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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.

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.

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.

December, 1966: Platoon leader Lt. Joseph Callaway had just turned 23 when he arrived in Vietnam to lead 42 untested men into battle against some of the toughest, most experienced, and best-trained guerrilla soldiers in the world. Callaway soon learned that most events in this savage jungle war were beyond his control. But there was one thing he could do well: take the best damn care of his troops he knew how.

Robert Peterson arrived in Vietnam in the fall of 1966, a young American ready to serve his country and seize his destiny. What happened in that jungle war would change his life forever. Peterson vividly relives the tense patrols in the Viet Cong-infested Central Highlands, the fierce firefights along the Cambodian border, the ambushes and enemy charges.

In Vietnam, river warfare was often conducted in the dark. It was always dangerous, sometimes fatal - especially in the eastern end of the Cong-plagued Mekong Delta. In 1967, US Navy Lt. Wynn Goldsmith was the "river rat" who led the first MK II PBR patrol boats in brutal combat. It was a deadly business. These sailors, famous for their courage and combat effectiveness, faced sniper bullets, machine guns, and mines while searching sampans, patrolling treacherous enemy-controlled waterways like Ambush Alley, and rescuing crews from burning boats in the middle of firefights.

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

They surged into Washington by the tens of thousands in the spring of 1971. Fiery radicals, flower children, and militant vets gathered for the most audacious act in a years-long movement to end America’s war in Vietnam: a blockade of the nation’s capital. And the White House, headed by an increasingly paranoid Richard Nixon, was determined to stop it.

Robert Stone was a singular American writer, a visionary whose award-winning novels - including Dog Soldiers, Outerbridge Reach, and Damascus Gate - earned him comparisons to literary lions ranging from Samuel Beckett to Ernest Hemingway to Graham Greene. Stone had an almost prophetic grasp of the spirit of his age, which he captured with crystalline clarity in each of his novels. Of course, he was also a sharp and brilliant observer of American life, and his nonfiction writing is revelatory.

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.

More than 40 years after it ended, the Vietnam War continues to haunt our country. We still argue over why we were there, whether we could have won, and who was right and wrong in their response to the conflict. When the war divided the country, it created deep political fault lines that continue to divide us today. Now, continuing in the tradition of their critically acclaimed collaborations, the authors draw on dozens and dozens of interviews in America and Vietnam to give us the perspectives of people involved at all levels of the war.

One night in 1967, 26-year-old John Donohue - known as Chick - was out with friends, drinking in a New York City bar. The friends gathered there had lost loved ones in Vietnam. Now, they watched as anti-war protesters turned on the troops themselves. One neighborhood patriot came up with an inspired - some would call it insane - idea. Someone should sneak into Vietnam, track down their buddies there, give them messages of support from back home, and share a few laughs over a can of beer. It would be the Greatest Beer Run Ever.

Dereliction of Duty is a stunning analysis of how and why the United States became involved in an all-out and disastrous war in Southeast Asia. Fully and convincingly researched, based on transcripts and personal accounts of crucial meetings, confrontations, and decisions, it is the only book that fully re-creates what happened and why. McMaster pinpoints the policies and decisions that got the United States into the morass and reveals who made these decisions and the motives behind them, disproving the published theories of other historians and excuses of the participants.

Many books have been written on the tragic decisions regarding Vietnam made by the stars of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Yet despite many words of analysis and reflection, no historian has been able to explain why such decent and previously successful men stumbled so badly. That changes with Road to Disaster. Historian Brian VanDeMark draws upon decades of archival research, his own interviews with many of those involved, and a wealth of previously unheard recordings by Robert McNamara and Clark Clifford, who served as Defense Secretaries for Kennedy and Johnson.

In Tour of Duty, Brinkley explores Senator John Kerry's career and deftly deals with such explosive issues as US atrocities in Vietnam and the bombing of Cambodia. Using new information acquired from the recently released Nixon tapes, Brinkley reveals how White House aides Charles Colson and H.R. Haldeman tried to discredit Kerry. Refusing to be intimidated, Kerry started running for public office, eventually becoming a US Senator from Massachusetts.

Fire and Rain is a compelling, meticulous narrative of the way national security decisions formed at the highest levels of government affect the lives of individuals at home and abroad. By drawing these connections, Carolyn Woods Eisenberg brings to life policy decisions about Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, conveying their significance to a new generation. She breaks fresh ground in contextualizing Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger's decisions within a wider institutional and societal framework.

Robert S. McNamara was widely considered to be one of the most brilliant men of his generation. While he could be cold and arrogant, he was an invaluable friend to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson as US secretary of defense and had a deeply moving relationship with Jackie Kennedy. McNamara was the leading advocate for American escalation in Vietnam during the summer of 1965, strongly urging Johnson to send hundreds of thousands of American ground troops just weeks before he concluded that the war was unwinnable.

Based on a decade of research and writing, enriched by eyewitness interviews and revealing documents obtained through dozens of freedom of information requests, Kennedy’s Coup vividly recreates the Kennedy Administration’s secret encouragement of the fatal 1963 military coup against South Vietnam’s defiant president.

During the course of his military career, Bud Day won every available combat medal, escaped death on no less than seven occasions, and spent 67 months as a POW in the infamous Hanoi Hilton, along with John McCain. Despite sustained torture, Day would not break. He became a hero to POWs everywhere—a man who fought without pause, not a prisoner of war, but a prisoner at war.

Days before he was drafted in 1962, Dennis Foley volunteered to join the army in the hopes of someday getting into West Point. He was only eighteen years old. At basic training in Fort Dix, New Jersey, a presentation by two impressive, self-confident special forces sergeants made an indelible impression on him. His career would come full circle. In 1972, wearing a green beret, Foley would be given command of his own A-Team.