Vietnam War Memoir

The final volume of Taylor Branch's monumental, much honored, and definitive history of the Civil Rights Movement (America in the King Years), At Canaan's Edge covers the final years of King's struggle to hold his non-violent movement together in the face of factionalism within the Movement, hostility and harassment of the Johnson Administration, the country torn apart by Vietnam, and his own attempt (and failure) to take the Freedom Movement north.

A Different Face of War is a riveting account of one American officer in the Medical Service Corps during the early years of the Vietnam War. Assigned as the senior medical advisor to the Army of the Republic of Vietnam in I Corps, near the DMZ, James G. Van Straten traveled extensively and interacted with military officers and non-commissioned officers, peasant-class farmers, Buddhist bonzes, shopkeepers, nurses, the mentally ill, and even political operatives. He sent his wife daily letters from July 1966 through June 1967, describing in impressive detail his experiences, and those letters became the primary source for his memoir.

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.

This book is all about personal life experiences, which aims to inspire people. This book is made out of the realization that you should share your story to the world so that when you die, people will know about you, and your story will serve as an inspiration to other people.

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.

This volume of Combat Veterans' Stories of the Vietnam War contains stories told by 14 men that fought in the Vietnam War in branches of the US military and the Australian Army. The first begins in February 1962, with a US Air Force pilot that trained South Vietnamese flyers and flew covert air support for South Vietnam’s military. The final story is told by a US civilian, previously a non-combat US Army Armor officer.

With unflinching honesty, author Glyn Haynie's new memoir, Soldiering After the Vietnam War: Changed Soldiers in a Changed Country, describes the difficulty he and many soldiers faced in adjusting to civilian life on their return from Vietnam. This moving story chronicles the impact this war had on these young combat veterans. It exposes how the shameful treatment these soldiers received on their return from Vietnam impacted them. It is also a story of brotherhood and the strong, lasting bonds that can only be forged in combat.

Charles "Chuck" Mawhinney is a United States Marine who holds the Corps' record for the most confirmed sniper kills (and the second most of any US service member in history), having recorded 103 confirmed kills in 16 months during the Vietnam War. He was also the youngest—killing the enemy as a teenager. In 1967, at the age of 18, Mawhinney joined the Marines and began his assent from recruit to the Marine Corps’ deadliest sniper.

Real stories told by real people, in their own words. Hundred veterans, men and women, caught up in an all-too-real war. From the Delta to the DMZ, come walk in their boots. If you were there, you understand. If you weren't, buy this audiobook and you will, because they’re like Doritos. Try a few, and you won't be able to stop. The Vietnam War dominated my generation and affected so many lives in so many different ways. Some of us were drafted.

This book is written by the men and officers of Victor 4 Coy, New Zealanders who served in the Vietnam War from 1969 to 1970, who tell about their experiences of combat in a faraway land. We have written the book not to celebrate war, but to tell the next generation about what we experienced. It is right that we should do this for our children and for our relatives and friends so that they may know what we did. It is a testament also to those seven comrades who gave their lives for their country. May they rest in peace for eternity.

Eighteen-year-old Marine recruit William V. Taylor, Jr. and his brother Marines are assembled into a new reaction force that is immediately tested in the fire of a bloody conflict known as Operation Beaver Cage. After a traumatic first fight, they push through back-to-back operations with little time to rest or reflect. Those who survive will return home ensnared by everlasting memories of a real but entirely surreal nightmare. Now, after more than 50 years of holding everything in, Taylor shares his experience in explicit—and often horrific—detail.

This book consists of 35 letters that I wrote to my aunt while I was serving in Vietnam from October of 1967 1968. The letters contain my thoughts as a young Marine and continued through the end of my tour where I was still young but far more experienced. The letters came to me when my aunt mailed them to me 33 years after Vietnam. One of her comments was she believed that I should have the letters published. My thoughts were that they were too personal to be published and would not be of any benefit to anyone.

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.

In February 1966, U.S. Navy pilot Dieter Dengler was shot down over "neutral Laos". He crashed deep in territory controlled by North Vietnamese army regulars and the communist Pathet Lao, who would eventually capture him and hold him prisoner in a fortified jungle prisoner-of-war camp.

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....

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 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.

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.

Major Richard J. "Dick" Meadows is renowned in military circles as a key figure in the development of the U.S. Army Special Operations. A highly decorated war veteran of the engagements in Korea and Vietnam, Meadows was instrumental in the founding of the U.S. Delta Force and hostage rescue force. Although he officially retired in 1977, Meadows could never leave the army behind, and he went undercover in the clandestine operations to free American hostages from Iran in 1980.

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