Download or read book Passing Time written by W.D. Ehrhart and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2022-11-09 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From 1969 to 1974 Ehrhart was just passing time. His reentry into the "world" began with his enrollment as a 21-year-old freshman (and token Vietnam vet) at Swarthmore College. At first simply trying to bury his past, Ehrhart slowly came to understand what happened to him, and why, in Vietnam. Interspersed are flashbacks to the war itself. It is the story of political--and personal--awakening. As the war dragged on, the United States' deceitful involvement and its perpetuation of fallacies and lies about the war's conduct forced Ehrhart to confront his own feelings about his government, country and self. Throughout, the reader shares with Ehrhart his odyssey through naivete, growing awareness, angry withdrawal and, finally, a measure of peace.

Download or read book Unexpected Prisoner written by Robert Wideman and published by Robert Wideman. This book was released on 2016-05-02 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Lieutenant Robert Wideman's plane crashed on a bombing run in the Vietnam War, he feared falling into enemy hands. Although he endured the kind of pain that makes people question humanity, physical torture was not his biggest problem. During six years as a prisoner of war, he saw the truth behind Jean-Paul Sartre's words: "Hell is other people." Unexpected Prisoner explores a POW's struggle with enemies and comrades, Vietnamese interrogators and American commanders, his lost dreams and ultimately himself.

Download or read book A Rumor of War written by Philip Caputo and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1996 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published: New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1977.

Download or read book Fearful Odds written by Charles W Newhall and published by . This book was released on 2015-10-01 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fearful Odds is a no holds barred narrative told in three parts. It is the true story of a young Army officer, groomed for command and assigned to lead a platoon on a reconnaissance mission in the A Shau Valley, Vietnam in 1968. An otherwise routine mission is complicated by the contradiction of an inept chain of command. The resulting casualties devastate the platoon and the graphic images and memories of the action and the grueling months that follow, lead Chuck Newhall to a lifetime of severe trauma, guilt, grief and anger. Returning home, Newhall embarks on an extraordinary entrepreneurial career bringing great wealth, prestige and security, despite severe episodes of depression and anxiety which would hobble others from achieving such levels of success. And yet a few years later, and seemingly without warning, the family that he had worked so hard to create and support is suddenly ripped apart by tragedy intensifying an emotional upheaval that revisits the pain and anguish he first felt during his time in Vietnam. After decades of experience in managing the long-term effects of trauma and with the support of his family, Chuck Newhall has successfully come to terms with his past and the effects of PTSD. Fearful Odds offers hope, inspiration and valuable coping tools for anyone, or their families, who has been affected by post-traumatic stress, depression, mild traumatic brain disorder or the suicide of a loved one. Fearful Odds is a story of perseverance in the face of insurmountable odds and will offer a guiding hand to others who are facing challenges on the battlefield, boardroom or back at home. "Chuck Newhall's compelling narrative account of combat action in Vietnam takes you to one of the darkest hellholes on earth -- the A Shau Valley in 1968. Just when you thought that the war was over, Fearful Odds packs a punch in the gut you will be feeling for a long time." Joseph L. Galloway, author of We Were Soldiers Once...and Young "If you care about America's warriors, and about how we as a society can help them come home after war, then you should read this book." Nathaniel Fick, author of One Bullet Away "The illuminating depictions of sessions with your phychiatrist Dr. Kaiser can be regarded as almost a manual for understanding PTSD and learning how to overcome it. However, unlike the majority of books on the subject, you explain how PTSD can be addressed via depictions of how your own efforts have succeeded to varying extents. Readers will learn far more from your book, which is "real life," than from others." Solomon H. Snyder, M.D. Distinguished Service Professor of Neuroscience, Pharmacology and Psychiatry, Johns Hopkins University

Download or read book Baptism written by Larry Gwin and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2008-12-10 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The 2nd Battalion of the 7th Cavalry had the dubious distinction of being the unit that had fought the biggest battle of the war to date, and had suffered the worst casualties. We and the 1st Battalion." A Yale graduate who volunteered to serve his country, Larry Gwin was only twenty-three years old when he arrived in Vietnam in 1965. After a brief stint in the Delta, Gwin was reassigned to the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) in An Khe. There, in the hotly contested Central Highlands, he served almost nine months as executive officer for Alpha Company, 2/7, fighting against crack NVA troops in some of the war's most horrific battles. The bloodiest conflict of all began November 12, 1965, after 2nd Battalion was flown into the Ia Drang Valley west of Pleiku. Acting as point, Alpha Company spearheaded the battalion's march to landing zone Albany for pickup, not knowing they were walking into the killing zone of an NVA ambush that would cost them 10 percent casualties. Gwin spares no one, including himself, in his gut-wrenching account of the agony of war. Through the stench of death and the acrid smell of napalm, he chronicles the Vietnam War in all its nightmarish horror.

Download or read book River of Time written by Jon Swain and published by Random House. This book was released on 2010-05-25 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1970 and 1975 Jon Swain, the English journalist portrayed in David Puttnam's film, The Killing Fields, lived in the lands of the Mekong river. This is his account of those years, and the way in which the tumultuous events affected his perceptions of life and death as Europe never could. He also describes the beauty of the Mekong landscape - the villages along its banks, surrounded by mangoes, bananas and coconuts, and the exquisite women, the odours of opium, and the region's other face - that of violence and corruption.

Download or read book Fifteen Minutes Ago written by Craig Tschetter and published by Mill City Press, Incorporated. This book was released on 2017-09-12 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Memoir: A innocent 18 year old leaves home to join the military during a time of war. He leaves because he can no longer live with the religious mandates imposed by his parents Mennonite faith. The Marine Corps boot camp and further training leave him filled with fear, uncertainty, and yet as a marine filled with pride. He serves 20 months in Vietnam during the height of the war (67-69) as a combat radio operator. Wounded twice, forced to witness a haunting murder, and living one day at a time he struggles to meet the date he can leave Vietnam. Finally he is sent to the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in San Diego, CA to become a Drill Instructor. After training seven platoons of raw recruit to face the hostile environment he left he is discharged after 4 years of a honorable decorated service. He marries, starts a family, earns his college degree while facing the hostile professors and student body in protest over the war he so valiantly fought. Years pass before he falls into a deep dark hole of depression. Obsessed with memories of Vietnam that won't leave him alone he see suicide as his only reprieve. Afraid of what he might do he finds help thru the local Veterans Hospital. No one but his wife understands the life he live and the medications required to keep him level. His family and friends see him as a happy, success former marine living life's dream. Little does anyone know the torment he's forced to live with everyday. When people ask him when he was in Vietnam, he responds by saying from November 1967 - July 1969. What he really wants to tell them is: 15 MINUTES AGO. CRAIG TSCHETTER, writes vividly about being raised by parents of strict Mennonite faith and his struggles to deal with their religious mandates. Enlisting in the Marine Corps to escape home he finds himself in the jungles of Vietnam for 20 months and then at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in San Diego, CA as a Drill Instructor. Educated with a degree in Mortuary Science he spends the next 34 years are spent in the funeral service industry. Craig and his wife, Della, live in Brookings, SD and have two children. Their daughter and granddaughter reside in Florida and their son in Oregon.

Download or read book Secrets written by Daniel Ellsberg and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2003-09-30 with total page 529 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The true story of the leaking of the Pentagon Papers, the event which inspired Steven Spielberg’s feature film The Post In 1971 former Cold War hard-liner Daniel Ellsberg made history by releasing the Pentagon Papers - a 7,000-page top-secret study of U.S. decision-making in Vietnam - to the New York Times and Washington Post. The document set in motion a chain of events that ended not only the Nixon presidency but the Vietnam War. In this remarkable memoir, Ellsberg describes in dramatic detail the two years he spent in Vietnam as a U.S. State Department observer, and how he came to risk his career and freedom to expose the deceptions and delusions that shaped three decades of American foreign policy. The story of one man's exploration of conscience, Secrets is also a portrait of America at a perilous crossroad. "[Ellsberg's] well-told memoir sticks in the mind and will be a powerful testament for future students of a war that the United States should never have fought." -The Washington Post "Ellsberg's deft critique of secrecy in government is an invaluable contribution to understanding one of our nation's darkest hours." -Theodore Roszak, San Francisco Chronicle

Download or read book Danger Close written by Phil Gioia and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-06-15 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Phil Gioia grew up an army brat during the decades after World War II. Drawn to the military, he attended the Virginia Military Institute, then was commissioned in the U.S. Army, where he completed Jump School and Ranger School. Not even a year after college graduation, he landed in Vietnam in early 1968—in the first weeks of the Tet offensive, which marked a major escalation of the war. Leading a platoon in the 82nd Airborne Division, Gioia took his paratroopers into the lifting of the siege of Hué—where death was always just around the corner—and the grisly discovery of mass graves of those executed by the Vietcong, during their occupation of the city. Wounded, he was sent home in April. Released from hospital, he commanded a paratroop company in the 82nd Airborne in 1968, returning to Vietnam with the hard-hitting First Air Cavalry Division a year later, this time leading a rucksack company of light infantry. Inserted into far-flung landing zones, Gioia and his men patrolled the jungles and rubber plantations along the Cambodian border, looking for a furtive enemy who preferred ambushes to set-piece battles and nighttime raids to daylight attacks. Danger Close! recounts the Vietnam War from the unique boots-on-the-ground perspective of a young officer who served two tours in two different divisions. He tells his story thoughtfully, straightforwardly, and always vividly, from the raw emotions of unearthing massacred human beings to the terrors of fighting in the dark, with red and green tracers slicing the air. Hard to put down and hard to forget, Danger Close! will remind readers of the best Vietnam memoirs, like Guns Up! and Baptism.

Download or read book American Warrior written by John C. Bahnsen and published by Citadel Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 548 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brigadier General John C. |Doc| Bahnsen Jr served as one of America's most decorated soldiers in the Vietnam War. The ultimate warrior who engaged the enemy from nearly every type of aircraft and armored vehicle in the army's inventory, Doc was also an expert strategist who developed military tactics later adopted as doctrine. Accounts of Doc's brilliance in time of war became the stuff of legend. Here he offers a spellbinding recollection - completely uncensored - of his remarkable wartime experience.

Download or read book When I Turned Nineteen written by Glyn Haynie and published by . This book was released on 2016-11-28 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It's the year 1969. I was serving in the U.S. Army with my brothers of First Platoon Company A 3/1 11th Bde Americal (23rd Infantry) Division. We were average American sons, fathers, husbands, or brothers who'd enlisted or been drafted from all over the United States and who'd all come from different backgrounds. We came together and formed a brotherhood that will last through time. I share my experiences about weeks of boredom and minutes to hours of terror and surviving the heat, carrying a 60-pound rucksack, monsoons, a forest fire, a typhoon, building a firebase, fear, death and fighting the enemy while mentally, physically, and morally exhausted.

Download or read book Eye of the Tiger written by John Edmund Delezen and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2015-09-01 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "We live together under the thick canopy, each searching for the other; the same leeches and mosquitoes that feed on our blood feed on his blood." John Edmund Delezen felt a kinship with the people he was instructed to kill in Vietnam; they were all at the mercy of the land. His memoir begins when he enlisted in the Marine Corps and was sent to Vietnam in March of 1967. He volunteered for the Third Force Recon Company, whose job it was to locate and infiltrate enemy lines undetected and map their locations and learn details of their status. The duty was often painful both physically and mentally. He was stricken with malaria in November of 1967, wounded by a grenade in February of 1968 and hit by a bullet later that summer. He remained in Vietnam until December, 1968. Delezen writes of Vietnam as a man humbled by a mysterious country and horrified by acts of brutality. The land was his enemy as much as the Vietnamese soldiers. He vividly describes the three-canopy jungle with birds and monkeys overhead that could be heard but not seen, venomous snakes hiding in trees and relentless bugs that fed on men. He recalls stumbling onto a pit of rotting Vietnamese bodies left behind by American forces, and days when fierce hunger made a bag of plasma seem like an enticing meal. He writes of his fallen comrades and the images of war that still pervade his dreams. This book contains many photographs of American Marines and Vietnam as well as three maps.

Download or read book Revisiting Vietnam written by Julia Bleakney and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-13 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the memorializing practices of American veterans of the Vietnam War at several of the most significant contemporary sites of memory in the United States and Vietnam. These sites include veterans' memoirs, museum exhibits, replicas of the National Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and tourism to Vietnam. Because war memorializing has, since the late 1960s, shifted focus from national soul searching to personal identity and recovery, I emphasize how contemporary narratives of the war, shaped more by memory than by history, often are detached from the specific history of the war and its political controversies. Drawing on trauma and cultural memory scholarship, as well as empirical data gathered during field research in the U.S. and Vietnam, the author examines how veterans' memorializing practices have become increasingly individualized, commodified, and conservative since the early 1980s.

Download or read book Vietnam Memoirs written by J. Robert Falabella and published by US Naval Institute Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published: New York: Pageant Press International. c1971.

Download or read book Ship of Fate written by Trần Đình Trụ and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2017-04-30 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ship of Fate tells the emotionally gripping story of a Vietnamese military officer who evacuated from Saigon in 1975 but made the dramatic decision to return to Vietnam for his wife and children, rather than resettle in the United States without them. Written in Vietnamese in the years just after 1991, when he and his family finally immigrated to the United States, Trần Đình Trụ’s memoir provides a detailed and searing account of his individual trauma as a refugee in limbo, and then as a prisoner in the Vietnamese reeducation camps. In April 1975, more than 120,000 Indochinese refugees sought and soon gained resettlement in the United States. While waiting in the Guam refugee camps, however, approximately 1,500 Vietnamese men and women insisted in no uncertain terms on being repatriated back to Vietnam. Trần was one of these repatriates. To resolve the escalating crisis, the U.S. government granted the Vietnamese a large ship, the Việt Nam Thương Tín. An experienced naval commander, Trần became the captain of the ship and sailed the repatriates back to Vietnam in October 1975. On return, he was imprisoned and underwent forced labor for more than twelve years. Trần’s account reveals a hidden history of refugee camps on Guam, internal divisions among Vietnamese refugees, political disputes between the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the U.S. government, and the horror of the postwar “reeducation” camps. While there are countless books on the U.S. war in Vietnam, there are still relatively few in English that narrate the war from a Vietnamese perspective. This translation adds new and unexpected dimensions to the U.S. military’s final withdrawal from Vietnam.

Download or read book Lieutenant Dangerous written by Jeff Danziger and published by Steerforth. This book was released on 2021-07-06 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A must-read war memoir… with zero punches pulled, related by one of the most incisive observers of the American political scene." —KIRKUS (starred review) "Funny, biting, thoughtful and wholly original." —Tim O'Brien, author of The Things They Carried Jeff Danziger, one of the leading political cartoonists of his generation, captures the fear, sorrow, absurdity, and unintended but inevitable consequences of war with dark humor and penetrating moral clarity. If there is any discipline at the start of wars it dissipates as the soldiers themselves become aware of the pointlessness of what they are being told to do. A conversation with a group of today’s military age men and women about America’s involvement in Vietnam inspired Jeff Danziger to write about his own wartime experiences: “War is interesting,” he reveals, “if you can avoid getting killed, and don’t mind loud noises.” Fans of his cartooning will recognize his mordant humor applied to his own wartime training and combat experiences: “I learned, and I think most veterans learn, that making people or nations do something by bombing or sending in armed troops usually fails.” Near the end of his telling, Danziger invites his audience—in particular the young friends who inspired him to write this informative and rollicking memoir—to ponder: “What would you do? . . . Could you summon the bravery—or the internal resistance—to simply refuse to be part of the whole idiotic theater of the war? . . . Or would you be like me?”

Download or read book A Vietcong Memoir written by Truong Nhu Tang and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1986-03-12 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An absorbing and moving autobiography...An important addition not only to the literature of Vietnam but to the larger human story of hope, violence and disillusion in the political life of our era."—Chicago Tribune When he was a student in Paris, Truong Nhu Tang met Ho Chi Minh. Later he fought in the Vietnamese jungle and emerged as one of the major figures in the "fight for liberation"—and one of the most determined adversaries of the United States. He became the Vietcong's Minister of Justice, but at the end of the war he fled the country in disillusionment and despair. He now lives in exile in Paris, the highest level official to have defected from Vietnam to the West. This is his candid, revealing and unforgettable autobiography.