Military Vietnam

Celebrating the skill and bravery of the United States armed forces and their South Vietnamese allies, A Noble Cause presents a gripping chronicle of both large and small unit successful combat engagements, including the Battle of Dong Xoai (1965); the Battle of Ia Drang Valley (1965), the first major ground battle of the Vietnam War; the Battle of Loc Ninh (1967) by the Cambodian border; the Battle of Khe Sanh (1967-1968) leading up to the Tet Offensive; and the Battle of Dong Ha (1968).

Vietnam, 1968—United States Air Force reconnaissance photos appear to show a newly built POW camp close to the DMZ. Special Forces Captain Mack Gerber and Master Sergeant Anthony B. Fetterman are sent into the jungles of North Vietnam to take a closer look. Instead of a POW compound, they discover a Soviet-run training camp for the NVA. American military officials believe a Russian presence could severely undermine the US war effort in Vietnam. The only option is to launch a raid into North Vietnam. Gerber's men now have a new mission: go in with guns blazing . . . and get out alive.

John Burnam served two combat tours in the Vietnam War (1966, 1968), first as a US Army infantryman and then as a German shepherd scout-dog handler. John quickly learned the incredible advantages of having a dog to detect the sight, sound, and scent of hidden dangers. The dog was far superior to even the most experienced combat soldier at alerting on distant enemy noises and movement, finding hidden enemy caches of ammunition and supplies, searching base camps, and locating camouflaged tunnel entrances.

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.

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 Studies and Observations Group was a covert American military unit in Vietnam that specialized in clandestine cross-border operations in Laos and Cambodia. In September 1970, sixteen Green Berets and one-hundred-twenty Montagnard mercenaries departed on Operation Tailwind, the largest and deepest raid in SOG history.

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.

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....

US Army Warrant Officer Carl Yeager, on his second tour of Vietnam, reaches Khe Sanh in late January 1968. His mission is to arrest an ARVN officer, guilty of murder and selling stolen weapons to the Vietcong. Things start to go wrong when the aircraft on which is due to fly back with the prisoner to Tan Son Nhut, outside Saigon, is destroyed by enemy shellfire. The shells do more than damage the aircraft. They uncover the body of an American officer in a hastily dug grave.

This could be the most important audiobook you'll listen to this year. It isn't another war story. It is an audiobook about people, and it contains the personal stories of 100 Vietnam veterans who served there.

How did the Vietnam War change the way we think of ourselves as a people and a nation? Christian G. Appy now examines the relationship between the war's realities and myths and its impact on our national identity, conscience, pride, shame, popular culture, and postwar foreign policy.

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.

Kiss the Boys Goodbye convincingly shows that a legacy of shame remains from America’s ill-fated involvement in Vietnam even though that conflict ended over 35 years ago. Until US government policy on POW/MIAs changes, it remains one of the most crucial issues for any American soldier who fights for home and country, particularly when we are engaged with an enemy who doesn't adhere to the international standards for the treatment of prisoners - or any American hostage...

Vietnam was the first war America lost on the ground. In this illustrated account, historian Nigel Cawthorne traces the conflict from its inception to its traumatic end. He looks at the political events that led to the war and examines its impact upon both the Americans and the Vietnamese, whose battle for the independence of their country was to leave lingering scars upon the American psyche. Vietnam: A War Lost and Won, is an even-handed assessment of a conflict whose wounds would take a generation to heal.

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.

Chief Petty Officer James "Patches" Watson was there at the start. One of the first to come out of the famed Underwater Demolition Team 21, he was an initial member—a "plank owner"—of America's deadliest and most elite fighting force, the U.S. Navy SEALs. Through three tours in the jungle hell of Vietnam, he walked the point—staying alert to trip wires, booby traps, and punji pits, guiding his squad of amphibious fighters on missions of rescue, reconnaissance, and demolition—confronting a war's unique terrors head-on, unprotected . . . and unafraid.

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.

Why were the American POWs imprisoned at the Hanoi Hilton so resilient in captivity and so successful in their subsequent careers? This book presents six principles practiced within the POW organizational culture that can be used to develop high-performance teams everywhere. The authors offer examples from both the POWs’ time in captivity and their later professional lives that identify, in real-life situations, the characteristics necessary for sustainable, high-performance teamwork.

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 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.