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Author: Joseph W. Callaway, Jr.
Publisher: Presidio Press
ISBN: 0307416038
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 282
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Book Description
“Before we got to Vietnam, the troops all thought you would be the first lieutenant killed, and in the end, you were the only one left. We were all wrong. You were the best.” —Sgt. Lonnie “Tallman” Caldwell December, 1966: Platoon leader Lt. Joseph Callaway had just turned twenty-three when he arrived in Vietnam to lead forty-two untested men into battle against some of the toughest, most experienced, and best-trained guerrilla soldiers in the world. Callaway soon learned that most events in this savage jungle war were beyond his control. But there was one thing he could do well: take the best damn care of his troops he knew how. In the Viet Cong–infested provinces around the Mekong Delta where the platoon was assigned, the enemy was always ready to attack at the first sign of weakness. And when the jungle suddenly erupted in the chaos of battle, the platoon leader was the Cong’s first target. Mekong First Light is at times horrific, heartrending, and heroic, but is always brutally honest. Callaway’s account chronicles a soldier’s painful realization of the true nature of America’s war in Vietnam: It was a war that could not be won.
Author: Joseph W. Callaway, Jr.
Publisher: Presidio Press
ISBN: 0307416038
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 282
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Book Description
“Before we got to Vietnam, the troops all thought you would be the first lieutenant killed, and in the end, you were the only one left. We were all wrong. You were the best.” —Sgt. Lonnie “Tallman” Caldwell December, 1966: Platoon leader Lt. Joseph Callaway had just turned twenty-three when he arrived in Vietnam to lead forty-two untested men into battle against some of the toughest, most experienced, and best-trained guerrilla soldiers in the world. Callaway soon learned that most events in this savage jungle war were beyond his control. But there was one thing he could do well: take the best damn care of his troops he knew how. In the Viet Cong–infested provinces around the Mekong Delta where the platoon was assigned, the enemy was always ready to attack at the first sign of weakness. And when the jungle suddenly erupted in the chaos of battle, the platoon leader was the Cong’s first target. Mekong First Light is at times horrific, heartrending, and heroic, but is always brutally honest. Callaway’s account chronicles a soldier’s painful realization of the true nature of America’s war in Vietnam: It was a war that could not be won.
Author: Joseph W. Callaway
Publisher: Presidio Press
ISBN: 0891418164
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
A former platoon leader describes how he led forty-two untested soldiers in the December 1966 battle against the tough guerrilla soldiers of the Viet Cong in the provinces around Vietnam's Mekong Delta. Original.
Author: Richard A. Ruth
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824860853
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289
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Book Description
In Buddha’s Company explores a previously neglected aspect of the Vietnam War: the experiences of the Thai troops who served there and the attitudes and beliefs that motivated them to volunteer. Thailand sent nearly 40,000 volunteer soldiers to South Vietnam to serve alongside the Free World Forces in the conflict, but unlike the other foreign participants, the Thais came armed with historical and cultural knowledge of the region. Blending the methodologies of cultural and military history, Richard Ruth examines the individual experiences of Thai volunteers in their wartime encounters with American allies, South Vietnamese civilians, and Viet Cong enemies. Ruth shows how the Thais were transformed by living amongst the modern goods and war machinery of the Americans and by traversing the jungles and plantations haunted by indigenous spirits. At the same time, Ruth argues, Thailand’s ruling institutions used the image of volunteers to advance their respective agendas, especially those related to anticommunist authoritarianism. Drawing on numerous interviews with Thai veterans and archival material from Thailand and the United States, Ruth focuses on the cultural exchanges that occurred between Thai troops and their allies and enemies, presenting a Southeast Asian view of a conflict that has traditionally been studied as a Cold War event dominated by an American political agenda. The resulting study considers such diverse topics as comparative Buddhisms, alternative modernities, consumerism, celebrity, official memories vs. personal recollections, and the value of local knowledge in foreign wars. The war’s effects within Thailand itself are closely considered, demonstrating that the war against communism in Vietnam, as articulated by Thai leaders, was a popular cause among nearly all segments of the population. Furthermore, Ruth challenges previous assertions that Thailand’s forces were merely "America’s mercenaries" by presenting the multiple, overlapping motivations for volunteering offered by the soldiers themselves. In Buddha’s Company makes clear that many Thais sought direct involvement in the Vietnam War and that their participation had profound and lasting effects on the country’s political and military institutions, royal affairs, popular culture, and international relations. As one of only a handful of academic histories of Thailand in the 1960s, it provides a crucial link between the keystone studies of the Phibun-Sarit years (1946–1963) and those examining the turbulent 1970s.
Author: Edward F. Murphy
Publisher: Presidio Press
ISBN: 0307417123
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 386
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Book Description
While the seventy-seven-day siege of Khe Sanh in early 1968 remains one of the most highly publicized clashes of the Vietnam War, scant attention has been paid to the first battle of Khe Sanh, also known as “the Hill Fights.” Although this harrowing combat in the spring of 1967 provided a grisly preview of the carnage to come at Khe Sanh, few are aware of the significance of the battles, or even their existence. For more than thirty years, virtually the only people who knew about the Hill Fights were the Marines who fought them. Now, for the first time, the full story has been pieced together by acclaimed Vietnam War historian Edward F. Murphy, whose definitive analysis admirably fills this significant gap in Vietnam War literature. Based on first-hand interviews and documentary research, Murphy’s deeply informed narrative history is the only complete account of the battles, their origins, and their aftermath. The Marines at the isolated Khe Sanh Combat Base were tasked with monitoring the strategically vital Ho Chi Minh trail as it wound through the jungles in nearby Laos. Dominated by high hills on all sides, the combat base had to be screened on foot by the Marine infantrymen while crack, battle-hardened NVA units roamed at will through the high grass and set up elaborate defenses on steep, sun-baked overlooks. Murphy traces the bitter account of the U.S. Marines at Khe Sanh from the outset in 1966, revealing misguided decisions and strategies from above, and capturing the chain of hill battles in stark detail. But the Marines themselves supply the real grist of the story; it is their recollections that vividly re-create the atmosphere of desperation, bravery, and relentless horror that characterized their combat. Often outnumbered and outgunned by a hidden enemy—and with buddies lying dead or wounded beside them—these brave young Americans fought on. The story of the Marines at Khe Sanh in early 1967 is a microcosm of the Corps’s entire Vietnam War and goes a long way toward explaining why their casualties in Vietnam exceeded, on a Marine-in-combat basis, even the tremendous losses the Leathernecks sustained during their ferocious Pacific island battles of World War II. The Hill Fights is a damning indictment of those responsible for the lives of these heroic Marines. Ultimately, the high command failed them, their tactics failed them, and their rifles failed them. Only the Marines themselves did not fail. Under fire, trapped in a hell of sudden death meted out by unseen enemies, they fought impossible odds with awesome courage and uncommon valor.
Author: Nick Turse
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0805086919
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 401
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Book Description
Based on classified documents and interviews, argues that American acts of violence against millions of Vietnamese civilians during the Vietnam War were a pervasive and systematic part of the war.
Author: Lt. General Ha Moore
Publisher: Presidio Press
ISBN: 0345472640
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 498
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Book Description
Each year, the Commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps selects one book that he believes is both relevant and timeless for reading by all Marines. The Commandant's choice for 1993 was We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young. In November 1965, some 450 men of the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry, under the command of Lt. Col. Hal Moore, were dropped by helicopter into a small clearing in the Ia Drang Valley. They were immediately surrounded by 2,000 North Vietnamese soldiers. Three days later, only two and a half miles away, a sister battalion was chopped to pieces. Together, these actions at the landing zones X-Ray and Albany constituted one of the most savage and significant battles of the Vietnam War. How these men persevered--sacrificed themselves for their comrades and never gave up--makes a vivid portrait of war at its most inspiring and devastating. General Moore and Joseph Galloway, the only journalist on the ground throughout the fighting, have interviewed hundreds of men who fought there, including the North Vietnamese commanders. This devastating account rises above the specific ordeal it chronicles to present a picture of men facing the ultimate challenge, dealing with it in ways they would have found unimaginable only a few hours earlier. It reveals to us, as rarely before, man's most heroic and horrendous endeavor.
Author: David Andrew Biggs
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295801549
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 322
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Book Description
Winner of the 2012 George Perkins Marsh Prize for Best Book in Environmental History In the twentieth century, the Mekong Delta has emerged as one of Vietnam’s most important economic regions. Its swamps, marshes, creeks, and canals have played a major role in Vietnam’s turbulent past, from the struggles of colonialism to the Cold War and the present day. Quagmire considers these struggles, their antecedents, and their legacies through the lens of environmental history. Beginning with the French conquest in the 1860s, colonial reclamation schemes and pacification efforts centered on the development of a dense network of new canals to open land for agriculture. These projects helped precipitate economic and environmental crises in the 1930s, and subsequent struggles after 1945 led to the balkanization of the delta into a patchwork of regions controlled by the Viet Minh, paramilitary religious sects, and the struggling Franco-Vietnamese government. After 1954, new settlements were built with American funds and equipment in a crash program intended to solve continuing economic and environmental problems. Finally, the American military collapse in Vietnam is revealed as not simply a failure of policy makers but also a failure to understand the historical, political, and environmental complexity of the spaces American troops attempted to occupy and control. By exploring the delta as a quagmire in both natural and political terms, Biggs shows how engineered transformations of the Mekong Delta landscape - channelized rivers, a complex canal system, hydropower development, deforestation - have interacted with equally complex transformations in the geopolitics of the region. Quagmire delves beyond common stereotypes to present an intricate, rich history that shows how closely political and ecological issues are intertwined in the human interactions with the water environment in the Mekong Delta. Watch the book trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gp1-UItZqsk
Author: Terry M Sater
Publisher: Independently Published
ISBN: 9781092364195
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 298
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Book Description
"The Nightmare of the Mekong" is a gritty account of the Vietnam War, from a sailor who manned automatic weapons in intense combat, on the rivers, streams and canals of the Mekong Delta. It is profoundly personal, with diary entries, and letters to and from home. It includes summaries of official "Operations Reports" and military historical records. The interwoven references to music and news of the day provides a vivid picture of the culture and politics of the times. It is a true story of love, family, war, life and death.Some of this story will bring a smile to your face and warm your heart. Much of it will surprise you. Some of it will give you nightmares.
Author: Milton E. Osborne
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : China
Languages : en
Pages : 276
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Book Description
Author: Ian Charles Campbell
Publisher: Academic Press
ISBN: 0080920632
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 647
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Book Description
The Mekong is the most controversial river in Southeast Asia, and increasingly the focus of international attention. It flows through 6 counties, China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Viet Nam. The 4 downstream countries have formed the Mekong River Commission to promote sustainable development of the river and many of their people depend on it for their subsistence ? it has possible the largest freshwater fishery in the world, and the Mekong waters support rice agriculture in the delta in Viet Nam (which produces about 40% of that country's food) as well as in Cambodia, Laos and Thailand. China is now building the first large mainstream dam on the river, and has proposals for several more. These dams are likely to affect the downstream countries. Several of the downstream countries also have plans for large scale hydropower and irrigation development which could also impact the river. This book will provide a solid overview of the biophysical environment of the Mekong together with a discussion of the possible impacts, biophysical, economic and social, of some possible development scenarios. It is intended to provide a technical basis which can inform the growing political and conservation debate about the future of the Mekong River, and those who depend on it. It is aimed at river ecologists, geographers, environmentalists and development specialists both in the basin and (especially) outside for whom access to this material is most difficult. This book will be the first comprehensive treatment of the Mekong system. The first comprehensive overview of all aspects of the Mekong River system Deals with a regionally critical ecosystem and one under threat The Mekong supports the world's largest freshwater fishery and provides water underpinning a major regional rice paddy system Presents the authoritative findings of the Mekong River Commission's research for a wider audience for the first time outside of limited distribution reports
