The year is 1970; the war in Vietnam is five years from over. The women’s movement is newly resurgent, and feminists are summarily reviled as “libbers.” Inette Miller is one year out of college—a reporter for a small-town newspaper. Her boyfriend gets drafted and is issued orders to Vietnam. Within their few remaining days together, Inette marries her US Army private, determined to accompany him to war.
There are obstacles. All wives of US military are prohibited in country. With the aid of her newspaper’s editor, Miller finagles a one-month work visa and becomes a war reporter. Her newspaper cannot afford life insurance beyond that. After thirty days, she is on her own.
As one of the rare woman war correspondents in Vietnam and the only one also married to an Army soldier, Miller’s experience was pathbreaking. Girls Don’t shines a light on the conflicting motives that drive an ambitious...
Inside the Diem Regime and South Vietnam's Tragedy
by Nguyen Thai
Edited by Justin Simundson
Foreword by Larry Berman
Price: $29.95
ISBN: 9781682830413
Pub Date: October 2019
Crooked Bamboo is a political memoir centered on Nguyen Thai’s inside account of South Vietnam’s Ngo Dinh Diem regime. Thai was a close personal aide for Diem as well as Director General of Vietnam Press, giving him significant access to Diem and other Ngo family members. Although the Diem era is the focus of the memoir, Nguyen Thai’s post-1963 career as a government official, businessman, and confidant of several key South Vietnamese figures sheds light on the aftermath of the Diem regime and the dilemmas of South Vietnam’s anti-communist elite throughout the Vietnam War. Thai’s attempts to help bring the war to a negotiated end and his experiences as one of the first former South Vietnamese officials to return to Communist Vietnam also offer important reflections on the meaning of the war and its aftermath.
A Naval Hospital Corpsman with the Marines in Vietnam, 1965
by Richard W. Schaefer
Price: $29.95
ISBN: 9781682830024
Pub Date: May 2016
Having just turned eighteen and graduated from high school, and living insmall-town Nebraska with nothing much to do, young Dick Schaefer joinedthe Navy on impulse, hoping that by choosing his branch of the military hewould have some measure of control over his future. Not fully aware of the increasing military action in Vietnam, Schaefer found himself on a train bound for boot camp in San Diego in late summer, 1962. Schaefer's account of his time at boot camp is wry and rollicking. Upon graduation, he requested and received orders to report to the U.S. Naval Hospital Corps School in San Diego--and found that his choice of study suited him very well. After completing his studies, again on impulse Schaefer requested assignment to Hawai'i, assuming there must be a large naval hospital at Pearl Harbor. In fact, there was no such hospital--and Schaefer was assigned to the Fleet Marine Force. And...
When the Viet Nam War ended, with the United States of America defeated, many wondered how a military powerhouse lost to a “raggedy-ass, little fourth-rate country,” as President Lyndon Johnson...
During the four years General Creighton W. Abrams was commander in Vietnam, he and his staff made more than 455 tape recordings of briefings and meetings. In 1994, with government approval, Lewis Sorley...
It just didn’t sit right. The American Embassy had reported the accidental death of Jerry “Hog” Daniels by carbon monoxide poisoning. Three decades later, his family, friends, and coworkers remain...
An insightful memoir of a high-ranking Vietnamese military official, who changed sides in the war from the Vietminh to South Vietnam--and became friends with John Paul Vann and Daniel Ellsberg.
The combat history of the 1st Battalion, 5th Marines--or “One Five” (1/5)--is long and illustrious, but there are many periods of their combat operations during the Vietnam War about which there...
They were little more than boys in the turbulent 1960s when Lee Roy Herron and his high school buddy, David Nelson, signed up for Marine Corps officer training. Decisions during college took the pair in different directions—Lee Roy to the infantry, language school, and the cauldron of Vietnam, David to law school, the JAG office, and eventually to Okinawa. When Lt. Lee Roy Herron was killed on the front lines in February 1969, only two months into his tour of duty, Nelson mourned the tragic loss. Haunted for years afterward, he questioned his own choices, his relative safety, and his backstage role in the conflict while his friend paid the ultimate price. A chance encounter with a retired officer in 1997 spurred Nelson to delve more deeply into Lee Roy’s death. What really happened that day on the hillside above A Shau Valley on the Laotian border? A quest to...
