Military History In Vietnam

By the spring of 1970, American troops were ordered to pull out of Vietnam. The Marines of First Reconnaissance Battalion, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel "Wild Bill" Drumright, were assigned to cover the withdrawal of First Marine Division. The Marines of First RECON Bn operated in teams of six or seven men. Heavily armed, the teams fought a multitude of bitter engagements with a numerically superior and increasingly aggressive enemy. Michael C. Hodgins served in Company C, First RECON Bn (Rein), as a platoon leader. In powerful, graphic prose, he chronicles his experience.

In 1965, Col. Thomas "Jerry" Curtis's helicopter was shot down over North Vietnam. He was immediately captured and spent seven and a half years confined in a filthy cell at the notorious Hanoi prison camp. Thousands of miles from home and unable to communicate with his wife and children, Jerry endured months of solitary confinement, suffocating heat, freezing cold, grueling physical and psychological torture, constant hunger, and unimaginable mental duress.

The 'Tonkin Gulf Yacht Club' was the tongue-in-cheek nickname of the US Seventh Fleet that was stationed off the coast of Vietnam and this book tells the full story of the US Naval air campaign in the Vietnam War from 1965 to 1975.

Every man serving in Vietnam was "Every Mother's Son". In 1968, the Marine helicopter crews during the 77-day Siege of Khe Sanh risked everything every day to keep the surrounding Marine hill positions alive and viable. The North Vietnamese Army committed more than 20,000 troops to destroying the Marine hill positions and the Khe Sanh Combat Base. The small Marine outposts were transformed into highly effective kill zones, as the enemy slammed the landing zones with rockets, mortars, artillery, and automatic weapons fire.

In 1972, America was completing its withdrawal from the long and divisive war in Vietnam. Air power covered the departure of ground forces, and search and rescue teams from all services and Air America covered the airmen and soldiers still in the fight. Day and night these military and civilian aircrews stood alert to respond to "Mayday" calls. The rescue forces were the answer to every man's prayer, and those forces brought home airmen, sailors, marines, and soldiers downed or trapped across the breadth and depth of the entire Southeast Asia theater.

The classic Vietnam war memoir, ...and a hard rain fell is the unforgettable story of a veteran's rage and the unflinching portrait of a young soldier's odyssey from the roads of upstate New York to the jungles of Vietnam. Updated for its twentieth anniversary with a new afterword on the Iraq War and its parallels to Vietnam, John Ketwig's message is as relevant today as it was twenty years ago.

A young US Marine officer recounts his experiences of the Vietnam War over a 19-month period. He graphically describes what it was like to perform three distinct combat missions: long-range ground reconnaissance in the Annamite Mountains of I Corps, infantry operations in the rice paddies and mountains of Quang Nam Province, and special police operations for the CIA in Tay Ninh province. Using official Marine Corps unit histories, CIA documents, and his weekly letters home, the author relies almost exclusively on primary sources in providing an accurate and honest account.

Like Gettysburg, Stalingrad, Midway, and Tet, the battle at Dien Bien Phu - a strategic attack launched by France against the Vietnamese in 1954 after eight long years of war - marked a historic turning point. By the end of the 56-day siege, a determined Viet Minh guerrilla force had destroyed a large tactical French colonial army in the heart of Southeast Asia.

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.

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.

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.

Author John J. Culbertson, a former Fifth Marine sniper himself, presents the riveting true stories of young Americans who fought with bolt rifles and bounties on their heads during the fiercest combat of the war, from 1967 through the desperate Tet battle for Hue in early '68.

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.

In three straight years he was a paratrooper, an army seaman, and a LRRP - and he lived to tell about it. As an FNG paratrooper in the 173d Airborne, John Leppelman made that unit's only combat jump in Vietnam. Then he spent months in fruitless search of the enemy, watching as his buddies died because of poor leadership and lousy weapons. Often it seemed the only way out of the carnage in the central highlands was in a body bag. But Leppelman did get out.

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.

The author was drawn into the United States Army through ROTC, and he went through training to fly helicopters in combat over Vietnam. His experiences are notable because he flew both Huey “Slicks” and Huey “Gunships”: the former on defense as he flew troops into battle, and the latter on offense as he took the battle to the enemy. Through this book, the author relives his experiences flying and fighting, with special attention given to his and other pilots’ day-to-day lives.

The new commander of the Company E, 52d Infantry LRRPs, Capt. George Paccerelli, was tough, but the men's new AO was brutal. Former LRRP Kregg Jorgenson provides a gripping account of ordinary men with extraordinary courage and heroism.

In October 1969, Captain William Albracht, the youngest Green Beret in Vietnam, took command of a remote hilltop outpost called Fire Base Kate, held by only 27 American soldiers and 150 Montagnard militiamen. He found their defenses woefully unprepared. At dawn the next morning, three North Vietnamese Army regiments - some 6,000 men - crossed the Cambodian border and attacked.

Across the nation in the spring of 1966, farm boys from the Midwest, surfers from California and city-slickers from Cleveland opened their mail to find greetings from Uncle Sam. Some of these men, optimistic and looking to serve their country, joined Charlie Company and trained for service. They deployed together, experiencing the camaraderie, fear, smell, pain, violence and senseless deaths. And through it all they wrote letters back and forth with the loved ones they’d left behind. Back at home, the families of Charlie Company faced fear, loneliness and uncertainty.

The Freedom Shield brings together stories of veterans of the 191st Assault Helicopter Company, who were tasked with carrying troops into battle, attacking enemy positions, and evacuating the wounded in their UH-1 Iroquois "Huey" helicopters. The unit was assembled from a hodgepodge of hand-me-down aircraft, used equipment, and overlooked personnel-its appearance belied the invaluable work the crews of the 191st would undertake during the Vietnam War.