Military Vietnam

Published for the 40th anniversary of the final days of the Vietnam War, this is the suspenseful and moving tale of how John P. Riordan, an assistant manager of Citibank's Saigon branch, devised a daring plan to save 106 Vietnamese from the dangers of the Communist takeover.

Col. "Bo" Bottomly is assigned as task force commander of the Dragon One Combat Task Force. Their assignment is to combat-test the A-37. But when several F-4 planes are shot down by a North Vietnamese barge battery over the Mekong River, Col. "Bo" and his wingman, Zach Butler, are needed to take out the "gattler" before it can cause any more damage. The men have the "gattler" in their sites, but the North Vietnamese have the drop on them as well, shooting down their plane and leaving them for dead.

A collection of short stories of people and events about my time in the service, and the year serving my country in Vietnam.

Active US involvement in what became known as the Vietnam War (in Vietnam, this conflict is remembered as the American War) began in 1961 and spanned a period of twelve years until the Paris Peace Talks finally brought the deployment of American combat troops to an end in early 1973. Unfortunately, the peace talks didn’t also lead to the end of the civil war between the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) and the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam).

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.

He was a young American soldier - and the most powerful man in a remote rural District of Vietnam.

In the spring of 1969, First Lieutenant David Donovan arrived in the Mekong Delta of South Vietnam to work as military advisor with village chiefs and local militia to win the war.

But as he was the highest-ranking person in the entire district, his life there was far more complex than anyone could have imagined.

Want to know what Vietnam was really like? From a Marine sniper in Hue, to a medevac dust-off pilot going into a hot LZ, Navy Corpsmen, A-6 pilots taking out bridges and SAM sites in North Vietnam, a nurse on the USS Repose, combat medics deep in the jungle, machine gunners in I-Corps, mechanics working on the rolling deck of a big carrier on Yankee Station, squad leaders on infantry sweeps in “the Arizona Territory”, truck convoys under fire, riverine patrol boats in the Delta, and much more....

When some of America's military men are captured or go missing during the Vietnam War, a small group of military wives become their champions. Never had families taken on diplomatic roles during wartime, nor had the fate of our POWs and missing men been a nationwide concern. In cinematic detail, authors Taylor Baldwin Kiland and Judy Silverstein Gray plunge you directly into the political maneuvering the women navigated, onto the international stage they shared with world leaders, and through the landmark legacy they created.

A searing chronicle of wartime experiences, Even the Women Must Fight probes the cultural legacy of North Vietnam's American War. Unflinching in its portrayal of hardship, valor, and personal sacrifice, this wrenching account is nothing short of a revelation, banishing in one bold stroke the familiar image of Vietnamese women as passive onlookers, war brides, prostitutes, or helpless refugees.

During the War, Vietnam's coast had to be protected against Viet Cong ambushes and smuggling. The U.S. forces had destroyers, cruisers and gargantuan aircraft carriers, none suited for inshore patrol. This is the story of the Brown Water Navy, the garage-band flotilla assembled to do the job. Douglas Branson has been to Vietnam several times, including trips in 1966, 1995 and 2011. The first time, he was a 22-year-old, Brown Water Navy lieutenant JG. Subsequent visits were as a consultant/tourist.

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.

1960: Against the backdrop of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Vietnam War, three pairs of fathers and sons must put their honor and bravery to the ultimate test.

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....

FSB Argonne, Hill 1308, was located on the border with Laos and just south of the DMZ. This story is told by the Marines that fought this fight, in their own words. There are 22 stories of the same fight, all from individual perspectives and experiences. LZ Sitting Duck is a down-in-the-dirt, grunt view of the Vietnam war. This was a fierce battle for the Marines of Delta Company (+ HQ), 1st Battalion, 4th Marines, and 3rd Marine Division.

The American war in Vietnam was concluded in 1973 after eight years of fighting, bloodshed, and loss. Yet the terms of the truce that ended the war were effectively identical to what had been offered to the Nixon administration four years earlier. Those four years cost America and Vietnam thousands of lives and billions of dollars, and they were the direct result of the supposed master plan of the most important voice in American foreign policy: Henry Kissinger.

In the 1960s, the US Air Force lacked both the equipment and properly trained pilots to assure air superiority because the Tactical Air Command (TAC) had become little more than a handmaiden to the Strategic Air Command (SAC). TAC focused primarily on the interdiction of enemy bombers and virtually ignored its other responsibilities, such as providing close support of ground troops with conventional weapons and the interdiction of enemy fighters over the battlefield.

The true story of Captain Sounthone Ratanakone is simply incredible. He was born into royalty in Laos and was a war hero and a CIA operative in the Secret War in Laos during the Vietnam War. The captain barely survived being a POW in a communist concentration camp (which the communists to this day deny ever existed), made a death-defying escape, had to escape the communist regime again once he had settled back home, and lived in a refugee camp. Til the Last is a story of heroism, patriotism, and self-sacrifice at the highest and most dramatic levels.

In The Soldiers' Story, veteran journalist Ron Steinman gathers the candid reminiscences of 76 men who survived combat in Vietnam. Not a military analysis or political study, this oral history vividly conveys the hardships, friendships, fears, and personal triumphs of marine, army, air force, and navy veterans - each of whom shares memories that have lingered to this day.

This volume contains 17 autobiographical stories. The first begins on December 31, 1968, with a US Army infantryman on search and destroy missions in the Mekong Delta. It ends with the story told by the US Marine Corps officer who was in charge of the Marine Corps’ evacuation of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and Saigon in 1975.

This sequel to Welcome to Vietnam, Macho Man digs deep into the mind of a Khe Sanh vet. The author, Ernest Spencer, opens up and shares with the world his life experiences from both before and after surviving the longest battle in the Vietnam War. How does wartime service change a person? Ernest shares his struggles with finding a place to fit back into the American Dream. Some, like the author, transition back into society very well in the eyes of the world, yet the demons deep inside are grappled with daily.