Military History In Vietnam

Tim O'Brien gave us this intensely personal account of his year as a foot soldier in Vietnam. The author takes us with him to experience combat from behind an infantryman's rifle, to walk the minefields of My Lai, to crawl into the ghostly tunnels, and to explore the ambiguities of manhood and morality in a war gone terribly wrong.

This magisterial work, based on Frances FitzGerald's many years of research and travels, takes us inside the history of Vietnam - the traditional, ancestor-worshiping villages, the conflicts between Communists and anti-Communists, Catholics and Buddhists, generals and monks, the disruption created by French colonialism, and America's ill-fated intervention - and reveals the country as seen through Vietnamese eyes. Originally published in 1972, Fire in the Lake was the first history of Vietnam written by an American, and subsequently won the Pulitzer Prize.

From award-winning journalist and children’s book author Mary Cronk Farrell comes the inspiring and fascinating story of the woman who gave a human face to the Vietnam War. Close-Up on War tells the story of French-born Catherine Leroy, one of the war’s few woman photographers, who documented some of the fiercest fighting in the 20-year conflict. Although she had no formal photographic training and had never before traveled more than a few hundred miles from Paris, Leroy left home at age 21 to travel to Vietnam and document the faces of war.

Every war continues to dwell in the lives it touched, in the lives of those living through that time, and in those absorbed by its historical significance. The Vietnam War lives on - famously or infamously, depending on political points of view - but those who have “been there, done that” have a highly personalized window on their time of that history. Valor in Vietnam focuses on nineteen stories of Vietnam, stories of celebrated figures in the veteran community, compelling war narratives, vignettes of battles, and the emotional impact on the combatants.

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.

A fresh, engaging, and relentlessly paced story of a Vietnam veteran's personal experiences and exploits while serving two tours of duty, one as a Cobra gunship pilot, in war-torn Vietnam.

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.

While most historians of the Vietnam War focus on the origins of US involvement and the Americanization of the conflict, Lien-Hang T. Nguyen examines the international context in which North Vietnamese leaders pursued the war and American intervention ended. This riveting narrative takes the listener from the marshy Mekong Delta swamps to the bomb-saturated Red River Delta, from the corridors of power in Hanoi and Saigon to the Nixon White House, and from the peace negotiations in Paris to high-level meetings in Beijing and Moscow.

Every war has its "bridge" - Old North Bridge at Concord, Burnside's Bridge at Antietam, the railway bridge over Burma's River Kwai, the bridge over Germany's Rhine River at Remagen, and the bridges over Korea's Toko Ri. In Vietnam it was the bridge at Thanh Hoa, called Dragon's Jaw. For seven long years hundreds of young US airmen flew sortie after sortie against North Vietnam's formidable and strategically important bridge, dodging a heavy concentration of anti-aircraft fire and enemy MiG planes. Many American airmen were shot down, killed, or captured....

Of all the military assignments in Vietnam, perhaps none was more challenging than the defense of the Mekong River Delta region. Operating deep within the Viet Cong - controlled Delta, the 9th Infantry Division of the U.S. Army was charged with protecting the area and its population against Communist insurgents and ensuring the success of the South Vietnamese government's pacification program.

In chronicling the adventurous life of legendary CIA operative Edward Lansdale, The Road Not Taken definitively reframes our understanding of the Vietnam War. In this epic biography of Edward Lansdale (1908-1987) best-selling historian Max Boot demonstrates how Lansdale pioneered a "hearts and mind" diplomacy, first in the Philippines, then in Vietnam. It was a visionary policy that, as Boot reveals, was ultimately crushed by America's giant military bureaucracy.

Navy Ace pilot and TOPGUN instructor Bill Driscoll demonstrates how his own life-or-death aerial dogfights - and the preparation for them - can help guide high-risk corporate decisions. Interviews with over 200 senior executives and 26 Ace pilots, as well as strategies from Driscoll's own highly successful second career in commercial real estate, reinforce the consistent patterns underlying exceptional performance under pressure.

In an increasingly urbanized world, urban terrain has become a greater factor in military operations. Simultaneously, advances in military technology have given military forces sharply increased capabilities. The conflict comes from how urban terrain can negate or degrade many of those increased capabilities. What happens when advanced weapons are used in a close-range urban fight with an abundance of cover? Storming the City analyzes the performance of the US Army and US Marine Corps in urban combat in four major urban battles of the mid-20th century.

For American children raised exclusively in wartime - that is, a Cold War containing monolithic communism turned hot in the jungles of Southeast Asia - and the first to grow up with televised combat, Vietnam was predominately a mediated experience. Walter Cronkite was the voice of the conflict, and grim, nightly statistics the most recognizable feature. But as involvement grew, Vietnam affected numerous changes in child life, comparable to the childhood impact of previous conflicts - chiefly the Civil War and World War II - whose intensity and duration also dominated American culture.

They will never be able to duplicate the 5th Special Forces Recondo School and the training that gave its grads something they desperately needed - the skills to survive Long Range Patrol missions in the jungle that NVA considered its own. Vietman veteran Larry Chambers vividly describes the grit and courage it took to pass the tough volunteer-only training program in Nha Trang and the harrowing graduation mission to scout out, locate, and out-guerrilla the NVA.

A remarkable memoir of small-unit leadership and the coming of age of a young soldier in combat in Vietnam.

In a gripping, moment-by-moment narrative based on a wealth of recently declassified documents and in-depth interviews, Bob Drury and Tom Clavin tell the remarkable drama that unfolded over the final, heroic hours of the Vietnam War. This closing chapter of the war would become the largest-scale evacuation ever carried out, as improvised by a small unit of Marines, a vast fleet of helicopter pilots flying nonstop missions beyond regulation, and a Marine general who vowed to arrest any officer who ordered his choppers grounded while his men were still on the ground.

FNH Audio presents an unabridged reading of Small Unit Action in Vietnam. This book was written as a "lessons learned" guide for fighting men. It relates incidents of actual small unit combat. Compiled by an author who accompanied the men into combat it relates the personal stories of the men on the ground. Included are the details of nine encounters. From fighting in mine laden paddies, ambushes, artillery spotting missions and dealing with snipers on the march.

LRPs were all volunteers. They were in the spine-tingling, brain-twisting, nerve-wracking business of Long Range Patrolling. They varied in age from eighteen to thirty. These men operated in precision movements, like walking through a jungle quietly and being able to tell whether a man or an animal is moving through the brush without seeing the cause of movement. They could sit in an ambush for hours without moving a muscle except to ease the safety off the automatic weapon in their hand at the first sign of trouble. These men were good because they had to be to survive.

In 1960 President Eisenhower was focused on Laos, a tiny Southeast Asian nation few Americans had ever heard of. Washington feared the country would fall to Communism, triggering a domino effect in the rest of Southeast Asia. So in January 1961, Eisenhower approved the CIA's Operation Momentum, a plan to create a proxy army of ethnic Hmong to fight Communist forces in Laos. While remaining hidden from the American public and most of Congress, Momentum became the largest CIA paramilitary operation in the history of the United States.