Veteran journalist Ron Steinman gathers candid reminiscences from seventy-six men (including Senator John McCain) who lived through the brutalities of combat in the Vietnam War. A Soldiers' Story provides a vivid and gripping oral history of the fear, fellowship, trauma and triumph of these Marine, Army, Air Force, and Navy veterans. Complete with maps and battlefield photographs, these indespensable first-hand accounts provide a unique front-line record of Vietnam - from its surreal horrors, to the comradeship and courage forged in battle. From the jungles of Southeast Asia to life back in the United States as veterans of an unpopular war, A Soldiers' Story also includes complete and updated biographies of the brave men who are profiled. This is a book that goes beyond the military and political implications of Vietnam, to the truth of what the war cost - and who actually paid the price.
Veteran journalist, Ron Steinman, profiled 76 Vietnam vets. Complete with maps & photographs, their stories are a record of the horrors & fellowship they experienced.
The US Army Special Forces, more familiarly known as the Green Berets, are the elite fighting force of the United States military. Their experiences in covert operations and unconventional warfare have been a part of American military action for decades Author Hans Halberstadt has collected first-hand recollections of dozens of Green Berets, past and present, who spent time on the battlefields of Viet Nam, Grenada, Panama, Kuwait, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Their harrowing stories are told here, providing rare insight into the world of the Green Beret.- Elite forces created in the 1960s and now the models for warfare in the 21st century- Fully updated to include the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan- First hand accounts- Updated: Now includes post-Vietnam War Stories as well as stories from the Gulf Wars and Afghanistan- Expanded: This new Zenith Press edition is almost 100 pages longer than the originalThe original hardcover, titled "War Stories of the Green Berets: The Viet Nam Experience" (ISBN 0-87938-955-9), was first published in 1994.About the AuthorHans Halberstadt studied documentary film in college and later took up writing. He has authored or co-authored more than fifty books, most on military subjects, especially U.S. special operations forces, armor, and artillery. Halberstadt served in the U.S. Army as a helicopter door gunner in Vietnam. He and his wife, April, live in San Jose, California.
With these audacious and murderously witty stories, Donald Barthelme threw the preoccupations of our time into the literary equivalent of a Cuisinart and served up a gorgeous salad of American culture, high and low. Here are the urban upheavals reimagined as frontier myth; travelogues through countries that might have been created by Kafka; cryptic dialogues that bore down to the bedrock of our longings, dreams, and angsts. Like all of Barthelme's work, the sixty stories collected in this volume are triumphs of language and perception, at once unsettling and irresistible. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
A war correspondent’s masterful blow-by-blow account of the Battle of Khe Sanh, reissued with a new preface by Mark Bowden for the battle’s 50th anniversary. The six-month siege of Khe Sanh in 1968 was the largest, most intense battle of the Vietnam War. For six thousand trapped U.S. Marines, it was a nightmare; for President Johnson, an obsession. For General Westmoreland, it was to be the final vindication of technological weaponry; for General Giap, architect of the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, it was a spectacular ruse masking troops moving south for the Tet offensive. With a new introduction by Mark Bowden—best-selling author of Hu? 1968—Robert Pisor’s immersive narrative of the action at Khe Sanh is a timely reminder of the human cost of war, and a visceral portrait of Vietnam’s fiercest and most epic close-quarters battle. Readers may find the politics and the tactics of the Vietnam War, as they played out at Khe Sahn fifty years ago, echoed in our nation’s global incursions today. Robert Pisor sets forth the history, the politics, the strategies, and, above all, the desperate reality of the battle that became the turning point of U.S. involvement in Vietnam.
In the connected highlands of southwest China, Vietnam, and Laos, recalling the past is a highly sensitive act. Among local societies, many may actively avoid recalling the past for fear of endangering themselves and others. Oral traditions and rare archives remain the main avenues to visit the past, but the national revolutionary narrative and the language of heritagization have strongly affected the local expression of historical memory. Yet this does not prevent local societies from producing their stories in their own terms, even if often in conflict with both national and Western categories. Producing history, ethnohistory, historical anthropology, and historical geography in the Southeast Asian highlands raises significant questions relating to methodology, epistemology, and ethics, for which most researchers are often ill-prepared. How can scholars manage to competently access information about the past? How is one to capture history-in-the-making through events, speech acts, rituals, and performances? How is the memory of the past transmitted—or not—and with what logic? Based on the experiences and reflections of a dozen diverse scholars rooted in decades of work in these three communist states, Chasing Traces is the first book about historical ethnography and related issues in the Southeast Asian highlands. Taking a critically reflexive posture, the authors make a plea for the individual, the hidden, and the backstage, for what life is really like on the ground, as opposed to imagined homogeneity, legibility, and unambiguousness. Their investigations on the history of ethnic minority communities adds archival historiography to ethnographic fieldwork and examines the relationship between the two fields. The individual chapters each tell distinctive stories of the conjunction of fieldwork, archival research, official surveillance, community participation, cultural norms, partnership with local scholars, and the other factors that both facilitate and frustrate the research enterprise of writing about the past in these societies. A timely work, this volume also provides guidelines for alternative ways to document and reflect when physical access becomes limited due to factors such as pandemic, political instability, and violence, and offers creative ways for researchers to cope with these dramatic shifts.
Lan is a woman of colour. She tries to navigate through her twenties and is faced by the complex intersection of her gender and race. Her Vietnamese heritage has always been and will always be part of her being, as well as her womanhood. Looking back into her family's history she understands that the past contains an immensity of generational legacies and wounds. This is a story about a woman who learns how to proudly claim her existence in a white country. Facing the daily horrors of racism and sexism in order to pave her way into adulthood. She understands the power of redefining the identity society has put on her.
Stories within stories, a few contemporary fables, a hint of the narrative complexity of Borges, a whiff of the gritty realism of pre- and post-communist life in Eastern Europe - these are the elements that come together in a unique and surprising way in the wildly imaginative and endlessly engaging short stories of Georgi Gospodinov. Whether a tongue-in-cheek crime/horror story or the Christmas story of a pig, a language game leading to an unexpected epiphany or an inward-looking tale built on the complexity of a puzzle box, the work in this collection offers a kaleidoscopic experience of a writer whose style has been described as anarchic, experimental (New Yorker) and compulsively readable (New York Times). Gospodinov's debut prose work Natural Novel was hailed as a go-for-broke postmodern construction - a devilish jam of jump-cut narration, pop culture riffs, wholesale quotation, and Chinese-box authorship (Village Voice). At once familiar and fantastic, his writing is high comedy, high seriousness, and of very high order.
Amazing Stories, the home of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, publisher of the first stories of Ursula K. Leguin and Isaac Asimov, is back in print after an absence of more than a decade! This relaunch of the iconic first science fiction magazine is packed full of exciting science fiction, fantasy, and articles, all in a beautiful package featuring eye-catching illustrations and cartoons.The Amazing Stories Fall 2019 issue (the 618th issue since 1926) includes work by: S. P. Somtow • R. S. Belcher • Liz Westbrook-Trenholm • T. B. Jeremiah • Bud Sparhawk • Wendy Nikel • Matthew Hughes • Sandra Kasturi • Shirley Meier • Jack McDevitt • Sally McBride • S. L. Saboviec • Paul Levinson • Amber Royer • Adam-Troy Castro • Dave Creek • Jack Clemons • Paul Di Filippo • Lawrence Watt-Evans
