Author: Christine & Mark Purdy
Publisher: AuthorHouse
ISBN: 1452072078
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 142
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Book Description
The book was written to give the forgotten River Rats a voice. They played such an important role during the entire US involvement in Vietnam. We hope this book gives not only the returning Rats some pease, but also the loved ones of those who didn't.
Author: Ralph Christopher
Publisher: AuthorHouse
ISBN: 146348853X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 292
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Book Description
The United States Navys fight for control of the waters of Southeast Asia. By far the greatest contribution of the narrative is the insight it provides into the hows and whys of United States involvement in Vietnam, and the attempt of that involvement to bring freedom to those who were unable to achieve it by their own efforts. We see the United States more as a caretaker and less as a policeman in terms of motivation for its involvement half a world away. Andwe see the tremendous price paid by those who served to ensure that freedom ordinary men who, by fate, were thrown together in a strange land, and who fulfilled a part of their destiny, and their Nations, on the brown water. Weldon Bleiler
Author: MaeRinda Heslop
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Fighter pilots
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Author: Macon Fry
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496833090
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 230
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Book Description
They Called Us River Rats: The Last Batture Settlement of New Orleans is the previously untold story of perhaps the oldest outsider settlement in America, an invisible community on the annually flooded shores of the Mississippi River. This community exists in the place between the normal high and low water line of the Mississippi River, a zone known in Louisiana as the batture. For the better part of two centuries, batture dwellers such as Macon Fry have raised shantyboats on stilts, built water-adapted homes, foraged, fished, and survived using the skills a river teaches. Until now the stories of this way of life have existed only in the memories of those who have lived here. Beginning in 2000, Fry set about recording the stories of all the old batture dwellers he could find: maritime workers, willow furniture makers, fishermen, artists, and river shrimpers. Along the way, Fry uncovered fascinating tales of fortune tellers, faith healers, and wild bird trappers who defiantly lived on the river. They Called Us River Rats also explores the troubled relationship between people inside the levees, the often-reviled batture folks, and the river itself. It traces the struggle between batture folks and city authorities, the commercial interests that claimed the river, and Louisiana’s most powerful politicians. These conflicts have ended in legal battles, displacement, incarceration, and even lynching. Today Fry is among the senior generation of “River Rats” living in a vestigial colony of twelve “camps” on New Orleans’s river batture, a fragment of a settlement that once stretched nearly six miles and numbered hundreds of homes. It is the last riparian settlement on the Lower Mississippi and a contrarian, independent life outside urban zoning, planning, and flood protection. This book is for everyone who ever felt the pull of the Mississippi River or saw its towering levees and wondered who could live on the other side.
Author:
Publisher: Turner Publishing Company
ISBN: 1563110326
Category : Fighter pilots
Languages : en
Pages : 162
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Book Description
Author: Jack Flowers
Publisher: Page Publishing Inc
ISBN: 1642141992
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 436
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Book Description
Based on a true story, Rat Six tells the story of Clifford Price who, like hundreds of thousands of other young men in the 1960s, was drafted into the United States Army and served in Vietnam. Price was from Indiana, where he was a college student who had recently returned from a year studying abroad in Denmark. He came from a long line of soldiers; his two grandfathers served in the First World War and his father in the Second. Vietnam proved to be his turn to fight. Little did he know that his war would not only be a conflict on the battlefield, but a conflict in his mind. Torn between his anti-war sentiments, which had been reinforced by his year abroad and the proud heritage of his forefathers, Price had to choose between right and wrong, survival and death, love and war. Having been a commissioned officer in the Army Corps of Engineers shortly after being drafted and selected for Officer's Candidate School, Price ended up in Vietnam in 1968. After three months of commanding a platoon of bridge builders, mine sweepers, and truck drivers, Price was offered the job of Rat Six, one of the most dangerous assignments in the war. Rat Six was the code name for the leader of the First Infantry Division Tunnel Rats. The Tunnel Rats were some of the most courageous soldiers to fight in Vietnam. All were volunteers, slightly built, cunning, rebellious, trained in demolitions, and dedicated to ferreting out the enemy below. In the beginning of the war, entering a tunnel with only a flashlight and a pistol was almost suicidal. Over time, the Army learned to successfully navigate the underground labyrinths, retrieve vital intelligence, and destroy the tunnels. The most organized of the Tunnel Rat teams in Vietnam was that of the First Infantry Division's First Engineer Battalion. The team was led almost from the beginning by Sergeant Robert Bateman, a crusty, hard-nosed non-commissioned officer from New Jersey. He was dubbed "Batman" by his men and his reputation spread far and wide. He became even more famous among the enemy, of whom he had killed many, than among other warriors in the Army. "Batman" was on the Viet Cong's "10 Most Wanted List," which included the most prominent generals and not one other non-commissioned officer. Lieutenant Price was put in charge of the team and the conflict with Batman was immediate. Although there was no rank underground, Rat Six and Batman slowly built a mutual trust and the team's exploits and reputation grew even more. Harrowing missions and close calls engulfed the two men and their team. The tunnels were the setting and the enemy inside was just as fearsome as the men who pursued them. After four months of working together, Batman was sent home after his fourth reenlistment for Vietnam was denied. Suddenly Price was alone and vulnerable. The fear became insurmountable, climaxing on his last mission. Rat Six tells one of the most important yet little known stories of Lieutenant Clifford Price and his men. They were known as the Tunnel Rats, and their courageous exploits during the war in Vietnam are breathtaking and extraordinary.
Author: Wynn Goldsmith
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780804119214
Category : Mekong River Delta (Vietnam and Cambodia)
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
The author takes a unique look at the rarely chronicled exploits of the U.S. Navy's "river rats" who engaged in some of the Vietnam War's most intense combat in the Mekong Delta in 1967. photo insert.
Author: Hollis C. Powell
Publisher: Exposition Pressof Florida
ISBN: 9780682498913
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 218
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Book Description
Author: Ronald L. McAbee
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781885354105
Category : Indochinese War, 1946-1954
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
BROWN WATER NAVY is the thrilling day-to-day life of a young seaman fighting for survival on the war torn, deadly canals and rivers of Vietnam as a "River Rat" with the U.S. Navy's Mobile Riverine Force. Seaman Ron McAbee, a Monitor 20mm gunner with the 92nd River Assault Division, tells his story in a down to earth memoir of what it was like to be on a moving target going eye-to-eye with VC Forces doing their level best to destroy his Monitor as VC Forces attempted to deny the Delta and IV Corps to US and South Vietnam Forces. BROWN WATER NAVY may very well become one of the epic stories of U.S. Naval Operations during the Vietnam War. 208 pages, 49 photos and illustrations.
Author: Bob Johnston
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781424131747
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 196
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Book Description
The bad guys always fired first. This is the story of a small naval river group, attached to NSA Da Nang, simply known as River Rats, which has no real written history in the annals of the Vietnam War. The author, a young volunteer, paints a vivid picture of life and death while serving on the rivers in the northern-most province in South Vietnam. He ran medium-sized cargo boats on costal operations, often living for months on the rivers where he worked. From the beginning, in fall of 1965, until well after the 1968 Tet Offensive, he found himself on every river in I-Corps. Growing up fast, at the age of twenty, he was already the craft commander of a sixty-ton landing craft. He was responsible for his crew and the boat while feeling like a target in a shooting galleryalmost every day, on a shallow brown river. He would wake up each day to wonder if this would be the last day of his life.
