I served in Vietnam in 1969 carrying a radio on my back with the 12th Marines on the DMZ. In 1970, I was a door gunner with HMM-364 (Purple Fox Squadron) out of Marble Mountain. Beginning in 1996, I have led 68 tours for veterans, their family members, historians, active-duty military personnel, and others to the jungles, mountains, and battlefields of Vietnam. I currently serve as president and bush guide for the non-profit tour company, Vietnam Battlefield Tours. As an avid reader of non-fiction books on the Vietnam experience, this knowledge base has helped tremendously in my non-profit volunteer service.
I wrote
VIETNAM War SPEAK: The Distinctive Language of the Vietnam Era
This short book depicts the actions of Vietnamese Marine Corps Advisor, John Ripley, and his heroic actions to stop the onslaught of the NVA tank invasion during the 1972 Easter Offensive. It provides a shining example of how one person can affect the outcome of a battle and to never, ever give up.
This is the true story of the legendary Vietnam War hero John Ripley, who braved intense enemy fire to destroy a strategic bridge and stall a major North Vietnamese invasion into the South in April 1972. Told by a fellow Marine, the account lays bare Ripley's innermost thoughts as he rigged 500 pounds of explosives by hand-walking the beams beneath the bridge, crimped detonators with his teeth, and raced the burning fuses back to shore, thus saving his comrades from certain death.
First published in 1989, the book has broad appeal as a riveting tale of adventure. But John Miller…
A true, non-fiction page-turner. This book describes the harrowing exploits of Sergeant Carlos Hathcock. This highly successful manhunter struck fear into the enemy’s heart. The communists offered an enormous bounty for his dead body. But the only ones who wound up dead, were the enemy.
The explosive true story of Sergeant Carlos Hathcock, a legendary Marine sniper in the Vietnam War.
There have been many Marines. There have been many marksmen. But there has only been one Sergeant Carlos Hathcock.
He stalked the Viet Cong behind enemy lines-on their own ground. And each time, he emerged from the jungle having done his duty. His record is one of the finest in military history, with ninety-three confirmed kills.
This is the story of a simple man who endured incredible dangers and hardships for his country and his Corps. These are the missions that have made Carlos…
It is rare when an actual participant of a battle can produce such a chilling and accurate narrative that keeps a reader’s attention page after page. This was the Tet Offensive urban battle for the Citadel, a walled city containing a labyrinth of buildings and houses jammed around numerous narrow streets. This was city fighting at its worst. In the end, many thousands of the enemy lay dead.
The bloody, month-long battle for the Citadel in Hue during 1968 pitted U.S. Marines against an entrenched, numerically superior North Vietnamese Army force. By official U.S. accounts it was a tactical and moral victory for the Marines and the United States. But a survivor's compulsion to square official accounts with his contrasting experience has produced an entirely different perspective of the battle, the most controversial to emerge from the Vietnam War in decades.
In some of the most frank, vivid prose to come out of the war, author Nicholas Warr describes with urgency and outrage the Marines' savage house-to-house fighting,…
The author has the gift of recall and detail that mesmerizes the reader as to the life of a young, high school dropout who finds himself in the most brutal fighting in the Que Son Valley. He leaves out no account to soften the blows for sensitive readers. He tells it as he experienced it. In the end, this devastating book leaves the reader on a high point... that there is salvation.
The naive plans of our youth often escalate to a point beyond our understanding or control. This is the story of a young man that at every turn believed the resolution for every problem was just around the next bend in the road of life. Instead with every turn came only more problems and hopelessness until finally one man came into his life showing him that during his life he was walking on the graves of his predecessors and that final the grave was an empty tomb.
This is a memoir that does not read like a memoir. It brings to the reader the harsh reality of war and a personal perspective on how one perceives war, told without shame or bravado. The reader is brought full circle from the fighting and destruction in 1967-68 to standing on the same battlefields some 45 years later, in peace.
To Hear Silence is the history of Charlie Battery, 1st Battalion, 13th Marines, from the time of its formation at Camp Horno, California, in July 1966, until the original members left Vietnam in early October 1967.Although partly written in narrative format, this book paints an accurate portrayal of the experiences of what really happened in 1966 and 1967 through its day-to-day, and often minute-to-minute, accounts of the members' time in Vietnam.This book is based on a diary kept by the author while in Vietnam, the actual declassified documents kept by the Marine Corps, and the memories of those who lived…
If there ever was a time worthy of its own vernacular, it is the Vietnam Era. A generation split by peace and war spawned a library of lingo, slang, and fresh new words like no era before it. The warriors found that the torch had been passed to them by an assassinated president. It motivated them to bear any burden and to pay any price. And they created a second language to augment what they brought with them.
In this book, you will find over 2,500 terms, acronyms, jargon, slang expressions, and various lingo transported to you by Vietnam servicemen who showed remarkable insight into their own generational place in history. It is not a language for the timid nor the politically correct. But it is the language of reality.
I come by my interest in history and the years before, during, and after the Second World War honestly. For one thing, both my father and my father-in-law served as pilots in the war, my father a P-38 pilot in North Africa and my father-in-law a B-17 bomber pilot in England. Their histories connect me with a period I think we can still almost reach with our fingertips and one that has had a momentous impact on our lives today. I have taken that interest and passion to discover and write true life stories of the war—focusing on the untold and unheard stories often of the “Average Joe.”
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on any other single day of the war.
The narrative of No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident while focusing its attention on ordinary individuals—clerks, radio operators, cooks, sailors, machinist mates, riflemen, and pilots and their air crews. All were men who chose to serve their country and soon found themselves in a terrifying and otherworldly place.
No Average Day reveals the vastness of the war as it reaches past the beaches in…
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, or on June 6, 1944, when the Allies stormed the beaches of Normandy, or on any other single day of the war. In its telling of the events of October 24, No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident. The book begins with Army Private First-Class Paul Miller's pre-dawn demise in the Sendai #6B Japanese prisoner of war camp. It concludes with the death…
