Military Vietnam

An Army Aviator's personal story of a year in Vietnam flying low and flying slow over the canals and rice paddies of the always dangerous Mekong Delta. They were known as the Shotguns, dependable, always by the side of America's Advisors engaged in battle, and ready to do whatever was asked of them.

By the late 1960s, what had been widely heralded as the best qualified, best-trained army in United States history was descending into crisis as the Vietnam War raged without end. Morale was tanking. AWOL rates were rising. And in August 1968, a group of Black soldiers seized control of the infamous Long Binh Jail, burned buildings, and beat a white inmate to death with a shovel. The days of "same mud, same blood" were over, and a new generation of Black GIs had decisively rejected the slights and institutional racism their forefathers had endured.

Vietnam, October 1966. ANZAC and US forces have secured Route 15 running through the heart of Phuc Tuy Province. Now at full strength the ANZAC 5th Battalion take the fight to the enemy in a grand, aggressive sweep. Their mission to locate and destroy Viet Cong bases and infrastructure within the Nui Thi Vai Mountains. They’ve been in this area before, but never in sufficient numbers to bring the enemy to bear.

When some of America's military men are captured or go missing during the Vietnam War, a small group of military wives become their champions. Never had families taken on diplomatic roles during wartime, nor had the fate of our POWs and missing men been a nationwide concern. In cinematic detail, authors Taylor Baldwin Kiland and Judy Silverstein Gray plunge you directly into the political maneuvering the women navigated, onto the international stage they shared with world leaders, and through the landmark legacy they created.

Duty – Service – Love of country – Honor – Dreams – Family. Those words mean everything to young Michael “Mikey” Roberts. From a small Kansas town, Mikey wants to find his path in life. To accomplish that he joins the United States Army. During his first tour of duty in Vietnam, he found his path…medicine. He became a Special Forces medic. However, in war that path can fork many times. Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worst. Mikey finds more horror than he expected and learns more about life than he ever wanted to know.

The American war in Vietnam was concluded in 1973 after eight years of fighting, bloodshed, and loss. Yet the terms of the truce that ended the war were effectively identical to what had been offered to the Nixon administration four years earlier. Those four years cost America and Vietnam thousands of lives and billions of dollars, and they were the direct result of the supposed master plan of the most important voice in American foreign policy: Henry Kissinger.

Peter Huchthausen, a river patrol officer on Vietnam's Mekong River Delta in 1967, rescued a badly wounded Vietnamese child, Nguyen Thi Lung. He and his men arranged for the girl's treatment and education, only to lose track of her when her town was overrun by the North Vietnamese during the Tet Offensive.

In the late summer of 1968, several intelligence sources stated that numerous American POW's were being held in bamboo cages for transport by vehicle up the Ho Chi Minh Trail from the North Vietnamese Army stronghold the Plei Trap Valley. Special Forces CPT Joe Dietrich and 1LT Don Bendell volunteered to lead a helicopter assault into the Plei Trap Valley with 100 Montagnard mercenaries as the point element of a joint task force of soldiers of the 4th Infantry Division.

In the spring of 1972, North Vietnam invaded South Vietnam in what became known as the Easter Offensive. Almost all of the American forces had already withdrawn from Vietnam except for a small group of American advisers to the South Vietnamese armed forces. The 23rd ARVN Infantry Division and its American advisers were sent to defend the provincial capital of Kontum in the Central Highlands.

I watched two point men take 50-caliber machine gun bullets to the head and watched the third being grabbed and taken behind enemy lines. Two of the enemy soldiers, whom we often referred to as gooks, quickly came after me. As I mowed them down with my automatic rifle, I crawled backward, away from the enemy gunfire, using my helmet to push sand in front of me as I went, which made it possible to look behind me. But as I looked back, I realized my safety net was no longer safe.

A few years after his release from a North Vietnamese prisoner-of-war camp, in 1973, Colonel Joseph Kittinger retired from the Air Force. Restless and unchallenged, he turned to ballooning, a lifelong passion as well as a constant diversion for his imagination during his imprisonment. His primary goal was a solitary circumnavigation of the globe, and in its pursuit he set several ballooning distance records, including the first solo crossing of the Atlantic in 1984. But the aeronautical feats that first made him an American hero had occurred a quarter of a century earlier....

In January 1968, the 26th Marine Regiment was ordered to a place in the far northwest corner of South Vietnam called Khe Sanh. John Corbett, an untested replacement in a clean, green uniform, and his fellow leathernecks were responsible for building and defending the combat base, and holding positions on the strategic hills overlooking the Ho Chi Minh Trail as it crossed into Laos and South Vietnam from nearby North Vietnam. Only days after Corbett arrived at Khe Sanh, some 20,000 North Vietnamese soldiers surrounded the base, outnumbering the American Marines seven to one.

Spreading democracy takes more than cutting-edge military hardware. Winning the hearts and minds of a troubled nation is a special mission we give to bewildered young soldiers who can't speak the native language, don't know the customs, can't tell friends from enemies, and, in this wonderfully outrageous Iraq-era novel about Vietnam, wonder why they have to risk their lives spraying peanut plants, inoculating pigs, and hauling miracle rice seed for Ho Chi Minh.

Vietnam, 1968—A US military Intelligence officer discovers the enemy has a stronghold deep inside Nui Ba Den, the Black Virgin Mountain. Inside is an extensive subterranean network of tunnels and caves being used by the NVA to store equipment and weapons. US Army Special Forces Captain Mack Gerber and Master Sergeant Anthony B. Fetterman are dispatched to Nui Ba Den to destroy the NVA base.

The rubella epidemic of 1964-65. The Vietnam War. Both converge on twelve-year-old Debbie when her sister is born with disabilities and her father may be flying into danger. Labeled as a “rubella baby,” Debbie’s sister Krista is born blind in one eye and with a hole in her heart. Although she survives risky open-heart surgery, months pass, and she doesn’t babble or crawl like most babies do. Doctors decide Krista is cognitively challenged—she’ll never be able to learn—and they advise her parents to put her in an institution. Just forget about her and raise their three “...

How can an Air Force kid survive junior high when her dad’s at war, her little sister is deaf, and friends have abandoned her? It’s 1967 and Debbie Hansen hates her life. She has to leave all of her New York friends, move to California’s Mojave Desert, then back to New York, all because her dad will be sent to Vietnam for a year. And three out of five pilots never come home. Debbie could be fatherless before she starts high school. Her only comfort? She’d have her old friends to lean on if the worst happened. Wrong. When Debbie returns to her hometown, she finds the group moved on ...

In February 1971, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) launched an incursion into Laos in an attempt to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail and destroy North Vietnamese Army (NVA) base areas along the border. US ground forces would support the operation from within South Vietnam and would pave the way to the border for ARVN troops, and US air support would cover the South Vietnamese forces once they entered Laos, but the South Vietnamese forces would attack on the ground alone.

A collection of short stories of people and events about my time in the service, and the year serving my country in Vietnam.

Corporal Jackman and his platoon, alongside their ARVN allies, are thrust into a deadly mission on Long Son Island during the early months of 1967. Tasked with rooting out a fortified Viet Cong force, they encounter relentless guerrilla tactics, ambushes, and a sniper who strikes with deadly precision. As the island becomes a brutal battleground, Jackman must lead his men through a maze of violence and betrayal.

Realm of the Golden Dragon is a sea story. On 17 August 1967, after many years of being home ported in Hawaii, the 180-foot Coast Guard Cutter Basswood set sail for her new home port on Guam in the Marianas Islands. During her travels, she would unleash sixty fun-loving, frolicking, fornicating, fighting, young Coasties on forty-seven Pacific Islands and five Asian Nations. This epic voyage would take them to the hooker bars and short-time hotels of Olongapo in the Philippines, the Vietcong infested bays and rivers of Vietnam, and the vaunted Namenoue Red Light District in Naha, Okinawa. ...