Elbridge Durbrow served as the third United States ambassador to the Republic of Vietnam from 1957 to 1961. His relationships with Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem and members of the Military Assistance Advisory Group in Saigon helped to shape his tenure in office, which ultimately concluded with his decision to end his support for the Vietnamese leader as well as turn away from the American military representatives who had earned Ngo Dinh Diem's trust. This triangular relationship between...
War in the Shallows: U.S. Navy Coastal and Riverine Warfare in Vietnam, 1965-1968
by John Darrell Sherwood
This is an epic, never-before-told true story of a North Vietnamese Army attack and how the men of this nearly overrun Fire Base survived. In the early morning hours of April 1, 1970, more than four hundred North Vietnamese soldiers charged out into the open and tried to over-run FSB Illingworth. The battle went on, mostly in the dark, for hours. Exposed ammunition canisters were hit and blew up, causing a thunderous explosion inside the FSB that left dust so thick it jammed the hand-held weapon...
Rooted in recent scholarship, The Columbia History of the Vietnam War offers profound new perspectives on the political, historical, military, and social issues that defined the war and its effect on the United States and Vietnam. Laying the chronological and critical foundations for the volume, David L. Anderson opens with an essay on the Vietnam War's major moments and enduring relevance. Mark Philip Bradley follows with a reexamination of Vietnamese revolutionary nationalism and the Vietminh-...
The Vietnam War lasted twenty years, and was the USA's greatest military failure. An attempt to stem the spread of Soviet and Chinese influence, the conflict in practice created a chaotic state torn apart by espionage, terrorism and guerilla warfare. American troops quickly became embroiled in jungle warfare and knowledge of the other side's troop movements, communication lines, fighting techniques and strategy became crucial. Panagiotis Dimitrakis uncovers this battle for intelligence and tells...
How the war in Vietnam came to represent the outer limits of feasible American intervention, how the working of the democratic process finally forced President Johnson to abandon a policy of escalation, and why the particular events of March 1968 signaled the end of an era constitute the subject matter of this prize-winning, firsthand account. As under secretary of the Air Force from October 1967 to February 1969, Townsend Hoopes had an insider's perspective on events. His book is both compellin...
During the Vietnam War, MACVSOG was a highly-classified, U.S. joint-service organisation that consisted of personnel from Army Special Forces, the Air Force, Navy SEALs, Marine Corps Force Reconnaissance units, and the CIA. This secret organisation was committed to action in Southeast Asia even before the major build-up of U.S. forces in 1965 and also fielded an element of South Vietnamese military personnel, indigenous Montagnards, ethnic Chinese Nungs, and Taiwanese pilots in its varied reconn...
"During 1965 and 1966," wrote Dale Andrade, a historian at the U.S. Army Center of Military History, "the Communists fought the Americans toe to toe, making little effort to act like guerillas." Indeed, despite pronounced disadvantages in firepower and mobility, the Communist Vietnamese endeavoured to crush South Vietnam and expel the American military with a strategy predicated on "big unit" war. Orchestrated by a militant clique in Hanoi, the "big unit" war was designed to yield a quick and de...
When Peter Scott began a 1968 tour in Vietnam advising ethnic Cambodian Khmer Krom paramilitaries, they shared only an earnest desire to check the spread of communism. It took nearly thirty years and a chance reunion for him to realize just how much they had become a part of him. Successfully blending intense combat narrative and stirring emotional drama, Scott vividly captures both the unique village culture of a little-known, highly spiritual people and their complex relationship with Special...
During the Vietnam War, hundreds of American POWs faced years of brutal conditions and horrific torture at the hands of communist interrogators who ruthlessly plied them for military intelligence and propaganda. Determined to maintain their Code of Conduct, the prisoners developed a powerful underground resistance. To quash it, the North Vietnamese singled out its eleven leaders, Vietnam's own "dirty dozen," and banished them to an isolated jail that would become known as Alcatraz. None would le...
Riverine Craft of the Vietnam Wars (Shipcraft, #26)
by Roger Branfill-Cook
Testimony from seventy eyewitnesses to the fall of Saigon--nurses, pilots, journalists, an ambassador, and others--illuminate this account of one of the most horrendous periods of this century.
The Poems Of The Author's Military Service In Vietnam
by Jaunita Hillerman
Individual and Collective Responsibility
by Peter French and Peter A. French
On November 8, 1967, the author arrived at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot, ill-prepared for boot camp, and was soon in Khe Sanh as an infantry grunt, like the other youths of the 3rd Marines, doing a difficult and deadly job.
A compelling personal account of a young SAS soldier's experiences in Vietnam.
Nicholas Murray's The Rocky Road to the Great War examines the evolution of field fortification theory and practice between 1877 and 1914. During this period field fortifications became increasingly important, and their construction evolved from primarily above to below ground. The reasons for these changes are crucial to explaining the landscape of World War I, yet they have remained largely unstudied. The transformation in field fortifications reflected not only the ongoing technological adva...