Vietnam War Memoir

"Kids like me didn't go to Vietnam", writes Jack McLean in his must-listen memoir. Raised in suburban New Jersey, he attended the Phillips Academy in Andover, MA, but decided to put college on hold. After graduation in the spring of 1966, faced with the mandatory military draft, he enlisted in the United States Marine Corps for a two-year stint. "Vietnam at the time was a country, and not yet a war", he writes. It didn't remain that way for long.

Vets and Pets tells fifteen emotional and entertaining stories of the incredible bonds between wounded warriors, veterans, and other service members and their service and companion animals. Whether these special relationships are with dogs, cats, horses, pigs, or even birds of prey, readers will discover how these remarkable animals help veterans return to civilian life and live independently while simultaneously bringing joy and confidence into their lives.

On November 25, 1950, during one of the toughest battles of the Korean War, the US Eighth Army Ranger Company seized and held the strategically important Hill 205 overlooking the Chongchon River. Separated by more than a mile from the nearest friendly unit, 51 soldiers fought several hundred Chinese attackers. Their commander, Lieutenant Ralph Puckett, was wounded three times before he was evacuated. For his actions, he received the country's second-highest award for courage on the battlefield and resumed active duty later that year as a living legend.

This is the story of Curtis "Colt" Terry, one of the original Green Berets. The information for this story came primarily from Colt's personal recollections documented in taped interviews. Many facts were confirmed with fellow paratroopers, military historians, and Special Forces NCOs and officers who served with him.

Army First Lieutenant Jack Jacobs was serving as an advisor to the South Vietnamese when he and his men came under devastating attack. Severely wounded, Jacobs took command and withdrew the unit, returning again and again to the site of the attack to rescue more men, saving the lives of a U.S advisor and thirteen Allied soldiers. Colonel Jacobs received the nation's highest military award, the Medal of Honor.

An inside account of the South Vietnamese elites who strove to carry on the war against the Communists during the US Army’s withdrawal. The book is a personal memoir of the author’s service as a US Army advisor during the end stages of America’s involvement in Vietnam. During the period 1970–71, the US was beginning to draw down its combat forces, and the new watchword was “Vietnamization.”

"Sarge, are you dead?" His question brought me back to consciousness. "Uh, no, at least I don't think so." I felt something sticky under my shirt. I reached inside my shirt, and my hand came out soaked in blood. The only thought that went through my mind was, "This is my blood on the outside of my body. This is not good." I joined the Army because I wanted freedom. My high school principal told me that I needed to grow up. We arrived in Vietnam on Dec. 15, and on Christmas day 1967, I grew up. A "training mission" turned into a full-scale firefight.

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.

Call Sign Dracula provides a valuable and worthy in-depth look into the life of a US Army Infantry soldier serving with the famed 1st Infantry Division (The Big Red One) in Vietnam. It is a genuine, firsthand account of a one-year tour that shows how a soldier grew and matured from an awkward, bewildered, inexperienced, 18-year-old country bumpkin from Kentucky, to a tough, battle-hardened fighting soldier.

Peter Huchthausen, a river patrol officer on Vietnam's Mekong River Delta in 1967, rescued a badly wounded Vietnamese child, Nguyen Thi Lung. He and his men arranged for the girl's treatment and education, only to lose track of her when her town was overrun by the North Vietnamese during the Tet Offensive.

In the fall of 1969, Gary Bray landed in South Vietnam as a recently married, freshly minted second lieutenant in the U.S. Army. His assignment was not enviable: leading the platoon whose former members had committed the My Lai massacre--the murder of hundreds of Vietnamese civilians--18 months earlier. In this compelling memoir, he shares his experiences of Vietnam in the direct wake of that terrible event.

During Vietnam, the basic role of the USMC gunship squadrons was to protect the transport helicopters during medevac missions, troop insertions and extractions, resupply missions, and supporting the Marines on the ground during operations and patrols. Basically, whenever the Marines or South Vietnam friendlies got in trouble the gunships were dispatched to assist them.

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.

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.

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.

In this inspiring meditation on courage, Senator John McCain shares his most cherished stories of ordinary individuals who have risked everything to defend the people and principles they hold most dear. These are some of the examples McCain turns to for inspiration and offers to others to help them summon the resolve to be both good and great. He explains the value of courage in both everyday actions and extraordinary feats. Most of all, listeners discover how sometimes simply setting the right example can be the ultimate act of courage.

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....

Stephen McAllister was a grunt, a dog handler in Vietnam, tasked not only with fighting what was by then an unwinnable war but with rehabilitating a scout dog named Big Mike whose trauma ran even deeper than his own. McAllister's voice has an abundance of heart and humor, but the laughter has a catch in its throat. For all the ingenuity and camaraderie, a dark and suspenseful melody plays behind the adventures of McAllister and his unforgettable constellation of young characters, American and Vietnamese.

Beloved TV host Bill Geist pens a reflective memoir of his incredible summers spent in the heart of America in this New York Times bestseller. Before there was "tourism" and souvenir ashtrays became "kitsch," the Lake of the Ozarks was a Shangri-La for middle-class Midwestern families on...

The powerful unvarnished memoir of General Hugh Shelton, war hero, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during 9/11, and one of the leading military figures of our time. Whether serving under a Democratic president or a Republican president, General Shelton was never afraid to speak out and...