This is the personal account of an army infantry platoon leader and commanding officer in the central highlands of Vietnam during 1967 and 1968 when he was 21 years old. These were the two bloodiest years of the war, a time when the U.S. army employed search and destroy missions with high casualty rates. The author provides a historical overview and casualty report of the Vietnam War, 15 information about his military and officer training, and his return to civilian life after Vietnam.

Annotation At the pivotal battles of Twin Tunnels and Chipyong-ni in February 1951, U.N. forces met and contained large-scale attacks by Chinese forces. Col. Paul Freeman and the larger-than-life Col. Ralph Monclar led the American 23rd Infantry Regiment and the French Bataillon de Coree, respectively. In this careful consideration of combat leadership at all levels, Kenneth E. Hamburger details the actions of these units, offering stories of men sustaining themselves and one another to the limits of human endurance. He analyzes the roles that training, cohesion, morale, logistics, and leadership play in success or failure on the front lines, providing a well-organized discussion that is sure to become a classic in the field of leadership studies. Lt. Gen. Matthew Ridgway, Eighth Army commander, and Lt. Col. Ralph Monclar, the French Battalion commander, March 1951.

In 1967, the North Vietnamese launched a series of offensives in the Central Highlands along the border with South Vietnam--a strategic move intended to draw U.S. and South Vietnamese forces away from major cities before the Tet Offensive. A series of bloody engagements known as "the border battles" followed, with the principle action taking place at Dak To. Drawing on the writings of key figures, veterans' memoirs and the author's records from two tours in Vietnam, this book merges official history with the recollections of those who were there, revealing previously unpublished details of these decisive battles.

Although the Paris Peace Accords ended direct United States military involvement in Vietnam on January 27, 1973, the process of withdrawal lasted over three years. This illuminating volume chronicles this withdrawal, its background, and its impact through a combination of official history and first-person accounts from key players at every level. Brief historical narratives join recollections from U.S. servicemen and support staff, North and South Vietnamese soldiers, and such notable figures as Henry Kissinger, Alexander Haig and Richard Nixon to reveal the human story behind the history. A biographical dictionary summarizes the lives of important individuals, a glossary presents unusual terms and acronyms, and an appendix analyzes the war casualties under each U.S. president.

In 2014, the US marks the 50th anniversary of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, the basis for the Johnson administration’s escalation of American military involvement in Southeast Asia and war against North Vietnam. Vietnam War Slang outlines the context behind the slang used by members of the United States Armed Forces during the Vietnam War. Troops facing and inflicting death display a high degree of linguistic creativity. Vietnam was the last American war fought by an army with conscripts, and their involuntary participation in the war added a dimension to the language. War has always been an incubator for slang; it is brutal, and brutality demands a vocabulary to describe what we don’t encounter in peacetime civilian life. Furthermore, such language serves to create an intense bond between comrades in the armed forces, helping them to support the heavy burdens of war. The troops in Vietnam faced the usual demands of war, as well as several that were unique to Vietnam – a murky political basis for the war, widespread corruption in the ruling government, untraditional guerilla warfare, an unpredictable civilian population in Vietnam, and a growing lack of popular support for the war back in the US. For all these reasons, the language of those who fought in Vietnam was a vivid reflection of life in wartime. Vietnam War Slang lays out the definitive record of the lexicon of Americans who fought in the Vietnam War. Assuming no prior knowledge, it presents around 2000 headwords, with each entry divided into sections giving parts of speech, definitions, glosses, the countries of origin, dates of earliest known citations, and citations. It will be an essential resource for Vietnam veterans and their families, students and readers of history, and anyone interested in the principles underpinning the development of slang.

This sweeping history of twentieth-century America follows the changing and often conflicting ideas about the fundamental nature of American society: Is the United States a social melting pot, as our civic creed warrants, or is full citizenship somehow reserved for those who are white and of the "right" ancestry? Gary Gerstle traces the forces of civic and racial nationalism, arguing that both profoundly shaped our society. After Theodore Roosevelt led his Rough Riders to victory during the Spanish American War, he boasted of the diversity of his men's origins- from the Kentucky backwoods to the Irish, Italian, and Jewish neighborhoods of northeastern cities. Roosevelt’s vision of a hybrid and superior “American race,” strengthened by war, would inspire the social, diplomatic, and economic policies of American liberals for decades. And yet, for all of its appeal to the civic principles of inclusion, this liberal legacy was grounded in “Anglo-Saxon” culture, making it difficult in particular for Jews and Italians and especially for Asians and African Americans to gain acceptance. Gerstle weaves a compelling story of events, institutions, and ideas that played on perceptions of ethnic/racial difference, from the world wars and the labor movement to the New Deal and Hollywood to the Cold War and the civil rights movement. We witness the remnants of racial thinking among such liberals as FDR and LBJ; we see how Italians and Jews from Frank Capra to the creators of Superman perpetuated the New Deal philosophy while suppressing their own ethnicity; we feel the frustrations of African-American servicemen denied the opportunity to fight for their country and the moral outrage of more recent black activists, including Martin Luther King, Jr., Fannie Lou Hamer, and Malcolm X. Gerstle argues that the civil rights movement and Vietnam broke the liberal nation apart, and his analysis of this upheaval leads him to assess Reagan’s and Clinton’s attempts to resurrect nationalism. Can the United States ever live up to its civic creed? For anyone who views racism as an aberration from the liberal premises of the republic, this book is must reading. Containing a new chapter that reconstructs and dissects the major struggles over race and nation in an era defined by the War on Terror and by the presidency of Barack Obama, American Crucible is a must-read for anyone who views racism as an aberration from the liberal premises of the republic.

This bibliography is a listing of selected, unclassified government and commercially produced motion picture films, videotapes and related audiovisual materials that support the teaching of American military history. It is designed to serve as a resource tool to assist instructors within the TRADOC Military History Education Program. Partial contents: General Military history; Military technology; Military Commanders and personalities; Unit histories; Colonial America to 1861; Civil War and Spanish-American War; World War I and between the wars; World War II; Korean War and the Cold war; Vietnam War to the Present; Hollywood Films.

Late in 1967, American officials and military officers pushed an optimistic view of the Vietnam War. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) said that the war was being won, and that Communist strength in South Vietnam was declining. Then came the Tet Offensive of 1968. In its broadest and simplest outline, the conventional wisdom about the offensive—that it was a military defeat for the Communists but a political victory for them, because it undermined support for the war in the United States—is correct. But much that has been written about the Tet Offensive has been misleading. Edwin Moïse shows that the Communist campaign shocked the American public not because the American media exaggerated its success, but because it was a bigger campaign—larger in scale, much longer in duration, and resulting in more American casualties—than most authors have acknowledged. MACV, led by General William Westmoreland, issued regular estimates of enemy strength in South Vietnam. During 1967, intelligence officers at MACV were increasingly required to issue low estimates to show that the war was being won. Their underestimation of enemy strength was most extreme in January 1968, just before the Tet Offensive. The weak Communist force depicted in MACV estimates would not have been capable of sustaining heavy combat month after month like they did in 1968. Moïse also explores the errors of the Communists, using Vietnamese sources. The first wave of Communist attacks, at the end of January 1968, showed gross failures of coordination. Communist policy throughout 1968 and into 1969 was wildly overoptimistic, setting impossible goals for their forces. While acknowledging the journalists and historians who have correctly reported various parts of the story, Moïse points out widespread misunderstandings in regard to the strength of Communist forces in Vietnam, the disputes among American intelligence agencies over estimates of enemy strength, the actual pattern of combat in 1968, the effects of Tet on American policy, and the American media’s coverage of all these issues.