Interview with Roy Armstrong, an Army 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. Armstrong 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 and Kanchanaburi, Thailand (1943), Saigon and Da Lat, French Indo-China (1944-1945), American air raids, and his liberation.

Interview with Garth Slate, an Army 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. Slate 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), Kanchanaburi, Thailand (1944), Saigon and Da Lat, French Indo-China (1944-1945), American air raids, and his liberation.

Interview with W. L. Starnes, a businessman, an Army 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. Starnes talks about 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), Kanchanaburi, Thailand (1944), Saigon and Da Lat, French Indo-China (1944-1945), and his liberation.

Transcript of an interview with Charles Leroy "Lee" Smith, U.S. Air Force veteran and private pilot. Smith recounts his experiences at the University of Alabama and in the US Air Force, Flight School at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, TX, and Basic Training in Mississippi. He speaks of his assignments in Keflavik, Iceland, Red Bluff, CA, and NORAD Sector as Captain in electronics and communications. He was Certified for the F-102 at Perrin Air Force Base, Sherman, TX. He tells of his experiences while assigned to combat squadron in Saigon during Vietnam War, and his life after Vietnam era and his work experiences flying world-wide for businesses and the private sector, particularly as pilot for Frank Sinatra.

Much of the history written about the Vietnam War overlooks the U.S. Marine Corps Combined Action Platoons. These CAPs lived in the Vietnamese villages, with the difficult and dangerous mission of defending the villages from both the National Liberation Front guerrillas and the soldiers of the North Vietnamese Army. The CAPs also worked to improve living conditions by helping the people with projects, such as building schools, bridges, and irrigation systems for their fields. In War in the Villages, Ted Easterling examines how well the CAPs performed as a counterinsurgency method, how the Marines adjusted to life in the Vietnamese villages, and how they worked to accomplish their mission. The CAPs generally performed their counterinsurgency role well, but they were hampered by factors beyond their control. Most important was the conflict between the Army and the Marine Corps over an appropriate strategy for the Vietnam War, along with weakness of the government of the Republic of South Vietnam and the strategic and the tactical ability of the North Vietnamese Army. War in the Villages helps to explain how and why this potential was realized and squandered. Marines who served in the CAPs served honorably in difficult circumstances. Most of these …

Interview with Howard Charles, a Marine WWII veteran and POW from Partridge, Kansas. Charles discusses growing up in the Great Depression; joining the Marine Corps and training; assignment to the USS Houston (CA-30) at Manila as a heavy machine gunner and events before the war; the Battle of Sunda Strait and sinking of the Houston; capture by the Japanese and being held at Serang, Java; experiences in internment and forced labor at Bicycle Camp in Batavia, Changi Camp in Singapore, various camps along the Burma Railway, and Saigon; liberation; psychological treatment, trauma, and adjusting to civilian life. In appendix is a letter written by Charles to Marcello including additional information for the interview.

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. Thorsen endured the tough Platoon Leaders Course at Quantico and barely earned a commission. He underwent aviation and intercept training while suffering airsickness issues—and still earned his wings. Thorsen joined the oldest and most decorated squadron in the Marine Corps, the VMFA-232 Red Devils in southern California, as it prepared for deployment to Vietnam. In combat, Thorsen felt angst when he saw the sky darken around him from anti-aircraft artillery explosions high above the Ho Chi Minh Trail. On his first close air support mission in support of ground troops (the majority of his Marine aviation missions), he witnessed tracers whiz by his …

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.

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 the air, a routine day mission turned into an unexpected duel with a deadly adversary. Complacency during a long night mission escorting a gunship almost led to death. A best friend died just before New Year’s. A RF-4 crashed into the base late in Buff’s tour of duty. The reader will experience Buff’s war from the cockpit of a supersonic F-4D Phantom II, doing 5-G pullouts after dropping six 500-pound bombs on trucks hidden beneath triple jungle canopy. These were well defended by a skillful, elusive, determined enemy firing back with 37mm anti-aircraft fire and tracers in the sky. The man who left the States …

This booklet is the sixth chapter of a training course developed for Air Force Reserve personnel about the state of defense in the United States during the Cold War. This chapter discusses how the principles of insurgency and counterinsurgency "have been applied, and are being applied, in actual practice in some specific campaigns since World War Two" (p. 1). It includes background information, analysis, review questions, and a list of suggested readings for further study.

This study describes the major elements of United States policy in the Vietnam War. It covers the period from the end of World War II to the fall of Saigon in April of 1975, with post-1975 developments. It emphasizes the changes in U.S. policy and American involvement.

This report quickly outlines limitations and restrictions on giving foreign assistance.

This report is a compilation of the return of American prisoners of war from Southeast Asia.

This report is about the effort carried on through diplomatic channels and only fragmentary information us available on some attempts to get talks under way.

This booklet is the fourth chapter of a training course developed for Air Reserve personnel about Southeast Asia. This chapter discusses Vietnam and includes background information, analysis, review questions, and a list of readings for further study.

From objectives and scope of work: The objective of this report is to provide a comprehensive review of the biology and population status of sea turtles potentially subject to entanglement in North Pacific high-seas driftnet fisheries. The report will assist National Marine Fisheries Service efforts to assess the impacts of the driftnet fisheries on threatened and endangered sea turtle populations.

This report discuses U.S. prisoners of war in Vietnam and nearby countries such as Cambodia and Laos and efforts to secure their release.

Abstract: A compilation of articles on United States involvement in Vietnam, appearing in New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Chicago Sun Times, the St. Louis Dispatch and the Knight News-papers. Also reports on Congressional interest in the U.S. vs. New York Times and Washington Post cases and the Supreme Court Decision.

An autobiographical account by Captain Winifred Quick Collins of her early life, the integration of women into the United States Navy, her Navy career, and her accomplishments in the service. The book focuses on Captain Collins's experience as a woman in a predominantly male division of the US military, as well as the history of women in the Navy. Includes a forward Arleigh Burke

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 …

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.

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 …

Anshel Brusilow was born in 1928 and raised in Philadelphia by musical Russian Jewish parents in a neighborhood where practicing your instrument was as normal as hanging out the laundry. By the time he was sixteen, he was appearing as soloist with the Philadelphia Orchestra. He also met Pierre Monteux at sixteen, when Monteux accepted him into his summer conducting school. Under George Szell, Brusilow was associate concertmaster at the Cleveland Orchestra until Ormandy snatched him away to make him concertmaster in Philadelphia, where he remained from 1959 to 1966. Ormandy and Brusilow had a father-son relationship, but Brusilow could not resist conducting, to Ormandy's great displeasure. By the time he was forty, Brusilow had sold his violin and formed his own chamber orchestra in Philadelphia with more than a hundred performances per year. For three years he was conductor of the Dallas Symphony, until he went on to shape the orchestral programs at Southern Methodist University and the University of North Texas. Brusilow played with or conducted many top-tier classical musicians, and he has opinions about each and every one. He also made many recordings. Co-written with Robin Underdahl, his memoir is a fascinating and unique view of American …

This report examines the bilateral trade issues between United States and Vietnam, discussing their main elements and exploring their potential implications for the 114th Congress.