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I know I contributed a fair amount to the last thread, but I'm feeling lazy right now so here's just one off the top of my head because I'm giving my copy to a friend of mine that will probably be going over to SEA on a JPAC trip later this year: One Day Too Long. As part of the secret war in Laos, the US government established a radar facility on a mountaintop in far northeastern Laos to control jets bombing North Vietnam, allowing them to bomb effectively in inclement weather. They staffed the site with USAF personnel who were sheep-dipped (temporarily removed from military service and working as Lockheed "contractors.") The North Vietnamese quickly recognized the significance of the facility and began preparations to attack it (including an aerial assault by An-2 biplanes where an Air America Huey got an air to air kill by firing an AK out the door at one of the An-2s). Despite growing indications that an attack was imminent, and the fact that the vast majority of the attacks Heavy Green (code name of the operation) was directing were in defense of Site 85 (kind of a self licking ice cream cone) the US Ambassador in Laos and 7th AF refused to pull out the site. NVA sappers scaled the cliffs where the site was situated and launched a devastating attack, killing 11 of the 17 USAF personnel at the site. Another (Chief Richard Etchberger) was killed during the evacuation the following morning (he was nominated for the Medal of Honor for his actions in defending his men, but this was denied and he was posthumously awarded the Air Force Cross in a secret ceremony...this was finally upgraded to a Medal of Honor in 2010). The US government then proceeded to engage in an over a decade long coverup of the incident, both the operation itself as well as the poor decision making that had led to the single largest ground combat loss of USAF personnel in Southeast Asia. USAF personnel as well as govt lawyers repeatedly and knowingly lied, in court and under oath, regarding the events of the day and what was known about the status of the men who were presumed dead. In short the government treated the surviving families like poo poo. The author also has gone to Laos on some JPAC missions, including a couple to Site 85, and the book goes into that in some depth as well. It is a very well written, very readable, but very scholarly book (it's got 75 pages of footnotes). Everyone should read this book. Okay I lied, here's a few more. The author of One Day Too Long also wrote an excellent book that is more of an overview of the US secret war in Laos, At War in the Shadow of Vietnam. If you are interested in the secret war, this is probably the book I would recommend as an initial primer...it is quite readable but like One Day Too Long is also very scholarly, with extensive footnotes. Here There Are Tigers is the memoir of a guy who spent a tour flying O-2s on Nail FAC missions over Laos, it's pretty good. Air Commando One is the biography of Heinie Aderholt, the guy who is basically the father of AFSOC. He flew covert missions during Korea, helped the CIA support Tibetan guerrillas in the late '50s and early '60s, assisted in drawing up the air support plans for the Bay of Pigs, was one of the first US dudes on the ground in Laos and helped set up the Lima sites, stood up the 56th Air Commando Wing at Nakhon Phanom, and finally in 1975 when he was commanding JUSMAGTHAI, basically singlehandedly organized the airlift that got 2,000 Hmong out of Long Tieng before it fell to the Pathet Lao. Dude was a badass. Also Ed Rasimus's (RIP) books are a couple of the finest aviation memoirs ever written. When Thunder Rolled is about his tour flying Thuds during Rolling Thunder, and Palace Cobra is about his tour flying Phantoms during Linebacker. He also helped author Fighter Pilot, Robin Olds's memoirs, which are very good. Sailors Till the End is a very readable account of the Forrestal fire: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chuiyXQKw3I Finally, going back a few years, Bernard Fall's books are basically required reading on the French experience in Indochina...Street Without Joy is THE definitive history of the First Indochina War, while Hell in a Very Small Place holds the same title for Dien Bien Phu. iyaayas01 fucked around with this message at 06:11 on May 16, 2013 |
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May 16, 2013 06:09
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Elendil004 posted:I know there's "Bear goes over the mountain", is that it? Bear Goes Over the Mountain is a book put out by the Frunze Military Academy (the Soviet Union's version of CGSC at Leavenworth) about the Soviet experience in Afghanistan. It was translated/edited by Grau. I doubt it's what he's thinking of since he was talking about a journalist's account or something. The Pacific isn't based solely on Leckie's book, it also draws heavily from Eugene Sledge's With The Old Breed, as well as the experiences of John Basilone. If you haven't seen it The Pacific is worth watching...I have a few quibbles with it (not the least of which is that one episode is almost completely fabricated for no real reason) but overall it's very well done.
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May 20, 2013 01:11
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iKon posted:On the fiction by former soldiers front, I really enjoyed Matterhorn. Matterhorn is outstanding. It might just be the best war fiction novel that I've ever read, and I don't give that praise lightly. At the very least it's the best Vietnam war novel, and that's pretty high praise on its own.
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May 20, 2013 01:34
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Uh I posted about Fall on the last page, get with it. But yeah his stuff is excellent, if you read Street Without Joy and Hell in a Very Small Place, give the book his widow wrote a try. It's very personal, but it's well written and I found it really interesting to get the background story of why Fall was the way he was (mother died in Auschwitz, father executed by the Gestapo, he spent his teenage years fighting with the French Resistance). Horne's work is excellent. If we're talking WWII US Navy in the Pacific books, Neptune's Inferno is absolutely required reading. It basically picks up where Pacific Crucible ends. The naval battles in Ironbottom Sound and elsewhere around Guadalcanal were loving insane; in the space of 4 months the US Navy took over 5,000 KIA and lost over 160,000 tons of shipping (including 8 cruisers and 2 carriers). Almost three sailors died in the waters and air around Guadalcanal for every Marine/soldier that died on the island. The same author also wrote Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors (about the stand of Taffy 3 off Samar, where a bunch of lightly armored and armed destroyers, destroyer escorts, and escort carriers held off the bulk of the IJN combined fleet) and Ship of Ghosts (about the USS Houston, the Galloping Ghost of the Java Coast, a heavy cruiser who fought a hopeless delaying action in the Western Pacific during the opening months of WWII until she was sunk, after which her survivors spent three long grueling years working on the brutal Death Railway in Burma.) Also in this vein, A Dawn Like Thunder is excellent. It's a history of VT-8, the torpedo squadron that at Midway had all 15 of their Devastators get shot down, with 29 of 30 aircrew KIA, and 5 of 6 Avengers shot down, with 10 of 12 aircrew KIA. Earning a PUC for their performance at Midway (unit equivalent of the MOH), the squadron was re-established and thrown into Guadalcanal, where they flew from the Saratoga until she took a torpedo, which sent the squadron to Henderson Field where they flew as part of the Cactus Air Force, where they took such heavy casualties that eventually all aircraft were disabled, at which point they operated as a single aircraft squadron, with the bulk of the aircrew and maintainers fighting infantry. They were withdrawn from combat in November and the squadron was disestablished, after being awarded another PUC. Finally, if Blind Man's Bluff interested you, check out By Any Means Necessary. It's basically the Blind Man's Bluff of the sky...except here people died. Over 100 aircrew, to be exact. And some of them came down alive, were captured, and were executed after spending time in Soviet or Chinese prisons. None of which the US government ever acknowledged to the families they left behind.
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May 23, 2013 06:40
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Bright Eyes posted:Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA was also interesting. It goes over how crazy the DO was (is?) and how Allen Dulles and John Dulles were very big into cover operations and how they almost always got messed up. The history of the CIA from its inception until about 1970 or so is a hilarious comedy of errors and outright insane poo poo that basically boils down to "bunch of upper class WASP Ivy Leaguers wanted to play spy, also mad scientist." Well, I guess it would be hilarious if it didn't involve a shitload of people getting killed unnecessarily.
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Jun 16, 2013 18:53
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Elendil004 posted:All i know about Air America is from the movie, and reading about Lima Site 38...recommend me a good book about Air America's exploits, please. It's not specific to Air America, but At War in the Shadow of Vietnam (mentioned earlier in the thread) is a very readable but quite scholarly account of the secret war in Laos...so Air America gets discussed a fair amount. Same goes for the Heinie Aderholt biography I mentioned earlier (Air Commando One.) Perilous Missions might be more up your alley...it's a history of Civil Air Transport, which is the "airline" that Claire Chennault (Flying Tiger guy) started up in China after WWII. It quickly morphed into the logistical air arm of the Nationalist forces, and when they fled to Taiwan CAT went with them. At this point the airline started dealing almost exclusively with the CIA, keeping up appearances by flying some above board scheduled airline flights while the majority of its fleet flew covert missions for the CIA in various spots around Asia. They took part in pretty much every East/Southeast Asian war of the late '40s and '50s, including Koren, French-Indochinese War (including Dien Bien Phu), and the revolution against Sukarno in Indonesia. While the airline was owned by a CIA front holding company starting in 1951 there was an on-going dispute between the airline's nominal overt operators and the CIA past that point, which led to the eventual complete CIA takeover in 1957. Two years later the "airline" was renamed to...Air America. The author was working on another book that would pick up where Perilous Missions left off and detail the history of Air America in SEA, but unfortunately he died before it was completed.  There are some other books about Air America out there on Amazon but I haven't read them so I can't comment.
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Jun 23, 2013 17:19
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:I don't know if you still care about this Elendil but I'd definitely recommend Phoenix Squadron. The operation described in it is an excellent illustration of why aircraft carriers matter for geostrategy and deterrence. Also should be required reading for the idiots running the Royal Navy into the ground.
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Jul 2, 2013 19:20
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piL posted:I'm not certain what it is you're trying to express. Starts with N, ends in apoleon. (The War of 1812 was a quaint sideshow to the British Empire, mostly because they were otherwise occupied trying to prevent a tyrant from taking over all of Europe.)
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Sep 29, 2013 18:01
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Elendil004 posted:A Lonely Kind of War: Forward Air Controller - I have read a ton of books about FACs, and they kind of blur together. I believe this is the one where the guy literally lands on a dirt road and shoves some commandos into the luggage compartment on his plane in order to extract them. Balls of steel. That definitely is in Here There are Tigers, except it's not just "some commandos," it's a couple of dudes who went way behind enemy lines in Laos to capture some NVA officer, the extraction (including the prisoner) is done by the author in his O-2 on the aforementioned dirt road.
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Dec 24, 2013 22:33
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hannibal posted:Nice. I have to say, Foreign Policy's recent site design is terrible. I like the additional content that they've added in conjunction with the new site design, but holy poo poo it is terrible from a functional standpoint.
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Jan 12, 2014 19:11
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Madurai posted:Wanted: a history of the Indo-Paki wars of 1965 and/or 1971. The Blood Telegram is focused on the Bangladesh genocide and by extension the US (lack of a) response to it, but it touches pretty heavily on the 1971 war as well since those two events are pretty intertwined. Written by a professor at Princeton, it was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in non-fiction this year...it's really really good.
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Oct 15, 2014 02:13
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Nostalgia4Ass posted:I did one of those freebie Audible trials and listened to Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War on the way to and from work. Especially the ending
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Jan 16, 2015 07:10
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This Kind of War by T.R. Fehrenbach is the classic history. It suffers a bit at the end from the geopolitical point the author makes at the end, since it was written before Vietnam, but the bulk of the book is excellent history. It tends to focus on the tactical and operational, not delving into the strategic side of things too much. The Coldest Winter by David Halberstam is also very good. It gets into the strategic side of things a bit more than Fehrenbach's work. They're both well worth reading.
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Feb 1, 2015 19:39
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ded posted:jesus christ the ending to matterhorn. gently caress. Yup Vietnam in a nutshell
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Feb 17, 2015 05:45
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