Vietnam Books

If Not Now, When?: Duty and Sacrifice in America's Time of Need

Colonel Jack Jacobs (retired), Douglas Century

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 16 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Refreshing candor by a career military man 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

Col Jacobs writes with humor & honesty about his life & military experience. It amazes me that leaders seem to learn so little or anything at all from the past. This book should be given to the cadets in the military academies & made required reading.

Editorial Review:

A Medal of Honor recipient looks back at his own service—and ahead to America’s future.

Jack Jacobs was acting as an advisor to the South Vietnamese when he and his men came under devastating attack. Severely wounded, 1st Lt. Jacobs took command and withdrew the unit, returning again and again to the site of the attack to rescue more men, saving the lives of a U.S. advisor and thirteen Allied soldiers. Col. Jacobs received the nation’s highest military award, the Medal of Honor.

Here, with candor, humor, and quiet modesty, Col. Jack Jacobs tells his stirring story of heroism, honor, and the personal code by which he has lived his life, and expounds with blunt honesty and insight his views on our contemporary world, and the nature and necessity of sacrifice.

If Not Now, When? is a compelling account of a unique life at both war and peace, and the all-too-often unexamined role of the citizenry in the service and defense of the Republic.

We Are Soldiers Still: A Journey Back to the Battlefields of Vietnam

Harold G. Moore, Joseph L. Galloway

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 15 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

In their stunning follow-up to the classic bestseller We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young, Lt. Gen. Hal Moore and Joe Galloway return to Vietnam and reflect on how the war changed them, their men, their enemies, and both countries—often with surprising results.

More than fifteen years since its original publication, the number one New York Times bestseller We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young is still required reading in all branches of the military. Now Moore and Galloway revisit their relationships with ten American veterans of the battle—men such as Sgt. Maj. Basil Plumley and helicopter pilot Bruce "Old Snake" Crandall—as well as Lt. Gen. Nguyen Hu An, who commanded the North Vietnamese Army troops on the other side, and two of his old company commanders. These men and their countries have all changed dramatically since the first head-on collision between the two great armies back in November 1965.

Traveling back to the red-dirt battlefields, commanders and veterans from both sides make the long and difficult journey from old enemies to new friends. After a trip in a Russian-made helicopter to the Ia Drang Valley in the Central Highlands, with the Vietnamese pilots using Moore's vintage U.S. Army maps and Galloway's Boy Scout compass to guide them, they reach the hallowed ground where so many died. All the men are astonished at how nature has reclaimed the land once scarred by bullets, napalm, and blood. As darkness falls, the unthinkable happens—the authors and many of their old comrades are stranded overnight, alone, left to confront the ghosts of the departed among the termite hills and creek bed.

Moore and Galloway combine gritty and vivid detail with reverence and respect for their comrades. Their ability to capture man's sense of heroism and brotherhood, their love for their men and their former enemies, and their fascination with the history of this enigmatic country make for riveting reading. With sixteen pages of photos, tributes to departed friends and loved ones, and General Moore's reflections on lessons learned throughout his military career, We Are Soldiers Still puts a human face on warfare in a way that will not soon be forgotten.

The Best and the Brightest

David Halberstam

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 59 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

History repeating itself 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 2 people found this review helpful.

I read this book for the first time over ten years ago and returned to it for the bitter relevancy it has as I reflect on our situation in Iraq today.

Editorial Review:

"A rich, entertaining, and profound reading experience." -- The New York Times
"[The] most comprehensive saga of how America became involved in Vietnam. It is also the Iliad of the American empire and the Odyssey of this nation's search for its idealistic soul. THE BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST is almost like watching an Alfred Hitchcock thriller." -- The Boston Globe
"Deeply moving . . . We cannot help but feel the compelling power of this narrative . . . . Dramatic and tragic, a chain of events overwhelming in their force, a distant war embodying illusions and myths, terror and violence, confusions and courage, blindness, pride, and arrogance." -- Los Angeles Times
"Most impressive, superb -- perceptive, literary, multidimensional." -- The New York Times Book Review
"A story which every American should read." -- St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam

John A. Nagl

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 50 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Invariably, armies are accused of preparing to fight the previous war. In Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, Lieutenant Colonel John A. Nagl—a veteran of both Operation Desert Storm and the current conflict in Iraq—considers the now-crucial question of how armies adapt to changing circumstances during the course of conflicts for which they are initially unprepared. Through the use of archival sources and interviews with participants in both engagements, Nagl compares the development of counterinsurgency doctrine and practice in the Malayan Emergency from 1948 to 1960 with what developed in the Vietnam War from 1950 to 1975.

In examining these two events, Nagl—the subject of a recent New York Times Magazine cover story by Peter Maass—argues that organizational culture is key to the ability to learn from unanticipated conditions, a variable which explains why the British army successfully conducted counterinsurgency in Malaya but why the American army failed to do so in Vietnam, treating the war instead as a conventional conflict. Nagl concludes that the British army, because of its role as a colonial police force and the organizational characteristics created by its history and national culture, was better able to quickly learn and apply the lessons of counterinsurgency during the course of the Malayan Emergency.

With a new preface reflecting on the author's combat experience in Iraq, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife is a timely examination of the lessons of previous counterinsurgency campaigns that will be hailed by both military leaders and interested civilians.

(20060328)

Marine Sniper: 93 Confirmed Kills

Charles Henderson

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 212 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Great read 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

I was in the Marine Corp in the late 60s but was fortunate not to make a tour in Nam. Lost quite a few good friends over there.

Saw this book mentioned on the web and couldn't wait to get it. A great moving story of someone we should be grateful to. Many men and women sacrificed their lives for us back here. Just hope people appreciate it.

Couldn't put it down. Well written and enlightening.

Wally

Editorial Review:

In the chaos of the combat zone, there are the living, the dead, and the Ghost.

In the ongoing Iraq conflict, there are no battle lines, no direct offensives, no ground won or lost––just the daily fight against an enemy who hits and runs, hides and sneaks. If the enemy shows himself, it’s only for a moment. But for a Marine Sniper, that is all that is needed.

Readers now have the opportunity, from these warriors’ perspective, to peer into the killing zone through a telescopic lens, down the barrel of a high-powered rifle, and into the very heart of the enemy. The training, the techniques, and the steel will necessary to survive as a sniper are all described in vivid detail.

Charles Henderson also delves into the core of the enemy––the maniacal ideology, and the tactics that have sown so much violence in Iraq––and how they are all vulnerable to a single bullet from a Ghost.

The Bridge at Dong Ha (Bluejacket Books)

John Grider Miller

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

A "Well Done" Presentation of A Marine Legend 5 out of 5 stars.
5 of 5 people found this review helpful.

This is one of the best written "Marine Legend" books that this former Marine has ever read.

John Grider Miller did an excellent job of interviewing Colonel (then Captain) John Ripley and his other sources. He presents what Colonel Ripley, his U.S. Army counterpart Major Jim Smock, and the Vietnamese Marines did at Dong Ha in 1972 in a fascinating story that is a quick and easy read. He also includes some of those intangible details that civilians may not notice, but that any Marine who served in Vietnam (or anywhere else) will recognize and appreciate.

Colonel Ripley's exploits are legendary in the U.S. Marine Corps. So too the courage of those Vietnamese Marines he served with as a "trusted friend" on that Easter Sunday. Colonel Ripley's visit to the gravesite near Di An tells it all. The bond between these "brothers in arms" was formed by honor, courage, commitment, mutual respect and sacrifice.

This book is on the Commandant's Reading list for all Marines, Private through General. And rightly so. It sets the standard high for all of us. It has an honored place in the "Read Again" section of my personal library.

Editorial Review:

In his desperate attempt to blow up the bridge at Dong Ha and keep some 30,000 men and 200 tanks at bay, Ripley endured three hours of direct fire to rig some 500 pounds of explosives. Such a story of raw courage and personal resolve is rarely encountered.

We were Soldiers Once...And Young: Ia Drang--The Battle That Changed The War In Vietnam

Harold G. Moore, Joseph L. Galloway

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 251 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

In the first significant engagement between American troops and the Viet Cong, 450 U.S. soldiers found themselves surrounded and outnumbered by their enemy. This book tells the story of how they battled between October 23 and November 26, 1965. Its prose is gritty, not artful, delivering a powerful punch of here-and-now descriptions that could only have been written by people actually on the scene. In fact, they were: Harold Moore commanded the men of the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry, who did most of the fighting, and Joseph Galloway was the only reporter present throughout the battle's 34 harrowing days. We Were Soldiers Once... combines their memories with more than 100 in-depth interviews with survivors on both sides. The Battle of Ia Drang also highlights a technological advance that would play an enormous role in the rest of the war: this was perhaps the first place where helicopter-based, air-mobile operations demonstrated their combat potential. At bottom, however, this is a tale of heroes and heroism, some acts writ large, others probably forgotten but for this telling. It was a bestseller when first published, and remains one of the better books available on combat during the Vietnam War. --John J. Miller

We Were Soldiers Once...and Young: Ia Drang - the Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam

Harold G. Moore, Joseph L. Galloway

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 16 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Each year, the Commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps selects one book that he believes is both relevant and timeless for reading by all Marines. The Commandant's choice for 1993 was We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young.
In November 1965, some 450 men of the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry, under the command of Lt. Col. Hal Moore, were dropped by helicopter into a small clearing in the Ia Drang Valley. They were immediately surrounded by 2,000 North Vietnamese soldiers. Three days later, only two and a half miles away, a sister battalion was chopped to pieces. Together, these actions at the landing zones X-Ray and Albany constituted one of the most savage and significant battles of the Vietnam War.
How these men persevered--sacrificed themselves for their comrades and never gave up--makes a vivid portrait of war at its most inspiring and devastating. General Moore and Joseph Galloway, the only journalist on the ground throughout the fighting, have interviewed hundreds of men who fought there, including the North Vietnamese commanders. This devastating account rises above the specific ordeal it chronicles to present a picture of men facing the ultimate challenge, dealing with it in ways they would have found unimaginable only a few hours earlier. It reveals to us, as rarely before, man's most heroic and horrendous endeavor.


From the Hardcover edition.

A Rumor of War

Philip Caputo

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Total reviews: 105 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

When it first appeared, A Rumor of War brought home to American readers, with terrifying vividness and honesty, the devastating effects of the Vietnam War on the soldiers who fought there. And while it is a memoir of one young man’s experiences and therefore deeply personal, it is also a book that speaks powerfully to today’s students about the larger themes of human conscience, good and evil, and the desperate extremes men are forced to confront in any war.

A platoon commander in the first combat unit sent to fight in Vietnam, Lieutenant Caputo landed at Danang on March 8, 1965, convinced that American forces would win a quick and decisive victory over the Communists. Sixteen months later and without ceremony, Caputo left Vietnam a shell-shocked veteran whose youthful idealism and faith in the rightness of the war had been utterly shattered. A Rumor of War tells the story of that trajectory and allows us to see and feel the reality of the conflict as the author himself experienced it, from the weeks of tedium hacking through scorching jungles, to the sudden violence of ambushes and firefights, to the unbreakable bonds of friendship forged between soldiers, and finally to a sense of the war as having no purpose other than the fight for survival. The author gives us a precise, tactile view of both the emotional and physical reality of war.

When Caputo is reassigned to headquarters as “Officer in Charge of the Dead,” he chronicles the psychological cost of witnessing and recording the human toll of the war. And after his voluntary transfer to the frontlines, Caputo shows us that the major weapons of guerrilla fighting are booby traps and land mines, and that success is measured not in feet but in body counts. Nor does the author shrink from admitting the intoxicating intensity of combat, an experience so compelling that many soldiers felt nostalgic for it years after they’d left
Vietnam. Most troubling, Caputo gives us an unflinching view not only of remarkable bravery and heroism but also of the atrocities committed in Vietnam by ordinary men so numbed by fear and desperate to survive that their moral distinctions had collapsed.

More than a statement against war, Caputo’s memoir offers readers today a profoundly visceral sense of what war is and, as the author says, of “the things men do in war and the things war does to men.”

This edition includes a twentieth-anniversary postscript by the author.

Dispatches

Michael Herr

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 107 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

The Gift of Ignorance 1 out of 5 stars.
2 of 3 people found this review helpful.

Fortunately I did not buy this book, it was given to me. Unfortunately I felt obliged to read it, and found it worth less than I had paid for it. I was so amazed by the how bad it was I read the whole thing, to see if it could maintain its low level of literary merit, I think it actually got worse. I would not normally bother to write a review on this book, but out of curiosity I looked at the reviews and thought ????. This is not James Joyce, or William Faulkner, this is Michael Herr, trying to get a little more fame and money out of his 18 months in Viet Nam. The only thing notable about this book is that he has managed in only 260 pages, to include every possible stereotype, caricature, and misconception there was, concerning the war and the solders. And then to read the reviews, Michael is not opening his heart to the reader he is trying very successfully to make some money. That he was in Viet Nam for so long a time and never talks of the people that live there shows how much he really cares. There are a lot of books about the Viet Nam War, many of them good, few of them as bad as this. To believe this is the way things were requires the reader to actively want it to be so.

Editorial Review:

Michael Herr, who wrote about the Vietnam War for Esquire magazine, gathered his years of notes from his front-line reporting and turned them into what many people consider the best account of the war to date, when published in 1977. He captured the feel of the war and how it differed from any theater of combat ever fought, as well as the flavor of the time and the essence of the people who were there. Since Dispatches was published, other excellent books have appeared on the war--may we suggest The Things They Carried, The Sorrow of War, We Were Soldiers Once ... and Young--but Herr's book was the first to hit the target head-on and remains a classic.