In 1965, Hank Tucker and his Brother Toby were out of draft deferments when they discovered an AFL/CIO poster in the union hiring hall advertising a Navy enlistment program offering advanced enlisted paygrades to construction men with extensive experience in the trades and heavy equipment. Just sign up for a thirty month enlistment and they could enter the Navy Seabees as instant petty officers. At that point, joining one of the services was the only way they could avoid getting drafted and joining the Navy sounded like the best deal in town. No guns. No foxholes. No battles. It didn't ...

Each soldier in Vietnam fought his own war. For some it was a war with loneliness, boredom, and endless fatigue. For others it was a war with unyielding jungle, mountains, and disease. For still others it was a war with terror and death and all of the above. And then there was the secret war fought mostly by Army Special Forces and Navy Seals. For these secret warriors, the war was seldom boring and always dangerous. The mountains and jungles of Laos and Cambodia were their playground, and disease, terror, and death stalked them on every mission. Sergeant First Class Ed Potter, returning ...

There was a truce on New Year’s Day, 1968, and Third Brigade of 25th Infantry Division used the respite to build a new fire support base near the Cambodian border, in a vast forested area of Viet Nam called War Zone C. They called it Fire Support Base Burt, manned by two infantry battalions and three batteries of artillery. When the truce ended at midnight, January 1, the Communist forces in the area responded by launching a massive assault on the base. Vastly outnumbered, the American soldiers repelled attack after attack and eventually forced the enemy to withdraw after suffering ...

The Beast, Raymond Hunter Pyle’s fourth and final novel featuring Marines in Vietnam tells a story about a small outpost during the final months before the Third Marine Division was pulled out of combat in Vietnam. For Marines, the Vietnam conflict was different in I-Corps along the DMZ, different and more massively deadly than the conflict in other parts of the country. That’s not to say the Army and other Marine units didn’t have a deadly time further south, but in northern I-Corps along the Z, south to Khe Sanh and the A-Shau valley, east to Cua Viet and west to Laos, and all of ...

The Viet-Nam War for America began in 1964, and finally ended in 1975. Nearly 59,000 Americans died, over 300,000 were wounded, and in total, almost 3,000,000 served "in-country." Combat was usually short-lived skirmishes, ambushes, and some longer sustained battles such as Dak To, Khe Sanh, and the 1968 Tet Offensive. No matter where you were stationed, there were always potential hazards to be faced. Allied forces faced not only an armed guerrilla population, but many "natural" hazards to one's health. Every American who served in Viet-Nam and came home after the end of their tour brought...

The true story of Lieutenant Steve Joyner, who carried all the traits of a "perfect Marine" - character, compassion, determination, patriotism . . . an All-American football star. But then came the harsh and unforgiving realities of combat in Vietnam. How the two worlds he inhabited both connected and conflicted reveals the character of an extraordinary man gone far too soon. "Promise Lost is a touching, crisply rendered account of a Marine lieutenant who fell heroically in the final, bloody days of the 1968 battle for Khe Sanh while leading a counterattack into the teeth of an overwhelming...

“A moving testimonial to the lads who answered their country’s call and whose devotion is brought to life in this searing, captivating account of infantry combat in Vietnam." General Jim Mattis, U.S. Marines (ret.) & 26th Secretary of Defense Follow a 17 year old Marine recruit through Marine Corps boot camp at Parris island and a combat tour in Vietnam. The gripping accounts of ambushes in the jungle, firefights in rice paddies, and night watches in listening posts. There is humor, horror, sadness at the loss of friends and primal fear. There is also bravery. During the entire Vietnam ...

…Ben Het has tanks in the wire! “Hawk Claw is engaging,” the pilot reports firing the first TOW missile ever from a helicopter in combat. Fire Base Delta had already been over run and Fire Base Charlie was fighting for its life. How much would fall before the North Vietnamese army was knocking on the doors of the key city of Kontum? This was the third phase of the North Vietnamese Easter Offensive Campaign of 1972. Standing across the country between them and the fall of Saigon was a poorly led South Vietnamese Army, brave South Vietnamese soldiers, and US Advisors. How much ground ...

In 1964, Charles A. McDonald was at Camp Khe Sanh before the first wholesale introduction of North Vietnamese Army troops onto the battlefield against U.S. forces. For twenty-four years in war and peace, McDonald served his country in its elite units as an Airborne Infantryman and Special Forces soldier. He trained and armed Bru tribesmen, Chinese mercenaries, Vietmamese Airborne and Special Forces troops. Stories as seen through his eyes "In This Valley There Are Tigers", McDonald tells a narrative of the personal violence and desperate suicide attacks in combat with vivid detail as it was...

Into The Mouth of The Cat: The Story of Lance Sijan, Hero of Vietnam tells the gripping true story of Lance Sijan. He was a United States Air Force captain in the Vietnam War. On November 9, 1967, Sijan was ejected from his F-4 Phantom II at high speed and a low altitude, causing him to suffer massive injuries to his entire body. During his violent ejection and very rough parachute landing on the karst ridge, Captain Lance Sijan suffered a fractured skull, a mangled right hand, with three of his fingers dislocated, and deep cuts and gashes in his forearms, a compound fracture of the left ...

Few American battles have been so extended, savage, and personal. A handful of Americans volunteered to live among six thousand Vietnamese, training farmers to defend their village. Such "Combined Action Platoons" (CAPs) are not a lost footnote about how the war could have been fought; only the villagers remain to bear witness. This is the story of 15 resolute young Americans matched against two hundred Viet Cong; how a CAP lived, fought, and died; and why the villagers remember them to this day.

This is the word for word account of one man's experience in Vietnam at the end of the conflict. He dictated his story to me, his wife, in March through May of 2010, just 2 years before he passed.

This book is an unvarnished look at the life of a helicopter pilot and his year in Vietnam. He arrived at the beginning of the great Tet Offensive in 1968. Some stories are humorous, some are not. It's an honest inside look at that war.

The United States Army drafted Steve in 1969. Like many young men, he was unaware of the consequences of being drafted until being sent to Vietnam. Although his father was also drafted into the Armed Forces for World War II, nothing could have prepared Steve for the year of duty to come. Growing up in a large family, he developed a talent early on for storytelling. His accounts of Vietnam will have you imagining him sitting across a campfire telling his story.

A secret revealed on his father’s death bed leads young Peter Lucas to become the U.S. Army’s most lethal sniper in a story that twists and turns from the frozen battlefield in Korea to the sweltering jungles of Vietnam. Along the way Peter is transformed from a high school football star into a deadly shadow warrior. Losing his father throws his world upside down, but a request for information about his father’s past sets in motion a string of events that will forever change Peter’s life. A family history he had never known pushes Peter into the world of clandestine operations. His ...