Showing titles in Vietnam War

A Green Beret's gripping memoir of American Special Forces in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War.

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.

From June 1967 to June 1968, Tom Johnson accumulated an astonishing 1,600 flying hours piloting the UH-1 "Iroquois" - better known as the "Huey" - as part of the famous First Air Cavalry Division. His battalion was one of the most decorated units of the Vietnam War, and helped redefine modern warfare. Johnson's riveting memoir takes us into key battles and rescue missions, including those for Hue and Khe Sanh. In harrowing detail, he tells of being shot down in the battle of A Shau Valley, of surviving enemy attacks during the Tet Offensive, and of a death-defying nighttime river rescue.

A no-holds-barred, straight-in-your-face account of combat in Vietnam. You know it's going to be hot when your brigade is referred to as a Fireball unit. From May 1967 through May 1968, Ted Arthurs was in the thick of it, humping an eighty-pound rucksack through triple canopy jungle, chasing down the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam. As sergeant major for a battalion of eight-hundred men, it was his job to see them through this jungle hell and get them back home again.

In 1968 James T. Gillam was a poorly focused college student at Ohio University who was dismissed and then drafted into the Army. Unlike most African-Americans who entered the Army then, he became a Sergeant and an instructor at the Fort McClellan Alabama School of Infantry.

Dale Hanson takes us from a northern Minnesota boyhood to the incredible stresses of US special operations during the Vietnam War, the deadly world of MAC-V-SOG, the top-secret Special Forces project that conducted America’s secret war against the Communist forces on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Shrouded in mystery and equipped with exotic weaponry, SOG operators suffered casualty rates in excess of 100 percent for three successive years.

Every now and then a work comes along that is so simple and refreshing in its originality that it immediately captures the spirit of American fighting men throughout the ages. Such is this work by Bob Babcock. What makes this work unique is that it is based upon his wartime writing as it occurred, without the softening of time and the refining of modern memory applied to past experience. In it you will find the thinking of a young officer as he struggles to take in all that he is responsible for while experiencing everything himself for the first time.

Things I’ll Never Forget is the story of a young high school graduate in 1965 who faces being drafted into the Army or volunteering for the Marine Corps. These are his memories of funny times, disgusting times and deadly times. The author kept a journal for an entire year; therefore many of the dates, times and places are accurate. The rest is based on memories that are forever tattooed on his brain. This is not a pro-war book, nor is it anti-war. It is the true story of what the Marine Corps was like in the late 1960’s.

Que Son Valley is actually a large area of hills and valleys just to the west of Da Nang, Viet Nam. During the 1960s, units from the US Marines and US Army engaged the 2nd North Vietnamese Division in heavy and close combat. Our mission was to keep the enemy from capturing the cities of Da Nang, Tam Ky, and Chu Lai and to pacify the area. We did prevent the enemy from capturing these vital cities, but the area was far from pacified.

In Legend, acclaimed best-selling author Eric Blehm takes as his canvas the Vietnam War as seen through a single mission that occurred on May 2, 1968. A 12-man Special Forces team had been covertly inserted into a small clearing in the jungles of neutral Cambodia - where US forces were forbidden to operate. Their objective, just miles over the Vietnam border, was to collect evidence that proved the North Vietnamese Army was using the Cambodian sanctuary as a major conduit for supplying troops and materiel to the south via the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

It is the worst of times... December 1968. The buses pull out of the holding station every hour. They are headed for Travis Air force base just north of the city, filled with a seemingly endless supply of young men who are themselves filled with doubts and fears. Of course, the doubt and fear is not allowed out in the open. It is instead tucked neatly away in a very private place. A place it can hide and grow, like a virus, as the journey continues.

Lynda Van Devanter was the girl next door, the cheerleader who went to Catholic schools, enjoyed sports, and got along well with her four sisters and parents. After high school she attended nursing school and then did something that would shatter her secure world for the rest of her life: in 1969, she joined the army and was shipped to Vietnam. When she arrived in Vietnam her idealistic view of the war vanished quickly. She worked long hours in cramped, ill-equipped, understaffed operating rooms. She saw friends die.

On a dark night in the Mekong Delta, young platoon sergeant Edgar Eaton's courage and self-sacrifice would mean the difference between life and death for his wounded comrades. This is the story of Ed the sniper. Ed doesn't plan on serving as a sniper; the small-town Oregon boy hopes to become a combat medic when he enlists at age nineteen. Instead, he finds himself an infantryman in the unique Army / Navy Riverine Force in the Mekong Delta.

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.

In this gripping memoir, a former marine returns to Vietnam to try to make sense of the war. Previously published as Brothers in Arms, this edition includes a new preface by the author. When William Broyles Jr. was drafted, he was a twenty-four-year-old student at Oxford University in England, hoping to avoid military service. During his physical exam, however, he realized that he couldn't let social class or education give him special privileges. He joined the marines, and soon commanded an infantry platoon in the foothills near Da Nang.

The candid memoir of a young doctor who reluctantly accepts a military commission and spends a year behind the front lines of the Vietnam War. Assigned to the marine camp at Phu Bai, Dr. John A. Parrish confronted all manner of medical trauma, quickly shedding the navet of a new medical intern.

Nicknamed "Mini-Man" for his diminutive stature, a mere five-foot-three and 125 pounds in his flight boots, chopper pilot Ron Alexander proved to be a giant in the eyes of the men he rescued from the jungles and paddies of Vietnam. With an unswerving concern for every American soldier trapped by enemy fire, and a fearlessness that became legendary, Ron Alexander earned enough official praise to become the second most decorated helicopter pilot of the Vietnam era. Yet, for Ron, the real reward came from plucking his fellow soldiers from harm's way, giving them another chance to get home alive.

Da Nang Diary is the story of how, in Vietnam, an elite group of Air Force pilots fought a secret air war in Cessna 0-2 and OV-10 Bronco prop planes - flying as low as they could get. The eyes and ears of the fast-moving jets who rained death and destruction down on enemy positions, the forward air controller made an art form out of an air strike - knowing the targets, knowing where friendly troops were, and reacting with split-second, life-and-death decisions as a battle unfolded.

A young US Marine officer recounts his experiences of the Vietnam War over a 19-month period. He graphically describes what it was like to perform three distinct combat missions: long-range ground reconnaissance in the Annamite Mountains of I Corps, infantry operations in the rice paddies and mountains of Quang Nam Province, and special police operations for the CIA in Tay Ninh province. Using official Marine Corps unit histories, CIA documents, and his weekly letters home, the author relies almost exclusively on primary sources in providing an accurate and honest account.

There have been many Marines. There have been many marksmen. But there has been only one Sergeant Carlos Hathcock, a legend of Marine lore. He stalked the Viet Cong behind enemy lines. His record has never been matched: 93 confirmed kills. This is his story. Powerful, chilling, and all true.