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Ngo The Vinh was an ARVN Airborne Ranger M.D. during the Vietnam War. This author, winner of the 1971 National Prize for Literature for his novel The Green Belt, ironically was also penalized for his writing, when he was summoned to the court of law because of the title story of this collection: "The Battle of Saigon". This short story records the spiritual journey of a soldier who accepts sacrifice and hardship in the struggle for freedom of South Vietnam, a soldier who at the same time longs for a better society in the future. For the contents of this work, Ngo The Vinh was accused of using the press to circulate arguments that were deemed detrimental to public order, that militated against the discipline and fighting spirit of the army, a collective of which he himself was a member. Like the title story, the other eleven works in this collection, half of them created before and the other half after 1975, present war and post-war traumatic experiences and dreams from the perspective of Vietnamese Diaspora. "The Battle of Saigon" has never ended and also will never end. The reality turns out to be that a writer possesses no power other than a sensitive heart that foresees in whole the Collective Pain. Everyone should read "The Battle of Saigon", and re-read it in order to reduce to some extent the cruelty and ruthlessness of the battle prevailing at present in Saigon, even in Hanoi, in the Central Highlands, in each of us here, overseas Vietnamese residing in the United States of America. -- Phan Nhat Nam, author of The Prisoners of War
The 1968 Tet Offensive resulted in a devastating battlefield defeat for the Viet Cong. But the Tet Offensive also marked the beginning of the end for the American war in Vietnam, and ultimately North Vietnam's 1975 conquest of the south. Keith Nolan's "The Battle for Saigon" is must reading for understanding how this happened. Illustrations. Maps.
An unforgettable true story of an orphan caught in the midst of war Over a million South Vietnamese children were orphaned by the Vietnam War. This affecting true account tells the story of Long, who, like more than 40,000 other orphans, is Amerasian -- a mixed-race child -- with little future in Vietnam. Escape from Saigon allows readers to experience Long's struggle to survive in war-torn Vietnam, his dramatic escape to America as part of "Operation Babylift" during the last chaotic days before the fall of Saigon, and his life in the United States as "Matt," part of a loving Ohio family. Finally, as a young doctor, he journeys back to Vietnam, ready to reconcile his Vietnamese past with his American present. As the thirtieth anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War approaches, this compelling account provides a fascinating introduction to the war and the plight of children caught in the middle of it.
Republic of Vietnam, May 1968: The battles of the Tet Offensive were over, and the Paris Peace Talks were about to begin. Yet, the battlefield situation remained tense. Shocked by the intensity and massive scale of the North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong’s Tet Offensive, allied commanders kept waiting for the other shoe to drop in the aftermath of the lunar New Year’s nationwide attacks against South Vietnam’s urban centers. Just days before the opening of the peace talks, that other shoe finally dropped. While they had no chance of securing victory on the battlefield with their second wave of urban attacks, the communists expected to wreak substantial psychological damage, making apparent to the American public, if not to the U.S. military high command, the folly of fighting a foe that was seemingly immune to combat losses. The second wave of attacks became known as the Mini-Tet Offensive. The name was a misnomer as far as the intensity of the combat was concerned. Although the communists concentrated on fewer targets than they had during Tet, Mini-Tet was the costliest two-week period of the Vietnam War in terms of American casualties. Saigon was the Mini-Tet’s primary target. In addition to penetrating the Cholon section of the capital, the enemy attacked the capital city’s southern suburbs of District 8. In response, four battalions from the 9th Infantry Division were dispatched from their Mekong Delta battlefields to clear out the invaders. What resulted was a brutal house-to-house street fight. Tenacious Viet Cong guerrillas dug in like termites, building bunkers inside and between houses, and knocking holes in adjoining walls so snipers could steal unseen from one building to another. There was no provision for retreat; the Viet Cong were on a suicide mission. On the other side were equally tenacious American infantrymen who had to adapt themselves to city fighting after previously operating in the rice paddies of the Delta. The battle for southern Saigon lasted a week; the U.S. Army’s only prolonged urban combat of the entire Vietnam War. The battle ended in a Pyrrhic victory for the soldiers of 9th Infantry Division. They had fought with raw courage, earning numerous decorations, including four Distinguished Service Crosses, in the course of pushing the Viet Cong out of District 8. However, in fighting that eerily foreshadows American combat in Iraqi cities, the engaged battalions destroyed the neighborhoods they liberated. This destruction, and the attendant civilian casualties, resulted in an official investigation of the 9th Infantry Division for its sledgehammer application of artillery and air strikes within the capital of South Vietnam.
*Includes pictures *Includes a bibliography for further reading The Vietnam War could have been called a comedy of errors if the consequences weren't so deadly and tragic. In 1951, while war was raging in Korea, the United States began signing defense pacts with nations in the Pacific, intending to create alliances that would contain the spread of Communism. As the Korean War was winding down, America joined the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, pledging to defend several nations in the region from Communist aggression. One of those nations was South Vietnam. Before the Vietnam War, most Americans would have been hard pressed to locate Vietnam on a map. South Vietnamese President Diem's regime was extremely unpopular, and war broke out between Communist North Vietnam and South Vietnam around the end of the 1950s. Kennedy's administration tried to prop up the South Vietnamese with training and assistance, but the South Vietnamese military was feeble. A month before his death, Kennedy signed a presidential directive withdrawing 1,000 American personnel, and shortly after Kennedy's assassination, new President Lyndon B. Johnson reversed course, instead opting to expand American assistance to South Vietnam. Over the next few years, the American military commitment to South Vietnam grew dramatically, and the war effort became both deeper and more complex. The strategy included parallel efforts to strengthen the economic and political foundations of the South Vietnamese regime, to root out the Viet Cong guerrilla insurgency in the south, combat the more conventional North Vietnamese Army (NVA) near the Demilitarized Zone between north and south, and bomb military and industrial targets in North Vietnam itself. In public, American military officials and members of the Johnson administration stressed their tactical successes and offered rosy predictions; speaking before the National Press Club in November 1967, General Westmoreland claimed, "I have never been more encouraged in the four years that I have been in Vietnam. We are making real progress...I am absolutely certain that whereas in 1965 the enemy was winning, today he is certainly losing." Ripe for the plucking by North Vietnam, the country of South Vietnam found itself in an unenviable position in 1974. American forces rapidly withdrew, leaving only a few advisers and other personnel in place of the large forces deployed in the Southeast Asian theater until recently. President Gerald Ford and his staff, completely outmatched at the negotiations during the American retreat, parleyed from a position of weakness. The North Vietnamese gave essentially no useful concessions since they had no reason to, and they secured an American withdrawal without needing to remove their own advance units from South Vietnamese territory in return. Naturally, these facts reflected themselves in the morale of the two sides. South Vietnamese morale collapsed to catastrophic levels and remained there, though the ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) forces occasionally managed gallant, even heroic stands. The North Vietnamese, by contrast, felt confident of victory, from the highest to the lowest ranks. A mix of Marxist zeal and barely expressed but very real nationalism strengthened the resolve of the North Vietnamese's commanders and soldiers as well. A haunting fear remained among the North Vietnamese that the Americans would return, but each fresh success with no American response made this concern recede further into the background. As 1975 dawned, the NVA prepared for a final series of campaigns to conquer the territory of South Vietnam, leading to a chain of events that culminated with the fall of Saigon and some of the most infamous footage in 20th century America's history. The Fall of Saigon: The History of the Battle for South Vietnam's Capital and the End of the Vietnam War examines how the war ended.
An examination of the political and cultural dynamism of the Republic of Vietnam until its collapse on April 30, 1975.
A slim, detailed volume on a key moment in the Vietnam War, featuring battlescenes, maps and archive photography. The 1968 Tet Offensive was the decisive battle for Vietnam. Masterminded by the brilliant North Vietnamese General, Vo Nguyen Giap, it was intended to trigger a general uprising in South Vietnam. However, the bloody fighting for Saigon, Hue and other cities actually resulted in a catastrophic defeat for the North. In this excellent assessment of the key battle of the Vietnam conflict, James Arnold details the plans and forces involved and explains how, despite the outcome of the battle, the American people and their leaders came to perceive the war for Vietnam as lost.
"Three days before Easter last spring, the North Vietnamese struck South Vietnam with a fury unknown to the Vietnam war since the Tet offensive four years earlier. They poured south across the DMZ, smashed into the central highland from Laos, crossed the border from Cambodia and, with an army of 36,000 men and 100 Russian-made tanks, raced toward Saigon, boasting that they'd be in the city by May 19, Ho Chi Minh's birthday. From one end of the country to the other, bases and villages fell before the savagery of their onslaught. By April 5, all that blocked them from Saigon was a ragtag band of 6,800 South Vietnamese regulars and militiamen and a handful of American advisors holed up in An Loc, a once-prosperous rubber-plantation town of 15,000 astride Highway 13, which led to the capital, 60 miles to the south ... In Thi's opinion, reporting the victory of An Loc would contradict the U.S. media's basic premise that the war could not be won because ARVN was a corrupt and ineffective force. Subsequent published studies of the conflict provide a wealth of details about the use of U.S. airpower and the role of the U.S. advisors, but they fail to provide equal coverage to the activities and performance of ARVN units participating in the siege. Thi believes that it is time to set the record straight. Without denying the tremendous contribution of the U.S. advisors and pilots to the success of An Loc, this book is written primarily to tell the South Vietnamese side of the story and, more importantly, to render justice to the South Vietnamese soldier who withstood ninety-four days of horror and prevailed"--Publisher's website.
Most history-minded Americans have discussed the Vietnam War, becoming familiar, at the very least, with the names of such pivotal events as the Siege of Khe Sanh, the Tet Offensive, and the Fall of Saigon. But to grasp the full impact of this agonizing conflict, the human costs of an infernal war that raged for ten years and took more than 58,000 American lives, one must hear about it from the soldiers, sailors, and airmen who experienced the fighting and endured. In The Soldiers’ Story, veteran journalist Ron Steinman gathers the candid reminiscences of seventy-six men who survived combat in Vietnam. Not a military analysis or political study, this oral history vividly conveys the hardships, friendships, fears, and personal triumphs of Marine, Army, Air Force, and Navy veterans—each of whom shares memories that have lingered to this day. It is a valuable frontline record of battle-torn Vietnam from the perspective of those who lived it first-hand, giving us a window into the horror, intensity, and raw courage that the war engendered. For this tenth anniversary reissue of the book, at a time of the continued commitment of American military forces on other continents, Steinman has added a brief new foreword, addressing the ongoing significance of soldiers’ stories—both to themselves and to their families. Praise for The Soldiers’ Story: “Ranks among the most vivid accounts of the war.”—Stanley Karnow “Their stories are as dangerous as the battles they fought—stunning, plain-spoken recollections that reveal the terror of combat and theperils of a far-off war and the folly of government policy.”— New York Newsday “A powerful book that brings to life the triumphs and tragedies experienced by American soldiers in Vietnam. This excellent compilation belongs on every Vietnam bookshelf.”—Publishers Weekly
The Battle of An Loc was one of the bloodiest battles in the Vietnam War and a defining moment in the history of the Republic of South Vietnam. A few square blocks tucked among vast rubber tree plantations, the provincial town was thought to be of little strategic value to the North Vietnamese. Yet for 66 days in 1972, it was the scene of savage house-to-house street fighting as artillery and mortar fire pounded the town daily until almost nothing was left standing. Facing three North Vietnamese infantry divisions, General Le Van Hưng defended the town with 7,500 men, vowing to "die with An Loc." A decisive victory for the South Vietnamese, the battle came at a time when the United States had begun pulling out of Vietnam and few American troops were on the ground. No foreign reporters were on hand and the action was ignored or misreported by the world press. This book tells the story of An Loc from the unique perspective of an officer who shared a bunker with the general during the fight.