"Part memoir, part investigative journalism, and completely engrossing, What We Inherit is not a book you'll be forgetting anytime soon." -Oprah Magazine In the wake of her mother's death, Jessica Pearce Rotondi uncovers boxes of letters, declassified CIA reports, and newspaper clippings that bring to light a family ghost: her uncle Jack, who disappeared during the CIA-led "Secret War" in Laos in 1972. The letters lead her across Southeast Asia in search of the truth that has eluded her famil...
USAF, FAC Operations in Southeast Asia, 1961-1965
by Us Air Force and Office of Air Force History
Crooked Bamboo is a political memoir centered on Nguyen Thai's inside account of South Vietnam's Ngo Dinh Diem regime. Thai was a close personal aide for Diem as well as Director General of Vietnam Press, giving him significant access to Diem and other Ngo family members. Although the Diem era is the focus of the memoir, Nguyen Thai's post-1963 career as a government official, businessman, and confidant of several key South Vietnamese figures sheds light on the aftermath of the Diem regime and...
Peace in the Mountains analyzes student activism at the University of Pittsburgh, Ohio University, and West Virginia University during the Vietnam War era. Drawing from a wide variety of sources including memoirs, periodicals, archival manuscript collections, and college newspapers such as The Pitt News, author Thomas Weyant tracks the dynamics of a student-led campus response to the war in real time and outside the purview of the national media. Along the way, he musters evidence for an emergin...
The helicopter is the defining weapon of the Vietnam War. Used for a variety of missions--attacks, clandestine insertions, observation, rescues and evacuations, and more--choppers were everywhere in Vietnam and created some of the war's most iconic, enduring images, from the fictional "Ride of the Valkyries" in Apocalypse Now to the very real battle described in Hal Moore's bestselling book We Were Soldiers Once. Villalva dives deep into the archives to find the best shots of Hueys, Chinooks, Jo...
"In order to give the truth back to history, we did not hide anything, whether it be victory or defeat." When South Vietnam was abandoned by its American allies and consequently defeated by the North Vietnamese in 1975, all its military records were lost to the enemy. This has led to a paucity of factually based analyses of the war by South Vietnamese authors. In a project lasting some ten years, and financed by his own hard-earned resources, Colonel Viet has researched, documented, and analy...
You Don't Lose 'til You Quit Trying
by Caroline Lambert and Sammy Lee Davis
In Black Hawk Down, the fight went on for a day. In We Were Soldiers Once & Young, the fighting lasted three days. In The Village, one Marine squad fought for 495 days--half of them died. Few American battles have been so extended, savage and personal. A handful of Americans volunteered to live among six thousand Vietnamese, training farmers to defend their village. Such "Combined Action Platoons" (CAPs) are now a lost footnote about how the war could have been fought; only the villagers rema...
The author describes his memoir: ""It's based on wartime letters. Upon arriving at the United States Marine Corps Boot Camp one of the first things my drill instructors told me to do was to write at least two letters home a week. I did what my they told me. My father, a World War II combat veteran, kept my letters, all 146 of them (and the 250 images I sent home). I continued to write all through my combat tour in Vietnam and my hospital stay in Japan recovering from wounds. I have selected and...
JFK and de Gaulle (Studies in Conflict, Diplomacy, and Peace)
by Sean J. McLaughlin
Despite French President Charles de Gaulle's persistent efforts to constructively share French experience and use his resources to help engineer an American exit from Vietnam, the Kennedy administration responded to de Gaulle's peace initiatives with bitter silence and inaction. The administration's response ignited a series of events that dealt a massive blow to American prestige across the globe, resulting in the deaths of over fifty-eight thousand American soldiers and turning hundreds of tho...