COMBAT VETERAN

Hailed as a "pithy and compelling account of an intensely relevant topic" ( Kirkus Reviews), this wide-ranging volume offers a superb account of a key moment in modern U.S. and world history. Drawing upon the latest research in archives in China, Russia, and Vietnam, Mark Lawrence creates an extraordinary, panoramic view of all sides of the war.

Now an American classic, this is a Vietnam book unlike any other, written by a woman who, after two years of covering the war for The New York Times, comes home wanting to once more love her country and to understand it. In four years of interviews that Newsweek called “superb,” Emerson traveled across America to speak to people who fought the war or who fought against it, to those who paid little attention and to others whose lives were changed by it.

The National Security Agency was born out of the legendary codebreaking programs of World War II that cracked the famed Enigma machine and other German and Japanese codes, thereby turning the tide of Allied victory. In the postwar years, as the United States developed a new enemy in the Soviet Union, our intelligence community found itself targeting not soldiers on the battlefield, but suspected spies, foreign leaders, and even American citizens.

They called it "minor surgery", but Nancy Greenly, Sean Berman, and a dozen others - all admitted to Boston Memorial Hospital for routine procedures - were victims of the same inexplicable, hideous tragedy on the operating table. They never woke up...

Dan Lyons resigned as Dean of Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington to become the free world's leading advocate of winning the war in Vietnam, visiting there 17 times between 1963 and 1975. His 500 daily radio and TV broadcasts, plus his nationwide weekly columns and debates on college campuses, reached millions every week for 12 years. In this book, he presents a brilliant exposé of why we lost the war, and why and how we should have won.

This ranks as one of the best books available about the Vietnam War from an ordinary soldier's point of view. A must read book. The author has captured the essence of that experience and that time in our history!