared "missing in action" in September 1965. The emotional impact of that news devastated me, my mother Sybil Stockdale, and my three brothers, but we struggled to carry on somewhat normal lives.

Finding Pete is one of the great, untold true stories of an escalating war and a young man caught in its sights. This personalized account of a critical moment in US history is the moving story of an altruistic youth who personifies what America lost in Vietnam. It is also a portrait of a family's struggle with loss, a mother's damaging grief, and, most of all, a sister's quest to solve a mystery and recover the connection with her brother.

Almost half a century ago, a young reporter from Germany arrived in still-glamorous Saigon to cover the Vietnam War over a period of five years. In this memoir he now tells the story of how he fell in love with the Vietnamese people. He praises the beauty, elegance and feistiness of their women. He describes blood-curdling Communist atrocities and fierce combat scenes he had witnessed. He introduces a striking array of characters: heroes, villains, statesmen and spooks, hilarious eccentrics, street urchins and orphans herding water buffalos.

The old battle tactics were useless for the U.S. soldiers in Vietnam, who were fighting a guerrilla war on foreign soil for the first time in American history. With the depth and honesty of Steel My Soldiers' Hearts, SEAL Warrior sheds light on the operations of the SEAL teams in Vietnam and shows how the SEALs laid the foundation for the modern guerrilla warfare that is used today.

A story of reconciliation from the Vietnam War. This is a war story for sure with graphic description of a life-and-death air battle. However, its real message is one of the power of friendship and our common human need for reconciliation.

In his 1967 megahit "San Francisco," Scott McKenzie sang of "people in motion" coming from all across the country to San Francisco, the white-hot center of rock music and anti-war protests. At the same time, another large group of young Americans was also in motion, less eagerly, heading for the jungles of Vietnam.

For over 25 years, award-winning journalist Henry Bradsher reported stories from around the world. In this lively and engaging account, Bradsher recounts episodes from a distinguished career that took him to the Himalayas, the jungles of Bhutan, Kremlin caviar receptions, China's Forbidden City, and the battlefields of Vietnam. Throughout, Bradsher emphasizes the unpredictability of a correspondent's life and the strains, perils, and privileges of standing witness to momentous world events.

In 1967, at age 19, John Stillman - refusing to wait for the draft - voluntarily enlisted in the Army to aid his fellow countrymen in one of the most opposed involvements in our nation’s history: the Vietnam War. Written with John’s daughter, Lori Stillman, Jumping from Helicopters is a vivid and moving memoir that unearths 50 years of repressed memories with stunning accuracy and raw details.

In 1966, a Marine sergeant screams, “Get the F*#k off my quarterdeck!” at a young man and changes his life forever. Before those words, Randy was a lost Midwestern boy who wandered through high school and college with no clear direction in his life. But he had an out-of-reach fantasy to become a Navy pilot. Through a chance encounter with a naval aviator recruiter, he finds the path to fulfill his dream. But it doesn’t happen overnight. The boy from the Detroit suburbs must first make his way through Primary, Basic, Aircraft Carrier Landing, and Advanced Multi-Engine Training.

Over 50 ago, I was a Harvard-trained pediatrician drafted as a Navy Flight Surgeon, thrust into the Vietnam War and onto the front lines, stationed in Dong Ha, leading up to the massive Tet Offensive.