Military Memoirs Vietnam

Air Force pilot Captain Carlyle "Smitty" Harris was shot down over Vietnam on April 4, 1965 and taken to the infamous Hoa Lo prison—nicknamed the "Hanoi Hilton." For the next eight years, Smitty and hundreds of other American POWs—including John McCain and George "Bud" Day—suffered torture, solitary confinement, and unimaginable abuse. It was there Smitty covertly taught the Tap Code—an old, long-unused World War II method of communication—to many POWs. In turn, they taught others, and it quickly became a way for POWs to communicate without their captors' knowledge.

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.

Craig McNamara came of age in the political tumult and upheaval of the late '60s. While Craig McNamara would grow up to take part in anti-war demonstrations, his father, Robert McNamara, served as John F. Kennedy’s Secretary of Defense and the architect of the Vietnam War. This searching and revealing memoir offers an intimate picture of one father and son at pivotal periods in American history. Because Our Fathers Lied is more than a family story—it is a story about America.

The true story of the fierce band of women who battled Washington - and Hanoi - to bring their husbands home from the jungles of Vietnam.

"Courage," Winston Churchill explained, is "the first of human qualities...because it guarantees all the others." As a naval officer, P.O.W., and one of America's most admired political leaders, John McCain has seen countless acts of bravery and self-sacrifice. Now, in this inspiring meditation on courage, he shares his most cherished stories of ordinary individuals who have risked everything to defend the people and principles they hold most dear.

Harold G. Moore and Joseph L. Galloway revisit their relationships with 10 American veterans of the battle, as well as Lt. Gen. Nguyen Hu An, who commanded the North Vietnamese Army troops on the other side, and two of his old company commanders.

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.

In 1978, CIA maverick Jack Platt and KGB agent Gennady Vasilenko were new arrivals on the Washington, D.C., intelligence scene, with Jack working out of the CIA's counterintelligence office and Gennady out of the Soviet Embassy. Both men were assigned to seduce the other into betraying his country in the final days of the Cold War, but instead the men ended up becoming the best of friends. Theirs is a friendship that never should have happened, and their story is chock full of treachery, darkly comic misunderstandings, bureaucratic inanity, and landmark intelligence breakthroughs.

Jeff Danziger, one of the leading political cartoonists of his generation, captures the fear, sorrow, absurdity, and unintended but inevitable consequences of war with dark humor and penetrating moral clarity.

I'm Just a Supply Sgt. is a compelling narrative of the Vietnam War with a very personal, psychological perspective that is difficult to find in most histories. Don Stout's ability to comprehend and record his feelings during the war, and his struggles after the war, provide not only a window into the suffering of many veterans but also a tool for catharsis for those afflicted with PTSD. Without a doubt, Don's story provides one of the most unique perspectives on the war and is not only a history of his service but a psychological epic.

A swamp warrior who served five tours in Vietnam tells it like it was in Death in the Jungle.

Phantom in the Sky is the story of a Radar Intercept Officer (RIO) in the back seat of the supersonic Phantom jet during the Vietnam War - a unique, tactical perspective of the “guy in back”, or GIB, absent from other published aviation accounts. During the time of Terry L. Thorsen’s service from 1966 to 1970, the RIO played an integral part in enemy aircraft interception and ordnance delivery. In Navy and Marine F-4 Phantom jets, the RIO was a second pair of eyes for the pilot, in charge of communications and navigation, and great to have during emergencies.

I had a memory of wearing a sidearm when I escorted Miss Missouri in Viet Nam. Upon examining photographs of that occasion, I found no evidence of a pistol. This memory of taking a sidearm, I think, was a memory that drifted in from a later event. Nevertheless, this “false” memory carries the truth of how important the safety of Miss Missouri meant at the time. On the other hand, my memory, tested against other evidence like photographs or other accounts, has often proven more accurate than some written records.

Uniquely adopting a third-person omniscient point of view, Nightingale eschews the "I" of memoir in favor of multiple perspectives and a larger historical vision that afford equal time and weight to ally and enemy alike. Examples of the many perspectives based on real-life characters include: Hu, a VC "informant" whose false information led the Rangers straight into the jaws of a ferocious ambush; General Tanh, the COSVN commander; Major Nguyen Hiep, the 52d Ranger Commander; and Ranger POWs later returned by the North.

First published in the New Yorker in 1969 and later adapted into an acclaimed film starring Michael J. Fox and Sean Penn, Casualties of War is the shocking true story of the abduction, rape, and murder of a young Vietnamese woman by US soldiers.

At the age of twenty-four, Dang Thuy Tram volunteered to serve as a doctor in a National Liberation Front (Viet Cong) battlefield hospital in the Quang Ngai Province. Two years later she was killed by American forces not far from where she worked. Written between 1968 and 1970, her diary speaks poignantly of her devotion to family and friends, the horrors of war, her yearning for her high school sweetheart, and her struggle to prove her loyalty to her country.

The old battle tactics were useless for the U.S. soldiers in Vietnam, who were fighting a guerrilla war on foreign soil for the first time in American history. With the depth and honesty of Steel My Soldiers' Hearts, SEAL Warrior sheds light on the operations of the SEAL teams in Vietnam and shows how the SEALs laid the foundation for the modern guerrilla warfare that is used today.

In Vietnam, we weren’t out to be heroes. We just did our jobs. For a helicopter pilot, each day was like all the others. You flew the mission and never stopped to think that it might be your last. You didn’t think about the bullet holes in the helicopter, the cracks in the tail boom, or any of it until night, lying in bed when you couldn’t think of anything else.

With remarkable clarity and with great detachment, Kidder looks back at himself from across three and a half decades, confessing how, as a young lieutenant, he sought to borrow from the tragedy around him and to imagine himself a romantic hero. Unrelentingly honest, rueful, and revealing, My Detachment gives us war without heroism, while preserving those rare moments of redeeming grace in the midst of lunacy and danger.

I watched two point men take 50-caliber machine gun bullets to the head and watched the third being grabbed and taken behind enemy lines. Two of the enemy soldiers, whom we often referred to as gooks, quickly came after me. As I mowed them down with my automatic rifle, I crawled backward, away from the enemy gunfire, using my helmet to push sand in front of me as I went, which made it possible to look behind me. But as I looked back, I realized my safety net was no longer safe.