Vietnam War Special

Robin Moore became one of the first true embedded journalists by training with and fighting alongside the Green Berets in Vietnam. Though fictionalized, his work is an eye-opening exposé of the horrors of the Vietnam War and the basis for the hit John Wayne movie of the same title. Taut, fast-paced, and interspersed with unforgettable accounts of combat, Moore’s novel features an American major who goes "native" with Montagnard tribesmen, a courageous Vietnamese girl who poses as a rabid anti-American Communist to capture a murderous Viet Cong officer, and the unforgettable acts of courage of soldiers in the field.

John Plaster’s riveting account of his covert activities as a member of a special operations team during the Vietnam War is “a true insider’s account, this eye-opening report will leave readers feeling as if they’ve been given a hot scoop on a highly classified project” (Publishers...

Each soldier in Vietnam fought his own war. For some it was a war with loneliness, boredom, and endless fatigue. For others it was a war with unyielding jungle, mountains, and disease. For still others it was a war with terror and death and all of the above. And then there was the secret war fought mostly by Army Special Forces and Navy Seals. For these secret warriors, the war was seldom boring and always dangerous. The mountains and jungles of Laos and Cambodia were their playground, and disease, terror, and death stalked them on every mission. Sergeant First Class Ed Potter, returning ...

In 1964, Charles A. McDonald was at Camp Khe Sanh before the first wholesale introduction of North Vietnamese Army troops onto the battlefield against U.S. forces. For twenty-four years in war and peace, McDonald served his country in its elite units as an Airborne Infantryman and Special Forces soldier. He trained and armed Bru tribesmen, Chinese mercenaries, Vietmamese Airborne and Special Forces troops. Stories as seen through his eyes "In This Valley There Are Tigers", McDonald tells a narrative of the personal violence and desperate suicide attacks in combat with vivid detail as it was...

In 1968, George Lanigan leaves the University of Maryland and sets off on the journey of his life. He volunteers to serve his country in the Vietnam War and enlists in the army where he becomes an elite Special Forces advisor in a top-secret program. The United States is clandestinely training the Cambodian Army, Forces Armees Nationales Khmeres, and Lanigan is at the heart of the mission. In this personal memoir, LTC George R. Lanigan, USA (Retired), adapts his forty-year-old letters and correspondence to his parents into an emotionally compelling and suspenseful narrative that relates his...

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...

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...

A helicopter crew returns for men who cannot escape on foot. A wounded medic crosses ground still covered by enemy fire. A prisoner resists captivity with no certainty that his story will ever be heard. In 100 Medal of Honor Stories from Vietnam, Gordon J. MacKenzie brings together accounts of 100 distinct recipients whose actions reveal different experiences of the conflict. These short narratives follow the immediate situation, the response and the consequences. The emphasis is on what each person did, rather than turning a name and an award into a simple legend. Roy Benavidez, Ed Freeman...

The Vietnam War cast a shadow over the American psyche from the moment it began. In its time it sparked budget deficits, campus protests, and an erosion of US influence around the world. Long after the last helicopter evacuated Saigon, Americans have continued to battle over whether it was ever a winnable war.

Six hours after the team crossed the fence, their own grid called the airstrike down on them. March 1971. A MACV-SOG recon team slips into the Laotian panhandle under total radio silence. Six hours later, American ordnance lands on the exact coordinates they were assigned — coordinates only their own command could have known. Master Sergeant Colton Harlan walks out. Most of his men don't. The official story is friendly fire. Harlan knows it was an execution. Working off a single intercepted transmission and a list of seven names, Harlan and his Montagnard partner Minh begin pulling a ...

The colonel is worth more alive than they are. Command doesn't say that. The math does. Cambodia, 1967. A facility fourteen kilometers across the border that the United States officially does not know about. A Chinese signals intelligence station three months from intercepting every American tactical radio transmission in the Central Highlands. And one man who can explain it all — Colonel Dao Vinh Loc, guarded by a hundred and thirty NVA regulars in a valley the team's intelligence sergeant marks on the overlay in red block letters: KILL BOX. Captain Decker and Recon Team Massai get the ...

Vietnam, 1969. Staff Sergeant Dillon Rourke runs six-man reconnaissance teams deep into denied territory — across the border, off the maps, officially nonexistent. He is good at this. He has been doing it for three tours. When intelligence designates a target in the Laotian highlands as a North Vietnamese supply cache, Rourke inserts his team to confirm it. What he finds instead — a ceramic jar repaired with care, a child's sandal impression in the dirt, a drawing on a reed wall — tells him the picture S-2 assembled from dry-season photographs is wrong. He transmits the abort. The ...

Six men. Five days. One rule: the enemy never knows you were there. Vietnam, 1968. Staff Sergeant Dolan Mast leads a six-man Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol into the Dak Kram valley to observe an NVA supply cache and report what he finds. The intelligence estimate says thirty enemy soldiers. From the helicopter, Dolan counts smoke from three separate cooking fires, spaced at tactical intervals. The estimate is wrong by a factor of four. The mission is simple. Get in. Watch. Get out. Do not fire a shot. Do not leave a trace. Spend five days lying in the dirt forty meters from a hundred and ...

The true story of the U.S. Army’s 240th Assault Helicopter Company and a Green Beret Staff Sergeant's heroic mission to rescue a Special Forces team trapped behind enemy lines during the Vietnam War, from New York Times bestselling author Eric Blehm. On May 2, 1968, a twelve-man Special Forces...

Cambodia, 1968. Officially, American soldiers are not there. Sergeant Cal Briggs is about to cross the border anyway. After nearly two decades in uniform, Briggs volunteers for one of the most secret assignments of the Vietnam War: MACV-SOG, the covert command sending small reconnaissance teams across the fence into enemy territory. As One-Zero of RT Kentucky, Briggs leads a team of American Special Forces soldiers and indigenous Bru fighters deep into northeast Cambodia. Their mission sounds simple: observe a vital section of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, count what moves through it, report by ...

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 ...

In May 1970 aerial photographs revealed what US military intelligence believed was a POW camp near the town of Son Tay, 23 miles west of North Vietnam's capital city. When American officials decided the prisoners were attempting to send signals, they set in motion a daring plan to rescue the more than 60 airmen thought to be held captive. On November 20 a joint group of volunteers from US Army Green Berets and US Air Force Special Operations Forces perfectly executed the raid, only to find the prisoners' quarters empty; the POWs had been moved.

Without doubt the most unique U.S. unit to participate in the Vietnam War, the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam Studies and Observations Group (MACVSOG) was a highly-classified, U.S. joint-service organization consisting of Army Special Forces, Navy SEALs, Marine Force Reconnaissance units, the Air Force, and the CIA. Committed to action in Southeast Asia even before the major U.S. build-up in 1965, it also fielded a division-sized element of South Vietnamese military personnel, indigenous Montagnards, ethnic Chinese Nungs, and Taiwanese pilots.

A six-man reconnaissance patrol has missed every extraction window, and monsoon weather is erasing its trail by the hour. Staff Sergeant Calvin Bledsoe is given what can fit into one aircraft: four men beside him, three radio batteries, one medical reserve, and a single chance to get onto the ground before the weather closes again. Their last confirmed position and extraction site are miles apart, and something happened between them. The insertion goes bad immediately when Bledsoe’s team finds armed men already occupying the landing ground. Now the rescuers must pick up a disappearing ...

It’s 1966 and Joshua’s like any other kid; out of high school and wondering what life holds in store, when he receives his draft notice. The son of a Korean War hero who died at the Chosin Reservoir battle, he realizes his best changes of surviving his year in Vietnam is through training. After arriving at Basic Training, he signs up for Army Special Forces, hoping to receive that training. All of his commanding officers detect strong, if latent, leadership skills in him. That hidden talent surfaces in unimaginable ways at the Battle of Dak Hoa. On the verge of being overrun by the ...