Latest Book Received

These are the most recent Vietnam related books I have acquired.



Skyline Ridge I have read. It is really well written as is anything by Parker. He served in Laos as a CIA case officer. Vang Pao's Hmong with some Thai battalions held off the NVA attack on Long Cheng despite tremendously heavy odds in favor of the NVA.

The Osprey in the middle I have not read yet. It may not show in this photo unless you enlarge it, but the NVA on the cover looks like a Caucasian. Must be some hippie traitor.

Silence was a Weapon is the account of an intelligence advisor involved in ferreting out the VC infrastructure. I read it years ago from the library and decided I wanted to buy a copy and read it again. The author was very successful in what he was doing. He was also able to turn North Vietnamese captives by showing them they had been duped about conditions in South Vietnam. This led to great intel. Reads like a novel.

Tom

NOT mine, I need to point out, but some guy posted this on a Vintage Paperbacks group on FB, and I thought it may be of interest to certain fans

Garryowen wrote:These are the most recent Vietnam related books I have acquired.



Skyline Ridge I have read. It is really well written as is anything by Parker. He served in Laos as a CIA case officer. Vang Pao's Hmong with some Thai battalions held off the NVA attack on Long Cheng despite tremendously heavy odds in favor of the NVA.

The Osprey in the middle I have not read yet. It may not show in this photo unless you enlarge it, but the NVA on the cover looks like a Caucasian. Must be some hippie traitor.

Silence was a Weapon is the account of an intelligence advisor involved in ferreting out the VC infrastructure. I read it years ago from the library and decided I wanted to buy a copy and read it again. The author was very successful in what he was doing. He was also able to turn North Vietnamese captives by showing them they had been duped about conditions in South Vietnam. This led to great intel. Reads like a novel.

Tom

They look good - yes the cover art on that Osprey book is strange: I thought that NVA guy was Australian on first sight.  I need more books on Laos so I'll keep that one in mind once I get through the current backlog.

OTB wrote:and I thought it may be of interest to certain fans

OTB wrote:NOT mine, I need to point out, but some guy posted this on a Vintage Paperbacks group on FB, and I thought it may be of interest to certain fans

Drape a base cloth over those and you could use them as a Central Highlands mountain range....

Tom

Just got this one.

That looks good.

Three books found in Wellington over the weekend:



This one is an analysis of effectiveness on the battlefield and looks like an interesting read.



A novel about an ACAV unit by a Vietnam veteran. I have dipped into this and it's very detailed and realistic - you can almost smell the grease and gasoline.



And a book compiled by the reporter from The Killing Fields.

DaNang Diary is good.

Tom

Totally agree Tom. Only reason I put it down is because of work.

Regarding Da Nang Diary, here are the notes I made from it that I thought were interesting from a wargaming standpoint. 

SOG extraction. Ambush in insertion LZ with the slick shot down on the LZ as the six man team made it to the tree line. Covey had two Cobras, two Spads and two more Huey slicks. NVA were on two sides of the LZ. Covey, not the Covey rider, put in the air package.

I'll have to get my Skyraiders finished.

The Easter Bunny just delivered my Easter present to myself:





A sex, drugs and rock'n'roll memoir of the war? I'll take it!  



Signed by the author in Nha Trang 2010, and brought back from Vietnam by whoever it was he gave it to.



Another classic of Vietnam War literature I have never read, written by a guy who spent four years as a corpsman with the US Marines.



Another classic I need to read.



The book that the 1980s film starring Michael J. Fox was based on - I missed this one in the 80s, so it's nice to get the UK first edition paperback.



Accounts of helicopter pilots' and other pilots' experiences.



I read the Carlos Hathcock memoir some years ago, so this looks like a good follow-up.



First English-language hardback edition.



She pops up in various memoirs, so it looks like an interesting read.

In addition to several WWII books, my son gave me a copy of
Max Hastings, Vietnam, an Epic Tragedy. I have heard mixed
opinions, would be interesting to hear what those of you who have already read it thought.

My best wargame buddy also gave me a copy of Valley of
Death by Ted Morgan to add to my Indochina War collection.
Again, would love to hear opinions.

Now, for these aging eyes to finish Suicide Creek, the Battle
for Cape Gloucester. Bigger double spaced print! :-)

I had mixed feelings about the Max Hastings book. The opening section on the French Indochina War was too smart alecky, with the underlying attitude being "we Brits would have handled it better". Throughout the book, he indulges in British boosterism, portraying Britain's role in Vietnam as being far more important than it actually was. I suspect this is partly in order to increase the book's appeal to the British book-buying public.

His coverage of the Australian and New Zealand involvement is skewed too - he bluntly states that Australia only committed to the war "following Britain's 1967 decision to withdraw its armed forces from East of Suez" which is ridiculous - Australia's deployment of advisors dates from 1962, and it made its decision to deploy in strength in 1965. He also claims Australia dragged New Zealand into the war, ignoring that the Holyoake government was committed to both SEATO and the US. The first NZ medical team arrived in South Vietnam in 1963, in the days when the first Australian advisors were there, followed by a platoon of NZ Army engineers in 1964, and an NZ artillery battery in 1965, well before the arrival of their Australian counterparts in 1966. Hastings gives the impression that NZ troops only belatedly arrived in 1966.

His comments about Australian "indiscipline" are caricatural: "Throughout Vietnam it was notable how often, when a body flew through a bar window, either the thrower or the thrown proved to be Australian." The Australians were mainly deployed at Nui Dat and caroused in Vung Tau, with small numbers of them in Saigon, so this is just fantasy on his part. Also, the photo facing page 306 showing a VC woman after being waterboarded by Australians is misleading - my recollection from reading about that incident is that one man used unauthorised interrogation techniques and she was rescued from him by her actual interrogators.

On the plus side, there are lots of photos I had never seen before, and he has provided new info. I particularly liked his coverage of Soviet and Chinese involvement in the war, right down to interviewing Ukrainian veterans who had trained the North Vietnamese SAM units. As far as I know, no one else has written about this in English before. His coverage from the early 1970s is better too - probably because he was there at the time. It has more immediacy.

OTB, you pretty much confirmed a lot of what I heard. I
asked a fellow Vietnam Veteran about his writings and without
the "punctuations", adjectives and adverbs, his comment
basically boiled down to how well could he have known the
war when he wasn't even in country in 1968. My son had
bought and read it since it covered the whole time period.
He is looking forward to my comments. I am going to try
not to be biased before reading it, but my expectations
are pretty low. 'fraid I too will probably launch into some
pretty salty comments.

I saw the Ken Burns series and was pleased, particularly
it was written by an academic. Have the companion book,
a used bookstore find, but have not read it.

Thanks for your info and opinion.

Sam

Hi Sam - it's a good read, even though I didn't agree with everything he wrote. It's an ambitious work too.

I enjoyed the Ken Burns documentary series - I watched it in Saigon two years ago. It was sub-titled in Vietnamese, which was entertaining. I was frantically writing down words like "strategic hamlet" from the sub-titles. I should get the book too.

OTB wrote:I should get the book too.

I have the DVD's and the book and they both tell exactly the same story which is nice and the same still photos used in the doco are in the book, great reference.

I will keep an eye out for it - it's the sort of thing that will turn up cheap at one of my local second-hand bookstores if I wait a bit.

OTB wrote:I thought it may be of interest to certain fans

Bit slow to the draw. I just saw this.

The latest purchases from Wellington;



A useful reference guide - Volume 2 is out soon, which covers aircraft of the US Navy, Marines etc.




Eyewitness accounts of the battle by the various commanders.



And a novel about a VC spy who infiltrates the Saigon Special Branch and accompanies its head to California at the time of the fall of Saigon. I am currently up to the chapter where he has been hired as a cultural advisor to a Hollywood director making a film in the Philippines that looks like a thinly disguised fictional version of Apocalypse Now.

Wayne,

I have read the Long Tan book, good read.

I'm looking forward to it.