Vietnam War Combat

The author served with Special Forces units in Vietnam on five different tours from 1963 to 1971. He served in Vietnam in every rank between Specialist Fourth Class to Sergeant First Class. All the tours were at A-detachment level, or on what at the time were called "special projects." For those who are interested in the history of the role Army Special Forces played in the Vietnam war, this book would be a good place start your study.

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 ...

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. ...

This is a first-hand account of a war the U.S. should not have entered. It is easy to read from the first page to the last, and gives some history of Vietnam and the ignored warning signs. It is written by a combat infantryman, or “grunt,” in the 5th Battalion 7th Cavalry, a battalion formed to join the other battalions of the 1st Cavalry Division’s airmobile operations. He, along with a core group of soldiers who trained together for over eight months, was sent to Vietnam in August 1966, a “band of brothers” mostly made up of draftees. Over the next year, the unit saw numerous ...

The Viet Nam war was in full swing, as Jonathan baker reports to reception station to soon after begin combat basic training at Fort Lenardwood Missouri, after completing basic it was off to Fort Knox Kentucky for armor tank training, having arrived he soon was assigned to an armor recon scout training, where he learned to drive Sheridan tanks, and to qualifie with the weapons on board. After his additional training was complete, he was off to Viet Nam. Arriving in Nam he soon meets his tank commander and his assigned unit, attached to the 1/87th 8th Infantry division, soon after he was in ...

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.

This volume, Combat Veterans’ Stories of the Vietnam War, contains 11 autobiographical stories. The first begins in October 1966, and is told by a Marine infantry forward observer who was in 13 operations. The final story in this volume is told by a Marine machine gunner that was in multiple skirmishes and ambushes, in I Corps, including the battle for Hue. Other stories in Volume 2 include those told by a marine infantry officer who was awarded the Medal of Honor for heroism and leadership in fighting at villages named Dai Do and Dinh To.

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...

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.

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 award-winning historian and filmmakers of The Civil War, Baseball, The War, The Roosevelts, and others: a vivid, uniquely powerful history of the conflict that tore America apart--the companion volume to the major, multipart PBS film to be aired in September 2017. More than forty years...

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.

Some warriors are drawn to the thrill of combat and find it the defining moment of their lives. Others fall victim to fear, exhaustion, impaired reasoning, and despair. This was certainly true for twentieth-century American ground troops. Whether embracing or being demoralized by war, these men risked their lives for causes larger than themselves with no promise of safe return.

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. ...

John Launer, a United States Army Combat Infantryman in the Vietnam War, details his horrific experiences during that time. Setting the record straight that soldiers were not drug addicts, murderers, and baby killers, Launer documents that American media bias led to the public misunderstanding of the war. The action within is violent, bloody, and never ending, leading many veterans to devastating physical and psychological trauma upon their return home to the USA.

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...

"Vietnam - The Teenage Wasteland. A Hippie in a War Zone" by Tom Martiniano. The author was asked: Why write this book in 2012? His response was this: "This book actually took ten years to write because of the research involved, but mainly because it was hard for me to write, emotionally speaking. After 40 years of people asking me, 'What was it like in Vietnam?' 'What was combat like?' 'Were you scared?' 'What was it like for a peace loving late-60’s Hippie, drafted, with no desires to go off to war and kill people; to go through the harshest combat that one could ever endure and not ...

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...

Mekong Delta, 1968. Five men on a fiberglass boat. A river that hides everything beneath its surface. PBR 621 patrols the brown water of the Bassac River—searching sampans, running canals, and counting the days. Harlan is the boat captain on his third tour. Pope cleans the twin .50-calibers every morning in the same order and reads Louis L'Amour westerns between firefights. Sugar is nineteen and writes letters to a girl he met twice. Vien is their Vietnamese Navy liaison who sees things in the water that no American can see. When the Navy's new SEALORDS campaign pushes the crew from the ...

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 ...