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Neglected by scholars and journalists alike, the years of conflict in Vietnam from 1968 to 1975 offer surprises not only about how the war was fought, but about what was achieved. Drawing from thousands of hours of previously unavailable (and still classified) tape-recorded meetings between the highest levels of the American military command in Vietnam, A Better War is an insightful, factual, and superbly documented history of these final years. Through...

Drawing on years of experience teaching about the war, Larry H. Addington presents a short, narrative history of the origins, course, and outcome of America's military involvement in Vietnam. Not intended as a competitor to the many excellent comprehensive studies of the Vietnam Era, this book will prove a useful introduction and a concise reference to America's longest, most controversial war. Addington reviews the history of pre-colonial Vietnam,...

In this comprehensive history, Stanley Karnow demystifies the tragic ordeal of America's war in Vietnam. The book's central theme is that America's leaders, prompted as much by domestic politics as by global ambitions, carried the United States into Southeast Asia with little regard for the realities of the region. Karnow elucidates the decision-making process in Washington and Asia and recounts the political and military events that occurred after...

The Vietnam War's influence on politics, foreign policy, and subsequent military campaigns is the center of much debate and analysis. But the impact on veterans across the globe, as well as the war's effects on individual lives and communities, is a largely neglected issue. As a consequence of cultural and legal barriers, the oral histories of the Vietnam War currently available in English are predictably one sided, providing limited insight into...

In this groundbreaking book, James William Gibson shatters the misled assumptions behind both liberal and conservative explanations for America's failure in Vietnam. Gibson shows how American government and military officials developed a disturbingly limited concept of war - what he calls "technowar" - in which all efforts were focused on maximizing the enemy's body count, regardless of the means. Consumed by a blind faith in the technology of destruction,...

On 30 January 1968 the North Vietnamese communists launched a coordinated surprise attack the Tet Offensive across South Vietnam against the South Vietnamese and American armies. Superior firepower eventually crushed the offensive, but it proved to be a major psychological victory for the communists a turning point in the Vietnam War. Anthony Tucker-Jones, in this photographic history of Tet and of American involvement in the struggle against the...

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 naïveté of a new medical intern. With this memoir, he crafts a haunting, humane portrait of one man's agonizing confrontation with war. With a wife and two children awaiting his return...

John Plaster's riveting account of his covert activities as a member of a special operations team during the Vietnam War. Code-named the Studies and Observations Group, SOG was the most secret elite US military unit to serve in the Vietnam War-so secret its very existence was denied by the government. Composed entirely of volunteers from such ace fighting units as the Army Green Berets, Air Force Air Commandos, and Navy SEALs, SOG took on the most...

The aircraft carrier USS Forrestal was preparing to launch attacks into North Vietnam when one of its jets accidentally fired a rocket into an aircraft occupied by pilot John McCain. A huge fire ensued, and McCain barely escaped before a 1,000-pound bomb on his plane exploded, causing a chain reaction with other bombs on surrounding planes. The crew struggled for days to extinguish the fires, but, in the end, the tragedy took the lives of 134 men....

In the spring of 1974, as the last American troops were being pulled out of Vietnam, Ron Kovic and a small group of other severely injured veterans in a California VA hospital launched the American Veterans Movement. In a phenomenal feat of political organizing, Kovic corralled his fellow AVM members into staging a sit-in, and then a hunger strike, in the Los Angeles office of Senator Alan Cranston, demanding better treatment of injured and disabled...