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.

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.

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.

Employing a narrative approach that uncovers the tangled and often confusing nature of foreign affairs, Crucible of Power focuses on the personalities, security interests, and post-war/Cold War tendencies behind the formulation and implementation of U.S. foreign policy since 1945. The book includes updated coverage of the Bush administration's foreign policy, with particular emphasis on the Middle East. Selections from key foreign policy documents appear in each chapter.

Margaret Chase Smith was the first woman in American history elected in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, the first politician to take a public stand against McCarthyism, and the first woman of a major political party to run for president of the United States. An American Stand: Senator Margaret Chase Smith and the Communist Menace, 1948-1972 explores her engagement with the 'masculine' issue of national defense. An unyielding foe of global communism, this Republican senator was the first female Cold Warrior. During the Korean War, she voiced strident anti-communist rhetoric in her newspaper column. Her energetic support for nuclear superiority in the fifties and sixties caused Nikita Khrushchev to describe her as 'Satan in the guise of a woman.' In the face of growing opposition to America's involvement in Vietnam, Smith remained committed to a clear stand against violent communist expansion. This book examines the exposition of the communist 'menace' and the Cold War as a fight between good and evil without sanitization of communist leaders' ruthless actions. For Smith and many others, America's fight against global communism, despite appalling sacrifices of lives and money, made sense because they believed that communism was a vicious, expansionist system with little respect for human life and freedom.

A sobering account of how the United States trapped itself in endless wars—abroad and at home—and what it might do to break free. Over the past half-century, Americans have watched their country extend its military power to what seemed the very ends of the earth. America’s might is felt on nearly every continent—and even on its own streets. Decades ago, the Wars on Drugs and Terror broke down the walls separating law enforcement from military operations. A World of Enemies tells the story of how an America plagued by fears of waning power and influence embraced foreign and domestic forever wars. Osamah Khalil argues that the militarization of US domestic and foreign affairs was the product of America’s failure in Vietnam. Unsettled by their inability to prevail in Southeast Asia, US leaders increasingly came to see a host of problems as immune to political solutions. Rather, crime, drugs, and terrorism were enemies spawned in “badlands”—whether the Middle East or stateside inner cities. Characterized as sites of endemic violence, badlands lay beyond the pale of civilization, their ostensibly racially and culturally alien inhabitants best handled by force. Yet militarized policy has brought few victories. Its failures—in Iraq, Afghanistan, US cities, and increasingly rural and borderland America—have only served to reinforce fears of weakness. It is time, Khalil argues, for a new approach. Instead of managing never-ending conflicts, we need to reinvest in the tools of traditional politics and diplomacy.

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.

The Vietnam War—a conflict defined by an ever-evolving mixture of conventional and guerrilla warfare and mass politics—has often been called a “war without fronts.” In fact, Vietnam had a multitude of fronts, as insurgents and counterinsurgents wrestled for control throughout 44 provinces, 250 districts, and more than 11,000 hamlets. In The Control War, Martin G. Clemis focuses on South Vietnam, where a highly complex politico-military struggle fragmented the battlefield along countless divergent points of conflict as both sides sought spatial and political hegemony. Complicating the conventional view that the Vietnam War was about winning “hearts and minds,” Clemis argues that both sides were more interested in asserting control over the people—and resources—of the countryside. As in other revolutionary civil conflicts, the key to winning political power in South Vietnam was to control the physical world of territory, population, and resources, as well as the ideational world of political organization and long-term legitimacy. Despite their countervailing purposes, both insurgency and pacification provided the means to exert this control. Proponents of each approach pursued the same goals, relying on a blend of military force, political violence, and socioeconomic policy to achieve them. Revealing the unique spatiality of the Vietnam War, The Control War analyzes the ways that both sides of the conflict conceptualized and used geography and the environment to serve strategic, tactical, and political ends. Clemis shows us that the operational environment of Vietnam, both natural and human-made, was far more than a backdrop to two decades of war.

A trenchant and haunting account of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and its aftermath.