Military Vietnam

When the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) planned to send 40,000 troops to attack the 6,000 US Marines at Khe Sanh in 1968, it expected a decisive victory. Certainly, the small US Special Forces camp in the way at Lang Vei would be quickly overcome. The tough, tenacious defenders at Lang Vei had other ideas.

Amity Whitford dared to stake her own claim on the endless plains of Western Kansas. She built her homestead, Dove's Nest, with her bare hands. But the ravages of the sun and drying winds took their toll.

A collection of short stories of people and events about my time in the service, and the year serving my country in Vietnam.

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.

1960: Against the backdrop of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Vietnam War, three pairs of fathers and sons must put their honor and bravery to the ultimate test.

Some warriors are drawn to the thrill of combat and find it the defining moment of their lives. Others fall victim to fear, exhaustion, impaired reasoning, and despair. This was certainly true for twentieth-century American ground troops. Whether embracing or being demoralized by war, these men risked their lives for causes larger than themselves with no promise of safe return.

A few years after his release from a North Vietnamese prisoner-of-war camp, in 1973, Colonel Joseph Kittinger retired from the Air Force. Restless and unchallenged, he turned to ballooning, a lifelong passion as well as a constant diversion for his imagination during his imprisonment. His primary goal was a solitary circumnavigation of the globe, and in its pursuit he set several ballooning distance records, including the first solo crossing of the Atlantic in 1984. But the aeronautical feats that first made him an American hero had occurred a quarter of a century earlier....

Early in 1968 a massive coordinated Viet Cong operation - the Tet Offensive - briefly paralyzed American and South Vietnamese forces across the country, threatening even the American embassy compound in Saigon. With this the smiling mask slipped even further, inflaming the burgeoning antiwar movement. Although American soldiers didn't lose a battle strategically during the campaign, the Tet Offensive made President Johnson noncredible and historically unpopular, to the extent that he did not run for reelection in 1968.

Following their fallen brothers home, Andy Carter and Jim Anderson struggle to carve out a normal life post-combat. Dead-end jobs are the least of the insults they must endure. Instead of the hero’s welcome they’d expected, they’re greeted with contempt or apathy by those waiting back home. Betrayed by those they fought to protect and burdened with the guilt of surviving, the friends make the only choice that feels right—they reenlist. After all, who’s going to help protect the soldiers left behind?

The story of the United States Air Force (USAF) stretches back to aerial operations prior to the First World War and looks forward to a new era of airpower in space. Fighting from Above presents a concise account of this history, offering a new perspective on how the air forces of the United States created an independent way of warfare over time.

An epic tale of a brotherhood forged by war—masterfully told by a lifelong journalist, war correspondent, and U.S. Army veteran.

The story of the indomitable American POWs who endured "Alcatraz," the Hanoi prison camp where North Vietnam locked up its most dangerous and subversive prisoners, and the wives who fought to bring them home. As these men suffered in Hanoi, their wives launched an extraordinary campaign that would ultimately spark the POW/MIA movement. When the survivors finally returned, one would receive the Medal of Honor, another became a U.S. Senator, and a third still serves in Congress.

Why you may ask, would they want to stop you from listening to my story? They say it’s because it tells too many secrets and that I’m a spy … a spy for the Brotherhood! Now you can follow my story from my birth in the Midwestern city of St. Louis, Missouri, to the gang-infested streets of Chicago, Illinois, and into the war-torn jungles of Vietnam.

In 1973 US participation in the Vietnam War ended in a cease-fire and a withdrawal that included promises by President Nixon to assist the South in the event of invasion by the North. But in early 1975, when North Vietnamese forces began a full-scale assault, Congress refused to send arms or aid. By early April that year, the South was on the brink of a defeat that threatened execution or years in a concentration camp for the untold number of South Vietnamese who had supported the government in Saigon or worked with Americans.

365 Days stands not only as a compelling account of this tragic conflict, but as a powerful antiwar statement. Nothing speaks so convincingly against the evils of war as the evils themselves. In this gripping account of the human cost of the Vietnam War, Ron Glasser offers an unparalleled description of the horror endured daily by those on the front lines.

In June 1969, Tom Hargrove arrived in Vietnam as a first lieutenant in the US Army. But he wasn’t just there to make war against the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese armies. Hargrove was also there to introduce improved rice varieties into the war-torn region. This unique memoir tells of Hargrove’s efforts to improve the everyday lives of the Vietnamese, even as he was calling in B-52 strikes against opposition forces.

This groundbreaking book provides the first systematic comparison of America's modern wars and why they were won or lost. John D. Caldwell uses the World War II victory as the historical benchmark for evaluating the success and failure of later conflicts. Unlike WWII, the Korean, Vietnam, and Iraqi wars were limited, but they required enormous national commitments, produced no lasting victories, and generated bitter political controversies.

Now an American classic, this is a Vietnam book unlike any other, written by a woman who, after two years of covering the war for The New York Times, comes home wanting to once more love her country and to understand it. In four years of interviews that Newsweek called “superb,” Emerson traveled across America to speak to people who fought the war or who fought against it, to those who paid little attention and to others whose lives were changed by it.

In the dense jungles of Vietnam, the line between hunter and hunted is razor-thin. For Sergeant Andy Carter and his squad of soldiers, it's a brutal reality they must navigate every day as they pursue a ruthless Vietcong captain deep into enemy territory.

Join Sergeant Andy Carter and his squad as they navigate the dense jungles of Vietnam on a perilous search and destroy mission to locate and eliminate a heavily fortified NVA base camp. As they confront danger at every turn, the bond between the men is tested like never before. Will they rely on each other to survive or will the chaos of combat tear them apart?