Combat Veterans

June 1966. Hollis Caudill, nineteen years old, stands in the open door of a Huey and learns what the valley costs. He is a door gunner with the 227th Assault Helicopter Battalion, flying resupply and extraction missions into the Vinh Thanh Valley during Operation Crazy Horse — one of the bloodiest helicopter operations of the Vietnam War. He has an M60, a crew chief who speaks in facts rather than comfort, and a 1964 Ford Galaxie waiting under a tarp at home in West Virginia. By the time the operation ends, he will have carried the dead from a burning ridge, watched a ship go down in a ...

David W. Powell enlisted for a tour of duty in April 1966 with the US Marines after receiving an imminent draft notice. Believing he would be able to leverage his existing skills as a computer programmer, he never thought all they would see on his resume was his Karate expertise. Even less that he would wind up serving as a Rocket man in the jungles of Da Nang and Chu Lai for a 13 month tour in hell. David's journey from naive civilian to battle-hardened combat veteran shows us all how fragile our humanity really is.

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.

On his second combat tour, Nick Brokhausen served in Recon Team Habu, CCN. This unit was part of MACV-SOG (Military Assistance Command Vietnam Studies and Observations Group), or Studies and Observations Group as it was innocuously called. The small recon companies that were the center of its activities conducted some of the most dangerous missions of the war, infiltrating areas controlled by the North Vietnamese in Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia. The companies never exceeded more than 30 Americans, yet they were the best source for the enemy's disposition.

This volume of Combat Veterans’ Stories of the Vietnam War contains 15 autobiographical stories.
The first begins in late October 1967, and is told by a Marine rifleman who fought in battles at Mike’s Hill, Foxtrot Ridge, and numerous others. The final story in this volume is told by an Army cavalry officer who led a platoon of armored personnel carriers with such ability and daring that he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, three Silver Stars, four Bronze Stars, and two Purple Hearts.

Want to know what Vietnam was really like? A 3-Volume BOX SET with 200 veteran interviews, 688 Photos, 1,236 pages, and 4.6 Stars on 2,270 Amazon Reviews for the individual books, at half price! Real stories told by real people in their own words, 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'll understand. If you weren't, grab a copy 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. ...

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.

From the author of the bestselling and award-winning Matterhorn comes a brilliant nonfiction book about war and the psychological and spiritual toll it takes on those who fight. “I wrote this book primarily to come to terms with my own experience of combat. So far—reading, writing...

When the ultimate act of courage is choosing to live—and serve.. For too many American veterans, the return home initiates a new and terrifying battle, fought in silence against the crippling darkness of rage, trauma, and suicide. Courage: Courage is Rage in Action is the unflinching look at this national health crisis, yet it is also a story of extraordinary redemption. Through riveting, intimate accounts, this book reveals how a generation of veterans—facing the edge of despair—made the radical choice to transform their internal fury into a new, selfless mission: providing vital ...

For fans of John Scalzi, Jack Campbell, and character-driven military science fiction where the cost of war is measured in more than casualties. Some pilots are born. Some are forged in fire. Logan Gilbert is both. Navigator Logan Gilbert is two weeks from earning his pilot’s wings when a sabotaged ejection seat forces an impossible choice. He saves his partner’s life — and loses his right arm, his face, and nearly everything else in the fire that follows. Burned beyond recognition, the doctors piece him back together with an experimental brain patch. It keeps his heart beating and ...

Who, or what, was the real enemy in Vietnam? The ever-elusive, jungle-wise Viet Cong and their NVA allies? The oppressive heat and torrential rains? The leeches, mosquitoes, and the jungle itself? Or the army whose regulations made you carry a .45 even though the firing pin was broken? Perhaps, each in their own way, they all were... and John Shook battled them all. In One Soldier, he recounts his experiences and describes how he faced—and overcame—all the enemies a machine-gunner encountered in the Nam. Straight-from-the-shoulder, Shook tells of search and destroy patrols and night ...

Vietnam, 1968. Daniel Cofield is nineteen years old, a helicopter crew chief with the 1st Cavalry Division. He will spend twelve months in the air above a war that will never leave him. Daniel arrives at Bien Hoa with sixty-two pounds of gear and no understanding of what waits for him. He is assigned to a Huey helicopter crew — Chalk One — under a pilot who communicates in three taps on the cyclic and says almost nothing else. His crew chief, Lou, teaches him the only rule that matters: The gun wants to fire. You just let it. Over twelve months, Daniel flies into landing zones where the...

November 1967. Central Highlands, Vietnam. Six men walk into the jungle on a routine patrol. None of them will come back the same. Sergeant Hargrove carries the weight of a brother who came home in a box. Jefferson walks point, running from a secret he's never told anyone. Delacroix reads the jungle like his Louisiana bayou, counting the days until he sees his wife again. Chen carries the radio and the unbearable weight of coordinates that turn men into smoke. Kowalski is nineteen, writing letters to a girl in a yellow dress, terrified of becoming what the war needs him to be. And Tran, the...

Volumes 1 and 2 of Combat Veterans’ Stories of Small Wars and Nation Building present 20 autobiographical stories of men and women that were in fire fights, raids, and other dangerous situations that exposed them to enemy ordnance. Their stories give listeners an understanding of warfare, as the US military has experienced it since the Vietnam War.

November 1965. The Central Highlands. Ray Halvorsen, nineteen years old, lies in a shallow hole at Landing Zone X-Ray while mortar rounds walk across the elephant grass and the man beside him prays in a voice Ray cannot hear. Before the sun comes up, Ray will fire his rifle at a shape in the grass and watch it stop moving. Before the week is over, he will walk the column to Landing Zone Albany and learn why half the men around him will never walk out of it. Sixteen months earlier, a letter from the Webster County Local Board arrived on a Tuesday in late July at a farm outside Corwin, Iowa. ...

The intelligence said platoon. The jungle said more. Vietnam, 1967. Captain Dan Decker and eleven Special Forces soldiers walk eighteen kilometers into triple-canopy jungle to ambush an NVA supply column on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The mission brief says platoon-size element. A Montagnard elder who has survived three wars says the number is higher. The FOB says proceed as planned. The ambush works. The extraction doesn't. Cut off from radio contact, carrying a wounded man through terrain that wants to kill them, hunted by a tracking element that reads the jungle better than they do, Decker's ...

We have a strong instinct to belong to small groups defined by clear purpose and understanding--"tribes." This tribal connection has been largely lost in modern society, but regaining it may be the key to our psychological survival. Decades before the American Revolution, Benjamin Franklin...

Discover true stories of the silent heros that live among us with these moving and powerful recollections of war, told by the men and women who lived them. “The stories America needs to hear” —Admiral William H. McRaven, US Navy (Ret.) Walk in my Combat Boots is a powerful collection...

The celebrated 2010 HBO miniseries The Pacific, winner of eight Emmy Awards, was based on two classic books about the War in the Pacific, Helmet for My Pillow and With The Old Breed. Audible Studios, in partnership with Playtone, the production company co-owned by Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman, and creator of the award-winning HBO series Band of Brothers, John Adams, and The Pacific, as well as the HBO movie Game Change, has created new recordings of these memoirs, narrated by the stars of the miniseries.

This volume contains 17 autobiographies of Korean War combat veterans, as well as a report about war prisoners' experiences told by a US Army doctor who spent three years as a POW. It also contains reports about how the US divided Korea after World War II and Theodore Roosevelt’s secret diplomacy, in 1905, which led to World War II in the Pacific, the Korean War, and continuing turmoil in the Pacific.