“The diversity of voices and songs reminds us that the home front and the battlefront are always connected and that music and war are deeply intertwined.” —Heather Marie Stur, author of 21 Days to Baghdad For a Kentucky rifleman who spent his tour trudging through Vietnam’s Central Highlands, it was Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’.” For a black marine distraught over the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., it was Aretha Franklin’s “Chain of Fools.” And for countless other Vietnam vets, it was “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die” or the song that gives this book its title. In We Gotta Get Out of This Place, Doug Bradley and Craig Werner place popular music at the heart of the American experience in Vietnam. They explore how and why U.S. troops turned to music as a way of connecting to each other and the World back home and of coping with the complexities of the war they had been sent to fight. They also demonstrate that music was important for every group of Vietnam veterans—black and white, Latino and Native American, men and women, officers and “grunts”—whose personal reflections drive the book’s narrative. Many of the voices are those of ordinary soldiers, airmen, seamen, and marines. But there are also “solo” pieces by veterans whose writings have shaped our understanding of the war—Karl Marlantes, Alfredo Vea, Yusef Komunyakaa, Bill Ehrhart, Arthur Flowers—as well as songwriters and performers whose music influenced soldiers’ lives, including Eric Burdon, James Brown, Bruce Springsteen, Country Joe McDonald, and John Fogerty. Together their testimony taps into memories—individual and cultural—that capture a central if often overlooked component of the American war in Vietnam.

Through the voices of senior officials, teachers, soldiers, journalists, and artists, The Republic of Vietnam, 1955–1975, presents us with an interpretation of "South Vietnam" as a passionately imagined nation in the minds of ordinary Vietnamese, rather than merely as an expeditious political construct of the United States government. The moving and honest memoirs collected, translated, and edited here by Tuong Vu and Sean Fear describe the experiences of war, politics, and everyday life for people from many walks of life during the fraught years of Vietnam's Second Republic, leading up to and encompassing what Americans generally call the "Vietnam War." The voices gift the reader a sense of the authors' experiences in the Republic and their ideas about the nation during that time. The light and careful editing hand of Vu and Fear reveals that far from a Cold War proxy struggle, the conflict in Vietnam featured a true ideological divide between the communist North and the non-communist South.

From 1965 to 1973, the United States sent troops to South Vietnam to assist in its war against the Communist regime of North Vietnam. In the end, the North was victorious, and Vietnam was reunited under Communist rule. This resource provides an overview of Vietnam’s history, a chronicle of the war itself, and profiles of people who played instrumental roles in and leading up to this long and bitter conflict—political and military leaders from North Vietnam, South Vietnam, and the United States, as well as some notable figures from the American antiwar movement.

An original and groundbreaking examination of the psychological devastation of war through the lens of Homer’s Iliad in this “compassionate book [that] deserves a place in the lasting literature of the Vietnam War” (The New York Times). In this moving and dazzlingly creative book, Dr. Jonathan Shay examines the psychological devastation of war by comparing the soldiers of Homer’s Iliad with Vietnam veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. A classic of war literature that has as much relevance as ever in the wake of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Achilles in Vietnam is a “transcendent literary adventure” (The New York Times) and “clearly one of the most original and most important scholarly works to have emerged from the Vietnam War” (Tim O’Brien, author of The Things They Carried). As a Veterans Affairs psychiatrist, Shay encountered devastating stories of unhealed PTSD and uncovered the painful paradox—that fighting for one’s country can render one unfit to be a citizen. With a sensitive and compassionate examination of the battles many Vietnam veterans continue to fight, Shay offers readers a greater understanding of PTSD and how to alleviate the potential suffering of soldiers. Although the Iliad was written twenty-seven centuries ago, Shay shows how it has much to teach about combat trauma, as do the more recent, compelling voices and experiences of Vietnam vets. A groundbreaking and provocative monograph, Achilles in Vietnam takes readers on a literary journey that demonstrates how we can learn how war damages the mind and spirit, and work to change those things in our culture that so that we don’t continue repeating the same mistakes.

A “masterful . . . brilliantly constructed novel” of love and chaos in 1950s Vietnam (Zadie Smith, The Guardian). It’s 1955 and British journalist Thomas Fowler has been in Vietnam for two years covering the insurgency against French colonial rule. But it’s not just a political tangle that’s kept him tethered to the country. There’s also his lover, Phuong, a young Vietnamese woman who clings to Fowler for protection. Then comes Alden Pyle, an idealistic American working in service of the CIA. Devotedly, disastrously patriotic, he believes neither communism nor colonialism is what’s best for Southeast Asia, but rather a “Third Force”: American democracy by any means necessary. His ideas of conquest include Phuong, to whom he promises a sweet life in the states. But as Pyle’s blind moral conviction wreaks havoc upon innocent lives, it’s ultimately his romantic compulsions that will play a role in his own undoing. Although criticized upon publication as anti-American, Graham Greene’s “complex but compelling story of intrigue and counter-intrigue” would, in a few short years, prove prescient in its own condemnation of American interventionism (The New York Times).

“It is impossible to walk away from this novel without being sharply reminded of the fact that Norman Mailer is a writer of extraordinary ability.”—Chicago Tribune Featuring a new foreword by Mailer scholar Maggie McKinley Published nearly twenty years after Norman Mailer’s fiction debut, The Naked and the Dead, this acclaimed novel further solidified the author’s stature as one of the most important figures in contemporary American literature. Ranald “D. J.” Jethroe, Texas’s most precocious teenager, recounts a brutal hunting trip he took to Alaska—in a story of fathers and sons, myth and masculinity, character and corruption. Both entertaining and profound, Why Are We in Vietnam? is an exceptional, timeless work awaiting discovery by a new generation of readers. Praise for Why Are We in Vietnam? “A book of great integrity. All the old qualities are here: Mailer’s remarkable feeling for the sensory event, the detail, ‘the way it was,’ his power and energy.”—The New York Review of Books “A tour de force, a treatise on human nature.”—The Dallas Morning News “A brilliant piece of writing.”—Newsweek “Original, courageous, and provocative.”—The New York Times

No single event since World War II has marked this country s foreign policy and national image as deeply as did the war in Vietnam. Vietnam and America is a complete history of the war, as documented in essays by leading experts and in original source material. With generous selections from the documentary records, the book dispels distortions and illuminates in depth the many facets of the war, from Vietnam s history before the war, to Washington s insider policy making, to troop perspectives, to the impact back on the home front. In essays introducing each major stage of the war, the editors elucidate the issues, foreign policy choices, and consequences of U.S. involvement. Substantial headnotes put each document in historical perspective. This comprehensive anthology is an invaluable reference for anyone who wants to understand the Vietnam War."

#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER. The definitive insider's account of American policy making in Vietnam. "Can anyone remember a public official with the courage to confess error and explain where he and his country went wrong? This is what Robert McNamara does in this brave, honest, honorable, and altogether compelling book."—Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Written twenty years after the end of the Vietnam War, former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's controversial memoir answers the lingering questions that surround this disastrous episode in American history. With unprecedented candor and drawing on a wealth of newly declassified documents, McNamara reveals the fatal misassumptions behind our involvement in Vietnam. Keenly observed and dramatically written, In Retrospect possesses the urgency and poignancy that mark the very best histories—and the unsparing candor that is the trademark of the greatest personal memoirs. Includes a preface written by McNamara for the paperback edition.

On November 8, 1985, 18-year-old Tom Odle brutally murdered his parents and three siblings in the small southern Illinois town of Mount Vernon, sending shockwaves throughout the nation. The murder of the Odle family remains one of the most horrific family mass murders in U.S. history. Odle was sentenced to death and, after seventeen years on death row, expected a lethal injection to end his life. However, Illinois governor George Ryan’s moratorium on the death penalty in 2000, and later commutation of all death sentences in 2003, changed Odle’s sentence to natural life. The commutation of his death sentence was an epiphany for Odle. Prior to the commutation of his death sentence, Odle lived in denial, repressing any feelings about his family and his horrible crime. Following the commutation and the removal of the weight of eventual execution associated with his death sentence, he was confronted with an unfamiliar reality. A future. As a result, he realized that he needed to understand why he murdered his family. He reached out to Dr. Robert Hanlon, a neuropsychologist who had examined him in the past. Dr. Hanlon engaged Odle in a therapeutic process of introspection and self-reflection, which became the basis of their collaboration on this book. Hanlon tells a gripping story of Odle’s life as an abused child, the life experiences that formed his personality, and his tragic homicidal escalation to mass murder, seamlessly weaving into the narrative Odle’s unadorned reflections of his childhood, finding a new family on death row, and his belief in the powers of redemption. As our nation attempts to understand the continual mass murders occurring in the U.S., Survived by One sheds some light on the psychological aspects of why and how such acts of extreme carnage may occur. However, Survived by One offers a never-been-told perspective from the mass murderer himself, as he searches for the answers concurrently being asked by the nation and the world.