Vietnam War Biography

These are the true stories of a young man being drafted into the military upon college graduation in 1969. His mother, being very concerned he'd be sent into combat in Vietnam, made him promise to write to her regularly to dispel her fears. That's why most of the letters are upbeat and about totally random topics.

In the mid-1960s, before GPS and global tracking, a young man could walk into a shipping hall, sign a paper, and be bound for war by sundown. Roberto Loiederman did precisely that. One day, he was dropping acid in a legendary San Francisco apartment called Cave 7, moving among the era's most influential counterculture figures—including a turbulent friendship with Hunter S. Thompson. The next, he was on the deck of a freighter hauling napalm across the Pacific to Vietnam.

A powerhouse fusion of pathos and humor, brutal realism and intimate reflection, Flying Through Midnight is a landmark contribution to Vietnam War literature, revealing previously top-secret intelligence on the 606's night missions. Fast-paced, thrilling, and bitingly intelligent, Halliday's writing illuminates it all: the heart-pounding air battles, the close friendships, the crippling fear, and the astonishing final escape that made the telling of it possible.

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.

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.

In 2003, already an older father, National Book Award–winning novelist Tim O’Brien resolved to give his young sons what he wished his own father had given to him—a few scraps of paper signed “Love, Dad.” Maybe a word of advice. Maybe a sentence or two about some long-ago Christmas Eve. Maybe some scattered glimpses of their rapidly aging father, a man they might never really know. For the next fifteen years, the author talked to his sons on paper, as if they were adults, imagining what they might want to hear from a father who was no longer among the living.

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.

Sherman Lead is the gripping story of a year flying the F-4 in combat during the Vietnam War, told through the eyes of a fighter pilot. Operating out of Ubon Royal Thai Air Base, Thailand in 1968-69, Gail Peck and his squadronmates in the 433rd Tactical Fighter Squadron of the 8th Tactical Fighter Wing were tasked with flying combat missions into North Vietnam and Laos. The F-4 was heavily involved in the air-to-ground mission at this time, with targets being well defended by enemy anti-aircraft artillery and surface-to-air missiles.

When the US Army went to war in South Vietnam in 1965, the general consensus was that counterinsurgency was an infantryman's war; if there were any role at all for armored forces, it would be strictly to support the infantry. However, from the time the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment arrived in country in September 1966, troopers of the Blackhorse Regiment demonstrated the fallacy of this assumption.

In the late summer of 1942, more than 10,000 members of the First Marine Division held a tenuous toehold on the Pacific island of Guadalcanal. As American marines battled Japanese forces for control of the island, they were joined by war correspondent Richard Tregaskis. Only one of two civilian reporters to land and stay with the marines, Tregaskis’ notebook captured the daily and nightly terrors faced by American forces in one of World War II’s most legendary battles - and it served as the premise for his best-selling book Guadalcanal Diary.

During basic training in the army, it was common practice for the recruits to exercise and march to the cadence of popular songs of the time to keep the trainees in sync. It also took the trainees' minds off the exercise—sometimes strenuous—that they were engaged in, and a five-mile forced march before breakfast was tolerated with little grumbling. Although the cadence was always the same, the words were often changed to reflect the reality of military duty. At the time, the words of the Coasters's hit song "Poison Ivy" were adapted to fit the life of a grunt in Vietnam.

On November 18, 1967, Private First Class Davis' artillery unit was hit by a massive enemy offensive. At 21 years old, he resolved to face the onslaught and prepared to die. Soon he would have a perforated kidney, crushed ribs, a broken vertebra, his flesh ripped by beehive darts, a bullet in his thigh, and burns all over his body. Ignoring his injuries, he manned a two-ton Howitzer by himself, crossed a canal under heavy fire to rescue three wounded American soldiers, and kept fighting until the enemy retreated.

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.

More than half a century after the Vietnam War, a riveting, true story emerges. The author embarks on a journey to bridge the silent gap between himself and his estranged father, whose memories of the war are deeply buried. This quest for understanding leads him to a close-knit brotherhood of Marine combat veterans who become the voice for the untold stories, filling the void left by his father's unspoken past.

An American Combat Bird Dog Pilot is a compelling look at the life and times of a member of the Silent Generation. Mike Leonard’s story chronicles not only his breathtaking combat adventures, but the unforeseen perils that nearly sidetracked him during his time as an international sales executive. This spellbinding narrative paints a vivid portrait of a man, as the Chinese proverb clearly states, "living in interesting times".

This audiobook does not explore the religious aspects of war. Your very belief is tested in combat, you must kill your enemy, or your enemy will kill you - that is the simple, hard cold fact. Because in my humble opinion, War is hell on Earth. Evil roams freely in War, and it will kill you, one way or another, with its evil intent. This audiobook is about war. It tells my experiences of the paths I took as a United States Marine in Vietnam. The mouths of many soldiers will say the same - the same soldiers who had shared my paths with the experiences of my many paths in life.

The rise of Adolf Hitler, America’s Great Depression in the heartland, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, American life following World War II, the Korean War, America’s development of atomic weapons in the Cold War age, the Bay of Pigs Invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War, and the Mariel boatlift. Captain Allen Brady not only witnessed all of these events but actually participated in them, in many instances as a US Naval Aviator.

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.

The experience of the Vietnam War is almost impossible to grasp - the fear, smell, pain, and camaraderie. Boys were turned into men, men were transformed into soldiers, and then from soldiers to warriors. These warriors had wives who shared in their transformations. Some marriages were strengthened, while for others men and their families were left emotionally and spiritually battered. Focusing in on a singular company’s experience of war and its eventual homecoming, Andrew Wiest discusses the shared experience of combat and both the darkness and resiliency of war’s aftermath.

You are with the author when he ejects from his burning Navy jet onto a karst ridge near Hanoi. What follows in this meticulously researched memoir is an account of one of the most implausible and heroic rescues of the air-war - and the aftermath. The events immediately following his rescue carry the author to a secret base in Laos and then to a makeshift hospital in Saigon. The larger story, however, is of the author’s complex relationship with Vietnam. It begins in Saigon, where he completes high school and comes to love the Vietnamese people.