Download or read book The Village written by Bing West and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2003-02-11 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The true story of seventeen months in the life of a Vietnamese village where a handful of American Marines and Vietnamese militia lived and died together attempting to defend it. In Black Hawk Down, the fight went on for a day. In We Were Soldiers Once & Young, the fighting lasted three days. In The Village, one Marine squad fought for 495 days—half of them died. Few American battles have been so extended, savage and personal. A handful of Americans volunteered to live among six thousand Vietnamese, training farmers to defend their village. Such “Combined Action Platoons” (CAPs) are now a lost footnote about how the war could have been fought; only the villagers remain to bear witness. This is the story of fifteen resolute young Americans matched against two hundred Viet Cong; how a CAP lived, fought and died. And why the villagers remember them to this day.
Download or read book War in the Villages written by Ted N. Easterling and published by University of North Texas Press. This book was released on 2021-03-15 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Much of the history written about the Vietnam War overlooks the U.S. Marine Corps Combined Action Platoons. These CAPs lived in the Vietnamese villages, with the difficult and dangerous mission of defending the villages from both the National Liberation Front guerrillas and the soldiers of the North Vietnamese Army. The CAPs also worked to improve living conditions by helping the people with projects, such as building schools, bridges, and irrigation systems for their fields. In War in the Villages, Ted Easterling examines how well the CAPs performed as a counterinsurgency method, how the Marines adjusted to life in the Vietnamese villages, and how they worked to accomplish their mission. The CAPs generally performed their counterinsurgency role well, but they were hampered by factors beyond their control. Most important was the conflict between the Army and the Marine Corps over an appropriate strategy for the Vietnam War, along with weakness of the government of the Republic of South Vietnam and the strategic and the tactical ability of the North Vietnamese Army. War in the Villages helps to explain how and why this potential was realized and squandered. Marines who served in the CAPs served honorably in difficult circumstances. Most of these Marines believed they were helping the people of South Vietnam, and they served superbly. The failure to end the war more favorably was no fault of theirs.
Download or read book Revolution in the Village written by Hy Van Luong and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 1992-04-01 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "One of the most significant efforts to result thus far from the improvement in scholarly access [to North Vietnam].... Combining life history interviewing with archival research in Vietnam, Canada, and France, the book focuses on the village sociocultural system's encounter with Western colonialism, capitalism, and socialist revolution." --Journal of Asian Studies
Download or read book Beyond Hanoi written by Benedict J Tria Kerkvliet and published by Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. This book was released on 2004 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book in English to examine local government and authority in Vietnam since the country's reunification in 1975. Six chapters emphasize particular villages and districts in different parts of the country, one examines a ward in Hanoi, another focuses on Ho Chi Minh City, and one compares leaders in several provinces. To contextualize conditions today, two chapters analyse local government in Vietnam's long history. The opening chapter synthesizes the findings in this book with those in other studies by researchers inside and outside Vietnam.
Download or read book Village at War written by H. H. the H.H. the Dalai Lama (Special Foreword) and published by . This book was released on 2019-10-08 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: VILLAGE AT WAR: AN ACCOUNT OF CONFLICT IN VIETNAM WITH A SPECIAL FOREWORD BY H.H. THE 14TH DALAI LAMA OF TIBET First published in 1980, this is a classic account of decades of warfare in Vietnam, seen through the eyes of the people in a large central Vietnamese village. This EXPANDED and UPDATED Third Edition also includes forewords to previous editions by Cornell Professor George McT. Kahin and U.S. Senator Eugene J. McCarthy. This is the real-life drama of a Vietnamese village as related by the villagers themselves to the young American who came to live nearby and stayed almost until the collapse of the Saigon government in 1975. We hear from a wide range of Vietnamese, and we gain an understanding of the trauma, confusion, and cruelty of war. With 32 photographs, many of which appear publicly here for the first time. Comments on the Book: "A different kind of story about Vietnam emerges in Village at War." - The New York Times "The Vietnam War, as seen through the eyes of the Vietnamese, is a haunting and absorbing saga." - The Asia Mail "Village at War is a superb and unique contribution to the literature on the Vietnam conflict. Trullinger is remarkably successful at combining an intensive case study of one Vietnamese village with the larger picture of modern Vietnamese political history from French colonialism through the Communist victory in 1975. It is truly an example of scholarship that makes history and politics come alive." - William A. Joseph, Wellesley College "I'm a big admirer of Village at War." - Fredrik Logevall, Harvard University "Thank you very much...for your important book Village at War." - King Norodom Sihanouk, Cambodia "This is a detailed description of how war and revolution swept up a single village in central Vietnam. Trullinger's purpose is to present the conflict 'primarily as villagers experienced it - not to turn My Thuy Phuong into a testing ground for theories and strategies.'... It is successful in describing how one village survived Vietnam's passage from colonialism to independence and socialism." - Journal of Asian Studies "...a well-rounded account of the political and military struggle that engulfed Vietnamese society for 30 years." - Choice "I have used this book in teaching the Vietnam War (as an incident in the history and culture of Vietnam, rather than as U.S. policy) since it was first published (1980). It gives a wonderful level of detail, insights into local community and into actual human beings which gives the study of the war a new dimension. Vietnamese often say something like, 'Vietnam was not a war, it is a country.' This book, coupled with Jeffrey Race's 'War Comes to Long An, Revolutionary Conflict in a Vietnamese Province, ' which is written from a very different political perspective, offers insights into the war that can be gotten no place else. While it is basically an anthropological study and most useful for serious study of the war, it is also very readable." - Jeffrey Barlow, Pacific University (Google Books review) About the Author, Jim Trullinger, Ph.D.: With USAID in Vietnam from 1969-1972. Returned to Vietnam in 1974 to conduct research for this book, sponsored by the East-West Center and the University of Hawaii. In recent decades, Trullinger worked at several large corporations in the U.S. and ran his own market research firm. Now enjoying life in Naples, Florida, at peace with the cosmos. Very pleased to have collaborated on this book with his hero the Dalai Lama. His Holiness' contribution elevates the book in this time of divisions, suffering, and violence. May the book's account of senseless fighting and destruction in one Vietnamese village inspire readers to a path of compassion a
Download or read book Discovering Craft Villages in Vietnam written by Sylvie Fanchette and published by IRD Éditions. This book was released on 2018-11-19 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With their festivals and traditional industries, their commun halls, pagodas, temples, and vernacular buildings, the villages around Hà Nội possess a rich body of cultural, architectural and craft heritage. Less than one hour from the capital are over 500 specialist craft villages, producing an array of religious or artistic objects, as well as food products, industrial goods, textiles, basketware and much more. Despite the trials and tribulations Vietnam has endured, these traditions have remained alive; today they constitute the basis of material, social and spiritual culture among the village communities of the Red River delta. The artisans themselves, and their local institutions, see cultural tourism as a way of further improving the fortunes of the craft village communities and bringing their heritage to wider attention. Until recently, few guides or tourists had forayed into these settlements, some of which are lost in the maze of routes and tracks that criss-cross the rice paddies of the Hà Nội hinterland. The history and skills they harbour have been inaccessible to all but a few specialists. Few of the villages are signposted, yet between them they are home to three quarters of the architectural, religious and craft heritage of the upper delta. This book, the fruit of several years' research by specialists working in northern Vietnam, comprises ten itineraries, blending potted histories, legends, descriptions of craft techniques, signposted walks and maps, designed to introduce travellers and lovers of Vietnamese culture to forty or so villages around Hà Nội. Many of us have seen their wares on sale in shops in and around the 36 streets of Hà Nội Old Quarter or in other cities in West. This book is about the true lives and enduring skills of the nameless artisans who made them.
Download or read book Kill Anything That Moves written by Nick Turse and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2013-01-15 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Waging Peace in Vietnam written by Ron Carver and published by New Village Press. This book was released on 2019-09-10 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How American soldiers opposed and resisted the war in Vietnam While mainstream narratives of the Vietnam War all but marginalize anti-war activity of soldiers, opposition and resistance from within the three branches of the military made a real difference to the course of America’s engagement in Vietnam. By 1968, every major peace march in the United States was led by active duty GIs and Vietnam War veterans. By 1970, thousands of active duty soldiers and marines were marching in protest in US cities. Hundreds of soldiers and marines in Vietnam were refusing to fight; tens of thousands were deserting to Canada, France and Sweden. Eventually the US Armed Forces were no longer able to sustain large-scale offensive operations and ceased to be effective. Yet this history is largely unknown and has been glossed over in much of the written and visual remembrances produced in recent years. Waging Peace in Vietnam shows how the GI movement unfolded, from the numerous anti-war coffee houses springing up outside military bases, to the hundreds of GI newspapers giving an independent voice to active soldiers, to the stockade revolts and the strikes and near-mutinies on naval vessels and in the air force. The book presents first-hand accounts, oral histories, and a wealth of underground newspapers, posters, flyers, and photographs documenting the actions of GIs and veterans who took part in the resistance. In addition, the book features fourteen original essays by leading scholars and activists. Notable contributors include Vietnam War scholar and author, Christian Appy, and Mme Nguyen Thi Binh, who played a major role in the Paris Peace Accord. The book originates from the exhibition Waging Peace, which has been shown in Vietnam and the University of Notre Dame, and will be touring the eastern United States in conjunction with book launches in Boston, Amherst, and New York.
Download or read book My Lai written by William Thomas Allison and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2012-10 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Allison tells the story of a terrible moment in American history and explores how to deal with the aftermath. On March 16, 1968, American soldiers killed as many as five hundred Vietnamese men, women, and children in a village near the South China Sea. In My Lai William Thomas Allison explores and evaluates the significance of this horrific event. How could such a thing have happened? Who (or what) should be held accountable? How do we remember this atrocity and try to apply its lessons, if any? My Lai has fixed the attention of Americans of various political stripes for more than forty years. The breadth of writing on the massacre, from news reports to scholarly accounts, highlights the difficulty of establishing fact and motive in an incident during which confusion, prejudice, and self-preservation overwhelmed the troops. Son of a Marine veteran of the Vietnam War—and aware that the generation who lived through the incident is aging—Allison seeks to ensure that our collective memory of this shameful episode does not fade. Well written and accessible, Allison’s book provides a clear narrative of this historic moment and offers suggestions for how to come to terms with its aftermath.
Download or read book My Lai written by Howard Jones and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 536 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A trenchant and haunting account of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and its aftermath.
Download or read book Silence was a Weapon written by Stuart A. Herrington and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 1987 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For two years, U.S. Intelligence advisor Stuart Herrington's job was to root out the Viet Cong from the villages of rural Hau Nghia province. Here is a riveting account of what he remembers of that reality.
Download or read book Four Hours in My Lai written by Michael Bilton and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1993-03-01 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Uncovering the secrets behind the 1968 My Lai massacre in Vietnam, this is "a brutal, cautionary tale that serves as a painful reminder of the worst that can happen in war."—Chicago Tribune.
Download or read book To Build as Well as Destroy written by Andrew J. Gawthorpe and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-12-15 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For years, the so-called better-war school of thought has argued that the United States built a legitimate and viable non-Communist state in South Vietnam in the latter years of the Vietnam War and that it was only the military abandonment of this state that brought down the Republic of Vietnam. But Andrew J. Gawthorpe, through a detailed and incisive analysis, shows that, in fact, the United States failed in its efforts at nation building and had not established a durable state in South Vietnam. Drawing on newly opened archival collections and previously unexamined oral histories with dozens of U.S. military officers and government officials, To Build as Well as Destroy demonstrates that the United States never came close to achieving victory in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Gawthorpe tells a story of policy aspirations and practical failures that stretches from Washington, D.C., to the Vietnamese villages in which the United States implemented its nationbuilding strategy through the Office of Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support known as CORDS. Structural factors that could not have been overcome by the further application of military power thwarted U.S. efforts to build a viable set of non-Communist political, economic, and social institutions in South Vietnam. To Build as Well as Destroy provides the most comprehensive account yet of the largest and best-resourced nation-building program in U.S. history. Gawthorpe's analysis helps contemporary policy makers, diplomats, and military officers understand the reasons for this failure. At a moment in time when American strategists are grappling with military and political challenges in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, revisiting the historical lessons of Vietnam is a worthy endeavor.
Download or read book Footprints of War written by David Andrew Biggs and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2018-10-08 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When American forces arrived in Vietnam, they found themselves embedded in historic village and frontier spaces already shaped by many past conflicts. American bases and bombing targets followed spatial and political logics influenced by the footprints of past wars in central Vietnam. The militarized landscapes here, like many in the world�s historic conflict zones, continue to shape post-war land-use politics. Footprints of War traces the long history of conflict-produced spaces in Vietnam, beginning with early modern wars and the French colonial invasion in 1885 and continuing through the collapse of the Saigon government in 1975. The result is a richly textured history of militarized landscapes that reveals the spatial logic of key battles such as the Tet Offensive. Drawing on extensive archival work and years of interviews and fieldwork in the hills and villages around the city of Hue to illuminate war�s footprints, David Biggs also integrates historical Geographic Information Systems (GIS) data, using aerial, high-altitude, and satellite imagery to render otherwise placeless sites into living, multidimensional spaces. This personal and multilayered approach yields an innovative history of the lasting traces of war in Vietnam and a model for understanding other militarized landscapes.
Download or read book The Village of Ben Suc written by Jonathan Schell and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2024-11-26 with total page 113 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With a new introduction by Wallace Shawn, a classic work of war reportage that describes, with unblinking vision, the systematic leveling of a Vietnamese village by American troops. In January 1967, as President Lyndon Johnson sent more forces to the war in Vietnam, the US military began what was to be the largest ground operation of the entire conflict. Not far from Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, and close to the Cambodian border was an area known as the Iron Triangle, long under Viet Cong control. Operation Cedar Falls set out to eliminate that guerrilla threat by sealing off the region, emptying its villages, and leveling the surrounding jungle. The local population would be transferred to model "New Life Villages" under US surveillance. The village of Ben Suc was the Americans' first target, and Jonathan Schell, a reporter at the start of his career, accompanied them there. He witnessed the destruction of the village; the frantic efforts of young soldiers to figure out who was or wasn't a foe; the destruction of people's homes and possessions; and the chaotic transfer of women, children, old men, and livestock to a refugee camp where no preparations had been made for their arrival. He described it all in measured tones and unflinching detail. As a cautionary tale about the unintended and devastating consequences of military occupation, The Village of Ben Suc remains unequaled. "Schell's book might have been the crystal ball that could have led American policymakers to realize that quasi-imperial American interventions of this type could not succeed in the contemporary world, and if the policymakers had read Schell's book and studied it carefully, who knows, maybe a million or more Vietnamese lives could have been saved, along with the lives of fifty thousand American soldiers, along with countless lives in Afghanistan and Iraq." —From Wallace Shawn's Introduction.
Download or read book Facing the Future Reviving the Past written by John Kleinen and published by Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. This book was released on 1999 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Study of Social Change in a Northern Vietnamese Village is based on anthropological fieldwork between 1992 and 1996 in a small Red River delta village. It treats the history of the village since its foundation in the mid-seventeenth century, based on existing French and Vietnamese archival materials. At the same time, the book discusses the essentialist character of the Vietnamese village community. Special interest is devoted to internal politics within the village which enable powerful lineages and groups to (re)gain political and social power within the village. The recent revival of religious activities as a result of the renovation policy is taken into consideration. Since Vietnamese society is changing at a very fast pace, a longitudinal study of this nature provides the reader with a firsthand account of the interplay between the reform under a Marxist regime and local village society.
Download or read book Other Moons written by and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2020-08-04 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this anthology, Vietnamese writers describe their experience of what they call the American War and its lasting legacy through the lens of their own vital artistic visions. A North Vietnamese soldier forms a bond with an abandoned puppy. Cousins find their lives upended by the revelation that their fathers fought on opposite sides of the war. Two lonely veterans in Hanoi meet years after the war has ended through a newspaper dating service. A psychic assists the search for the body of a long-vanished soldier. The father of a girl suffering from dioxin poisoning struggles with corrupt local officials. The twenty short stories collected in Other Moons range from the intensely personal to narratives that deal with larger questions of remembrance, trauma, and healing. By a diverse set of authors, including many veterans, they span styles from social realism to tales of the fantastic. Yet whether describing the effects of Agent Orange exposure or telling ghost stories, all speak to the unresolved legacy of a conflict that still haunts Vietnam. Among the most widely anthologized and popular pieces of short fiction about the war in Vietnam, these works appear here for the first time in English. Other Moons offers Anglophone audiences an unparalleled opportunity to experience how the Vietnamese think and write about the conflict that consumed their country from 1954 to 1975—a perspective still largely missing from American narratives.
