North Vietnam

Vietnam became the Western world’s most divisive modern conflict, precipitating a battlefield humiliation for France in 1954, then a vastly greater one for the US in 1975. Max Hastings has spent the past three years interviewing scores of participants on both sides, as well as researching a multitude of American and Vietnamese documents and memoirs, to create an epic narrative of an epic struggle. Here are the vivid realities of strife amid jungle and paddies that killed two million people.

John Launer served in the United States Army during the Vietnam War. All Expenses Paid 2.0 summarizes All Expenses Paid as how to become a Combat Infantryman, then continues with the second half of his military experience. It covers the human aspect of the war, through the Winning Hearts and Minds program; spending time with the South Vietnamese people, especially the children; his R&R to Sydney, Australia; and finally returning home. Launer also documents the lasting physical and psychological effects on himself and all veterans who served there. Containing a glossary of military ...

David R. “Buff” Honodel was a cocky young man with an inflated self-image when he arrived in 1969 at his base in Udorn, Thailand. His war was not in Vietnam; it was a secret one in the skies of a neighboring country almost unknown in America, attacking the Ho Chi Minh Trail that fed soldiers and supplies from North Vietnam into the South. Stateside he learned the art of flying the F-4, but in combat, the bomb-loaded fighter handled differently, targets shot back, and people suffered. Inert training ordnance was replaced by lethal weapons.

A searing chronicle of wartime experiences, Even the Women Must Fight probes the cultural legacy of North Vietnam's American War. Unflinching in its portrayal of hardship, valor, and personal sacrifice, this wrenching account is nothing short of a revelation, banishing in one bold stroke the familiar image of Vietnamese women as passive onlookers, war brides, prostitutes, or helpless refugees.

In this intimate memoir, Perry A. Ulander chronicles with powerful clarity the bewildering predicament he confronted and the fellowship and guidance that transformed him during the year he served as an American GI in the jungles of Vietnam. Conveying with unadorned precision the harrowing experiences that shattered his core beliefs, Ulander also captures the camaraderie and humor of his platoon, the hostility between "lifers" and draftees, the physical hardships of reconnaissance missions, and the unrelenting apprehension underlying everyday life.

In this comprehensive history, Stanley Karnow demystifies the tragic ordeal of America's war in Vietnam. The book's central theme is that America's leaders, prompted as much by domestic politics as by global ambitions, carried the United States into Southeast Asia with little regard for the realities of the region. Karnow elucidates the decision-making process in Washington and Asia and recounts the political and military events that occurred after the Americans arrived in Vietnam.

Meet Harry S. Truman, Joe McCarthy, Ike, JFK, LBJ, Rosa Parks, Thurgood Marshall, Elvis Presley, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Cesar Chavez, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton. Full coverage of everything, including President Clinton's impeachment trial.

In Vietnam, Christopher Goscha tells the full history of Vietnam, from antiquity to the present day. Generations of emperors, rebels, priests, and colonizers left complicated legacies in this remarkable country. Periods of Chinese, French, and Japanese rule reshaped and modernized Vietnam, but so too did the colonial enterprises of the Vietnamese themselves as they extended their influence southward from the Red River Delta.

Hanoi: a maze of alleys, lakes, pagodas, jazz clubs, cafes, and Soviet statues. Even for us Vietnamese people, Hanoi is infamously inscrutable. It’s Vietnam’s enigma wrapped in a mystery, with egg cream on top. You can take the easy, well-trodden path: the tourist market, the tourist pho restaurant, the tourist beer street, and a dude in a glass case. Or you can go local: eat the pho that Vietnamese foodies eat, drink the coffee VIetnamese hipsters drink, and hang out on the other beer street, the one that’s not in any guidebooks, the one for locals. I'll even show you a super-creepy ...

There was a truce on New Year’s Day, 1968, and Third Brigade of 25th Infantry Division used the respite to build a new fire support base near the Cambodian border, in a vast forested area of Viet Nam called War Zone C. They called it Fire Support Base Burt, manned by two infantry battalions and three batteries of artillery. When the truce ended at midnight, January 1, the Communist forces in the area responded by launching a massive assault on the base. Vastly outnumbered, the American soldiers repelled attack after attack and eventually forced the enemy to withdraw after suffering ...

This covers the air war over North Vietnam from August 1966 through November 1968 for a young Naval Aviator, his squadron (VA-163) and Air Wing 16 on the USS Oriskany CVA-34 and the USS Hancock CVA-19.

In 1965, Col. Thomas "Jerry" Curtis's helicopter was shot down over North Vietnam. He was immediately captured and spent seven and a half years confined in a filthy cell at the notorious Hanoi prison camp. Thousands of miles from home and unable to communicate with his wife and children, Jerry endured months of solitary confinement, suffocating heat, freezing cold, grueling physical and psychological torture, constant hunger, and unimaginable mental duress.

The Vietnam War could have been called a comedy of errors if the consequences weren’t so deadly and tragic. In 1951, while war was raging in Korea, the United States began signing defense pacts with nations in the Pacific, intending to create alliances that would contain the spread of Communism. As the Korean War was winding down, America joined the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, pledging to defend several nations in the region from Communist aggression. One of those nations was South Vietnam.

Rattler One-Seven puts you in the helicopter seat, to see the war in Vietnam through the eyes of an inexperienced pilot as he transforms himself into a seasoned combat veteran. Soon after the war, Gross wrote down his adventures, while his memory was still fresh with the events. Rattler One-Seven (his call sign) is written as he experienced it, using these notes along with letters written home to accurately preserve the mindset he had while in Vietnam.

Dan Lyons resigned as Dean at Gonzaga University to become the free world's leading advocate of winning the war in Vietnam, visiting there 17 times from 1963 to 1975. His 500 daily radio and TV broadcasts, plus his nationwide weekly columns and debates on college campuses, reached millions every week for 12 years.

A powerful work of literary military history from the New York Times best-selling author of In Harm's Way and Horse Soldiers - the harrowing and redemptive account of an American army platoon fighting for survival during the Vietnam War.

In early February of 1968, at the beginning of the Tet Offensive, Private First Class Gregory V. Short arrived in Vietnam as an 18-year-old US Marine. Amid all of the confusion and destruction, he began his tour of duty as an 81mm mortarman with the 2nd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, which was stationed at Con Thien near the DMZ.

In geology an erratic is a "boulder or rock formation transported some distance from its original source, as by a glacier." In award-winning novelist Mark Frutkin's case, his movement from his native Cleveland. Ohio, was instigated by his wish to protest and resist the U.S. military draft during the Vietnam War, and his destination was Canada. An estimated 50,000 to 100,000 American Vietnam War draft resisters sought sanctuary in Canada.

Phantom in the Sky is the story of a Radar Intercept Officer (RIO) in the back seat of the supersonic Phantom jet during the Vietnam War - a unique, tactical perspective of the “guy in back”, or GIB, absent from other published aviation accounts. During the time of Terry L. Thorsen’s service from 1966 to 1970, the RIO played an integral part in enemy aircraft interception and ordnance delivery. In Navy and Marine F-4 Phantom jets, the RIO was a second pair of eyes for the pilot, in charge of communications and navigation, and great to have during emergencies.

In clear, lucid prose, Vietnam War, Revised Edition explores the critical questions surrounding the United States' experience in Vietnam: What led President Lyndon B. Johnson to commit combat troops in 1965? How was it possible for the North Vietnamese to suffer a military defeat in the Tet Offensive in 1968 and yet achieve a political victory?