Best Vietnam War History Books
Here you will get Best Vietnam War History Books For you.This is an up-to-date list of recommended books.
1. Walk in My Combat Boots: True Stories from America's Bravest Warriors
Author: by James Patterson
Little, Brown and Company
English
416 pages
“These are the stories America needs to hear about the remarkable young men and women who serve.” – Admiral William H. McRaven, US Navy (Ret.. The most moving and powerful war stories ever told, by the men and women who lived them.
Walk in my Combat Boots is a powerful collection crafted from hundreds of original interviews by James Patterson, the world’s #1 bestselling writer, and First Sergeant US Army (Ret. Matt Eversmann, part of the Ranger unit portrayed in the movie Black Hawk Down.
These are the brutally honest stories usually only shared amongst comrades in arms. Here, in the voices of the men and women who’ve fought overseas from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan, is a rare eye-opening look into what wearing the uniform, fighting in combat, losing friends and coming home is really like.
Readers who next thank a military member for their service will finally have a true understanding of what that thanks is for.
2. Presidents of War: The Epic Story, from 1807 to Modern Times
Author: by Michael R. Beschloss
B078QTY62K
Crown (October 9, 2018)
October 9, 2018
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER From a preeminent presidential historian comes a superb and important (The New York Times Book Review) saga of America’s wartime chief executives Fascinating and heartbreaking …Timely … Beschloss’s broad scope lets you draw important crosscutting lessons about presidential leadership.
Bill Gates Widely acclaimed and ten years in the making, Michael Beschloss’s Presidents of War is an intimate and irresistibly readable chronicle of the Chief Executives who took the United States into conflict and mobilized it for victory. From the War of 1812 to Vietnam, we see these leaders considering the difficult decision to send hundreds of thousands of Americans to their deaths; struggling with Congress, the courts, the press, and antiwar protesters; seeking comfort from their spouses and friends; and dropping to their knees in prayer.
Through Beschloss’s interviews with surviving participants and findings in original letters and once-classified national security documents, we come to understand how these Presidents were able to withstand the pressures of waror were broken by them. Presidents of War combines this sense of immediacy with the overarching context of two centuries of American history, traveling from the time of our Founders, who tried to constrain presidential power, to our modern day, when a single leader has the potential to launch nuclear weapons that can destroy much of the human race.
3. About Face: The Odyssey of an American Warrior
Author: by Col. David H. Hackworth
English
912 pages
1982144041
Called everything a war memoir could possibly be by The New York Times, this all-time classic of the military memoir genre now includes a new forward from bestselling author and retired Navy SEAL Jocko Willink. Whether he was fifteen years old or forty, David Hackworth devoted his life to the US Army and quickly became a living legend.
However, he appeared on TV in 1971 to decry the doomed war effort in Vietnam. From Korea to Berlin and the Cuban missile crisis to Vietnam, Hackworth’s story is that of an exemplary patriot, played against the backdrop of the changing fortunes of America and the US military.
This memoir is the stunning indictment of the Pentagon’s fundamental misunderstanding of the Vietnam conflict and of the bureaucracy of self-interest that fueled the war. With About Face, Hackworth has written what many Vietnam veterans have called the most important book of their generation and presents a vivid and powerful portrait of patriotism.
4. Across The Fence
Author: by John Stryker Meyer
SOG Publishing
English
352 pages
For eight years, far beyond the battlefields of Vietnam and the glare of media distortions, American Green Berets fought a deadly secret war in Laos and Cambodia under the aegis of the top secret Military Assistance Command Vietnam Studies and Observations Group, or SOG.
Go deep into the jungle with five SOG warriors surrounded by 10,000 enemy troops as they stack up the dead to build a human buttress for protection. Witness a Green Beret, shot in the back four times and left for dead, who survives to fight savagely against incredible odds to complete his missions.
Shudder as an enemy soldier touches a Green Beret’s boot in the dark of night. Cringe as a Sergeant on SOG Spike Team Louisiana calls in an air strike on his team to break an enemy’s wave attack. A team member dies instantly, and a Green Beret has an out-of-body experience as he watches his leg get blown off.
As the commander of SOG, I can say that Across the Fence accurately reflects why the secret war was hazardous for our troops and so deadly for the enemy. Major General John K.Singlaub (U.S.Army Ret. Black Ops told with the terrifying clarity that only one who was there can tell it.W.E.B.
5. The Best and the Brightest: Kennedy-Johnson Administrations (Modern Library)
Author: by David Halberstam
B000FC1GV0
Modern Library
March 26, 2002
David Halberstam’s masterpiece, the defining history of the making of the Vietnam tragedy, with a new Foreword by Senator John McCain.”A rich, entertaining, and profound reading experience. The New York Times Using portraits of America’ s flawed policy makers and accounts of the forces that drove them, The Best and the Brightest reckons magnificently with the most important abiding question of our country’ s recent history: Why did America become mired in Vietnam, and why did we lose?
As the definitive single-volume answer to that question, this enthralling book has never been superseded. It is an American classic. Praise for The Best and the BrightestThe 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 GlobeDeeply 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.
6. Portraits of Courage: A Commander in Chief's Tribute to America's Warriors
Author: by George W. Bush
Crown
English
192 pages
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A vibrant collection of oil paintings and stories by President George W. Bush honoring the sacrifice and courage of America’s military veterans. With Forewords by former First Lady Laura Bush and General Peter Pace, 16th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Growing out of President Bush’s own outreach and the ongoing work of the George W. Bush Institute’s Military Service Initiative, Portraits of Courage brings together sixty-six full-color portraits and a four-panel mural painted by President Bush of members of the United States military who have served our nation with honor since 9/11and whom he has come to know personally.
Our men and women in uniform have faced down enemies, liberated millions, and in doing so showed the true compassion of our nation. Often, they return home with injuriesboth visible and invisiblethat intensify the challenges of transitioning into civilian life.
In addition to these burdens, research shows a civilian-military divide. Seventy-one percent of Americans say they have little understanding of the issues facing veterans, and veterans agree: eighty-four percent say that the public has “little awareness” of the issues facing them and their families.
7. Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America
Author: by Kathleen Belew
Harvard University Press
English
352 pages
A Guardian Best Book of the YearA gripping study of white power Explosive. New York TimesHelps explain how we got to today’s alt-right. Terry Gross, Fresh AirThe white power movement in America wants a revolution. Returning to a country ripped apart by a war they felt they were not allowed to win, a small group of Vietnam veterans and disgruntled civilians who shared their virulent anti-communism and potent sense of betrayal concluded that waging war on their own country was justified.
The command structure of their covert movement gave women a prominent place. They operated with discipline, made tragic headlines in Waco, Ruby Ridge, and Oklahoma City, and are resurgent under President Trump. Based on a decade of deep immersion in previously classified FBI files and on extensive interviews, Bring the War Home tells the story of American paramilitarism and the birth of the alt-right.
A much-needed and troubling revelation The power of Belew’s book comes, in part, from the fact that it reveals a story about white-racist violence that we should all already know. The NationFascinating Shows how hatred of the federal government, fears of communism, and racism all combined in white-power ideology and explains why our responses to the movement have long been woefully inadequate.
8. Legend: The Incredible Story of Green Beret Sergeant Roy Benavidez's Heroic Mission to Rescue a Special Forces Team Caught Behind Enemy Lines
Author: by Eric Blehm
Crown
English
304 pages
The true story of the U.S. Army’s 240th Assault Helicopter Company and a Green Beret Staff Sergeant’s heroic mission to rescue a Special Forces team trapped behind enemy lines during the Vietnam War, from New York Times bestselling author Eric Blehm.
On May 2, 1968, a twelve-man Special Forces team covertly infiltrated a small clearing in the jungles of neutral Cambodiawhere U.S. Forces were forbidden to operate. Their objective, just miles over the Vietnam border, was to collect evidence that proved the North Vietnamese Army was using the Cambodian sanctuary as a major conduit for supplying troops and materiel to the south via the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
What the team didn’t know was that they had infiltrated a section of jungle that concealed a major enemy base. Soon they found themselves surrounded by hundreds of NVA, under attack, low on ammunition, stacking the bodies of the dead as cover in a desperate attempt to survive the onslaught.
When Special Forces Staff Sergeant Roy Benavidez heard their distress call, he jumped aboard the next helicopter bound for the combat zone. What followed would become legend in the Special Operations community. Flown into the foray of battle by the 240th Assault Helicopter Company, Benavidez jumped from the hovering aircraft, ran nearly 100 yards through withering enemy fire, and-despite being immediately and severely wounded-organized an extraordinary defense and rescue of the Special Forces team.
9. Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975
Author: by Sir Max Hastings
B071VJBRB6
Harper
October 16, 2018
An absorbing and definitive modern history of the Vietnam War from the acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of The Secret War. Vietnam became the Western world’s most divisive modern conflict, precipitating a battlefield humiliation for France in 1954, then a vastly greater one for the United States in 1975.
Max Hastings has spent the past three years interviewing scores of participants on both sides, as well as researching a multitude of American and Vietnamese documents and memoirs, to create an epic narrative of an epic struggle. He portrays the set pieces of Dienbienphu, the 1968 Tet offensive, the air blitz of North Vietnam, and also much less familiar miniatures such as the bloodbath at Daido, where a US Marine battalion was almost wiped out, together with extraordinary recollections of Ho Chi Minh’s warriors.
Here are the vivid realities of strife amid jungle and paddies that killed two million people. Many writers treat the war as a US tragedy, yet Hastings sees it as overwhelmingly that of the Vietnamese people, of whom forty died for every American.
10. We Few: U.S. Special Forces in Vietnam
Author: by Nick Brokhausen
B07CMHKC5Q
April 3, 2018
English
A Green Beret’s gripping memoir of American Special Forces in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. In 1970, on his second tour to Vietnam, Nick Brokhausen served in Recon Team Habu, CCN. Officially, it was known as the Studies and Observations group.
In fact, this Special Forces squad, which Brokhausen calls an unwashed, profane, ribald, joyously alive fraternity, undertook some of the most dangerous and suicidal reconnaissance missions ever in the enemy-controlled territory of Cambodia and Laos. But they didn’t infiltrate the jungles alone.
They fought alongside the Montagnardsoppressed minorities from the mountain highlands, trained by the US military in guerilla tactics, armed, accustomed to the wild, and fully engaged in a war against the North Vietnamese. Together this small unit formed the backbone of ground reconnaissance in the Republic of Vietnam, racking up medals for valorbut at a terrible cost.
In colorful, military-jargon-laced prose leavened by gallows humor, Brokhausen pulls few punches describing what it was like to navigate remote jungle terrain under the constant threat of enemy fire. A smartly written, insider’s view of one rarely seen Vietnam War battleground.
11. You Don't Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War
Author: by Elizabeth Becker
English
320 pages
1541768205
The long-buried story of three extraordinary female journalists who permanently shattered the barriers to women covering war. Kate Webb, an Australian iconoclast, Catherine Leroy, a French daredevil photographer, and Frances FitzGerald, a blue-blood American intellectual, arrived in Vietnam with starkly different life experiences but one shared purpose: to report on the most consequential story of the decade.
At a time when women were considered unfit to be foreign reporters, Frankie, Catherine, and Kate challenged the rules imposed on them by the military, ignored the belittlement of their male peers, and ultimately altered the craft of war reportage for generations.
In You Don’t Belong Here, Elizabeth Becker uses these women’s work and lives to illuminate the Vietnam War from the 1965 American buildup, the expansion into Cambodia, and the American defeat and its aftermath. Arriving herself in the last years of the war, Becker writes as a historian and a witness of the times.
12. Undaunted Valor: An Assault Helicopter Unit in Vietnam
Author: by Colonel Matt Jackson
English
433 pages
1703382641
American troops are in contactThe UH-1H helicopter swoops in to bail them outTracer fire everywhere, the windshield shatters, the door gunners returning fireWill Colonel Cory’s helicopter be able to rescue the pinned down soldiers? Undaunted Valor is the first hand account of helicopter pilot, Colonel Dan Cory as he flies combat missions in the jungles of Vietnams.
From dodging enemy ground fire and RPGs, to constant mortar and rocket attacks on his base, Colonel Cory stared down the enemy to bring his fellow soldiers’ home. Join Colonel Cory as he recounts some of the most intense helicopter and ground combat of the Vietnam war from the eyes of a man who spent two combat tours there.
From being shot down by enemy fire, to leading his air crew to repel an enemy assault, Colonel Cory’s firsthand accounts of the Vietnam War are awe inspiring. Awarded the Silver Star, and two Bronze Stars for Valor, Cory’s hair-raising accounts of what it was like to fly over the Jungles of Vietnam will make you feel as if you are right there with him.
13. Whisky Tango Foxtrot
Author: by Lynne M. Black Jr.
English
376 pages
1463797796
Lynne Black is one of those warriors who have added one more piece to the puzzle which was known as MACV-SOG and the secret projects that fought the silent, bloody contacts across the fence in the Second Indochina War. His details of a Saigon Headquarters debriefing by Chief SOG, Colonel Steve Cavanaugh, are the first, in-depth recorded recollections of one of those taut, sometimes combative, sessions between the desk jockeys and the men whom they sent, all-too-often, to their deaths.
His narration of the events which a History Channel program labeled Jungle Ambush, which is part of series titled Heroes Under Fire, will immediately immerse the reader in what it meant to win The Lottery at FOB 1. The Target Area encompassing the crossroads of Routes 92 and 922, best known by the one name that to this day will conjure images of death and destruction to any recon man who ever ran there: Oscar Eight; was the prize.
That aspect of the book is sufficient to make the reader become glued to the pages, as the recon team faces what will eventually be revealed to be very, very long odds. The book is not simply about running and gunning, but also contains some intimate insight into the mind-set, the motivations, of these young men thrust into situations which few readers will ever come to understand.
14. The Giant Killer: American hero, mercenary, spy … The incredible true story of the smallest man to serve in the U.S. Military—Green Beret Captain Richard J. Flaherty
Author: by David A. Yuzuk
English
318 pages
195065947X
4′ 9″ 97lbs Vietnam Vet Green Beret Captain Richard J. Flaherty – 101st Airborne & 3rd Special Forces Group Vietnam 1967-1971. #1 New York Times bestselling author Doug Stanton “You are holding in your hands an amazing journey into a world of puzzles, intrigue, and mystery.
Giant Killers are among us- author David Yuzuk walked with one and returned with this tale. If Richard Flaherty was only the shortest man to ever be in the U.S. Army and a Green Beret, that would certainly be a unique story in itself.
Flaherty was much more, though. He was a bonafide war hero and beloved leader of the men he commanded. A small stature with a oversized shadow. Yet, he was cut from the Army that was his life after two tours in Vietnam.
This story documents as much as can be known about a man whose post army life was spent in a variety of jobs freelancing, alternating between classified missions conducted by the CIA and NSA…. What an interesting man and totally unique story.
John Werner, VINE VOICE At 4′ 9″ tall, Richard J. Flaherty needed a Congressional waiver just to enlist in the Army as he did not meet the height or weight requirements. Bullied and ridiculed at boot camp, Flaherty nonetheless achieved the kind of stature that’s only dreamed of: He became a 101st Airborne Screaming Eagle and a 3rd Special Forces Group Green Beret Captain earning the Silver Star, 2 Bronze Stars and 2 Purple Hearts.
15. We Were Soldiers Once…and Young: Ia Drang – The Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam
Author: by Harold G. Moore
Presidio Press
English
480 pages
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.
