In early February of 1968, at the beginning of the Tet Offensive, Private First Class Gregory V. Short arrived in Vietnam as an eighteen-year-old U.S. 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. While living in horrendous conditions reminiscent of the trenches in World War I, his unit was cut off and constantly being bombarded by the North Vietnamese heavy artillery, rockets, and mortars. Soon thereafter Short left his mortar crew and became an 81mm’s Forward Observer for Hotel Company. Working with the U.S. Army’s 1st Air Cavalry Division and other units, he helped relieve the siege at Khe Sanh by reopening Route 9. Short participated in several different operations close to the Laotian border, where contact with the enemy was often heavy and always chaotic. On May 19, Ho Chi Minh’s birthday, the NVA attempted to overrun the combat base in the early morning hours. Tragically, during a two-month period, one of the companies (Foxtrot Company) within his battalion would sustain more than 70 percent casualties. By September Short was transferred to the …

Book describing military philosophy before and after WWII, with full chapters analyzing how the U.S. Army and Marine Corps engaged in urban warfare during four specific battles: Aachen (October 1944), Manila (February 1945), Seoul (September 1959), and Hue (February 1968). Index starts on page 363.

Donut Dolly puts you in the Vietnam War face down in the dirt under a sniper attack, inside a helicopter being struck by lightning, at dinner next to a commanding general, and slogging through the mud along a line of foxholes. You see the war through the eyes of one of the first women officially allowed in the combat zone. When Joann Puffer Kotcher left for Vietnam in 1966, she was fresh out of the University of Michigan with a year of teaching, and a year as an American Red Cross Donut Dolly in Korea. All she wanted was to go someplace exciting. In Vietnam, she visited troops from the Central Highlands to the Mekong Delta, from the South China Sea to the Cambodian border. At four duty stations, she set up recreation centers and made mobile visits wherever commanders requested. That included Special Forces Teams in remote combat zone jungles. She brought reminders of home, thoughts of a sister or the girl next door. Officers asked her to take risks because they believed her visits to the front lines were important to the men. Every Vietnam veteran who meets her thinks of her as a brother-at-arms. Donut Dolly is …

For Victor Hugo, the nineteenth century could be remembered by only its first two years, which established peace in Europe and France's supremacy on the continent. For General Lam Quang Thi, the twentieth century had only twenty-five years: from 1950 to 1975, during which the Republic of Vietnam and its Army grew up and collapsed with the fall of Saigon. This is the story of those twenty-five years. General Thi fought in the Indochina War as a battery commander on the side of the French. When Viet Minh aggression began after the Geneva Accords, he served in the nascent Vietnamese National Army, and his career covers this army's entire lifespan. He was deputy commander of the 7th Infantry Division, and in 1965 he assumed command of the 9th Infantry Division. In 1966, at the age of thirty-three, he became one of the youngest generals in the Vietnamese Army. He participated in the Tet Offensive before being removed from the front lines for political reasons. When North Vietnam launched the 1972 Great Offensive, he was brought back to the field and eventually promoted to commander of an Army Corps Task Force along the Demilitarized Zone. With the fall of Saigon, he …

In 1972 a North Vietnamese offensive of more than 30,000 men and 100 tanks smashed into South Vietnam and raced to capture Saigon. All that stood in their way was a small band of 6,800 South Vietnamese (ARVN) soldiers and militiamen, and a handful of American advisors with U.S. air support, guarding An Loc, a town sixty miles north of Saigon and on the main highway to it. This depleted army, outnumbered and outgunned, stood its ground and fought to the end and succeeded. Against all expectations, the ARVN beat back furious assaults from three North Vietnamese divisions, supported by artillery and armored regiments, during three months of savage fighting. This victory was largely unreported in the U.S. media, which had effectively lost interest in the war after the disengagement of most U.S. forces. Thi believes that it is time to set the record straight. Without denying the tremendous contribution of the U.S. advisors and pilots, this book is written primarily to tell the South Vietnamese side of the story and, more importantly, to render justice to the South Vietnamese soldier.

As an intelligence officer during the Vietnam War, Fred L. Edwards, Jr., was instructed to visit every major ground unit in the country to search for intelligence sources—long range patrols, boats, electronic surveillance, and agent operations. “Edwards found time to keep a journal, an extremely well-written, sharply observed report of his adventures. Along with contemporary postscripts and a helpful historical chronology, that journal is a significant improvement on most Vietnam memoirs. It is the record of a Marine’s on-the-job education.”—Proceedings

Transcript of an interview with M. L. Rea, a Texas native, Army veteran (2nd Battalion, 131st Field Artillery, Texas National Guard), and a member of the "Lost Battalion." Rea discusses his experiences as a prisoner-of-war of the Japanese during World War II.

Transcript of recorded letters sent by Captain Edward P. Jaeger (Ed) to his parents while stationed in South Vietnam as part of the U.S. Army Medical Corps. He discusses both personal and military topics including a chronicle of his departure for Vietnam; description of Vietnamese village life and culture; assignment to the 17th Field Hospital at An Khe; physical description of facilities at 17th Field Hospital; his responsibilities as medical supply officer; descriptions of and comments about unit personnel; problems in procuring medical supplies; problems with drunkenness among personnel; enemy mortar attacks; discipline problems; his institution of reforms in the medical supply operations; effects of constant changeovers in unit command; remodeling of the Officer's Club; leisure time and recreational activities; racial tensions; comments about U S domestic politics; personal financial matters; planning for a leave in Hawaii with his wife, Elizabeth, and parents; drug problems among personnel; comments about the anti-war movement in the States; description of Cam Ranh Bay and the military facilities there; medical supplies and black marketeering; description of the medical depot supply system; future civilian employment plans; transfer to Qui Nhon to the 67th Evacuation Hospital; comments about the Paris peace negotiations for ending the war; …

Interview with John H. Owen, U.S. Army WWII veteran (2nd Battalion, 131st Field Artillery, Texas National Guard) and a member of the "Lost Battalion," concerning his experiences as a prisoner-of-war of the Japanese during World War II. Owen discusses the fall of Java and his capture, Bicycle Camp in Batavia (1942), Changi Prison Camp in Singapore (1942), building the Burma-Thailand Death Railway (1942-1944), Tamarkan, Thailand (1944), Saigon and Da Lat, French Indo-China (1944-1945), and his liberation.

Interview with Tony Coalson, a Army Vietnam veteran and Air America pilot from Oxford-Anniston, Alabama. Coalson discusses his early interest in aviation, education and ROTC at Auburn University, becoming an Army helicopter pilot, deployment to Vietnam, missions in II Corps, return to the US and becoming an Air America pilot, returning to Vietnam, the nature of Air America and their missions, and flying into Laos and Cambodia. In appendix are several photos of Coalson during his career, mentions of him in related literature, and a letter addressed to him by a fellow chopper pilot.

Interview with Thomas Spencer, a Texas National Guard WWII veteran and POW from Joplin, Texas. Spencer discusses his experiences with the 2nd Battalion, 131st Field Artillery, the "Lost Battalion" captured on Java in March 1942, including: joining the service; training; deployment to East Asia; diversion to Brisbane and Malang; the Japanese attack on Java; the American surrender; experiences in internment and labor at Tanjong Priok and Bicycle Camp in Batavia, several camps on the Burma Railway, and Saigon; liberation.

Chaplain James D. Johnson broke all the rules to be with his men. He chose to accompany them, unarmed, on their daily combat operations, a decision made against the recommendations of his superiors. During what would be the final days for some, he offered his ministry not from a pulpit but on the battlefields--in hot landing zones and rice paddies, in hospitals, aboard ship, and knee-deep in mud. He even found time for baptisms in the muddy Mekong River. "You've never really lived until you've almost died," writes Johnson, one of the youngest army chaplains at the time. Through his compelling narration, he takes us into the hearts of frightened young boys and the minds of experienced men. In Combat Chaplain, we live for eight and one-half months with Johnson as he serves in the field with a small unit numbering 350 men. The physical price can be counted with numbers--ninety-six killed and over nine hundred wounded. Only those who paid it can understand the spiritual and psychological price, in a war that raised many difficult moral issues. "It placed my soul in the lost and found department for awhile," Johnson writes. Also provided here is an in-depth look at …

Assigned as the senior medical advisor to the Army of the Republic of Vietnam in I Corps, an area close to the DMZ, James G. Van Straten traveled extensively and interacted with military officers and non-commissioned officers, peasant-class farmers, Buddhist bonzes, shopkeepers, scribes, physicians, nurses, the mentally ill, and even political operatives. He sent his wife daily letters from July 1966 through June 1967, describing in impressive detail his experiences, and those letters became the primary source for his memoir. The author is grateful that his wife retained all the letters he wrote to her and their children during the year they were apart. The author describes with great clarity and poignancy the anguish among the survivors when an American cargo plane in bad weather lands short of the Da Nang Air Base runway on Christmas Eve and crashes into a Vietnamese coastal village, killing more than 100 people and destroying their village; the heart-wrenching pleadings of a teenage girl that her shrapnel-ravaged leg not be amputated; and the anger of an American helicopter pilot who made repeated trips into a hot landing zone to evacuate the wounded, only to have the Vietnamese insist that the dead be given a …

In Beyond the Quagmire, thirteen scholars from across disciplines provide a series of provocative, important, and timely essays on the politics, combatants, and memory of the Vietnam War. The essays pose new questions, offer new answers, and establish important lines of debate regarding social, political, military, and memory studies. Part 1 contains four chapters by scholars who explore the politics of war in the Vietnam era. In Part 2, five contributors offer chapters on Vietnam combatants with analyses of race, gender, environment, and Chinese intervention. Part 3 provides four innovative and timely essays on Vietnam in history and memory.