- Waroduce
- Aug 5, 2008
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You should add Sympathy for the Devil as well as Matterhorne for Vietnam. I am drinking and not going to write a summary now cause they are classics and deserve good ones but if you really want one I will tomorrow at some point
E: Fallen Angels
Great childrens book on Vietnam. Or well teenage. I read it in sixth grade...idk.
The Endgame: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Iraq, from George W. Bush to Barack Obama Paperback – March 12, 2013
by Michael R. Gordon
Good Iraq overview
Tiger Force
Some dirty poo poo Tiger Force did in Nam
TIGER FORCE is the searing story of a group of elite army soldiers in Vietnam who spun dangerously out of control and went on a horrific seven-month rampage. It is also the story of how these crimes, buried by the army for decades, at last came to light through the heroic persistence of a few individuals who could not forget.
Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq
Book by Thomas E. Ricks
How we hosed Iraq up
Cobra II
Great examination of the opening ground war of Iraq
Waroduce fucked around with this message at 04:39 on Aug 17, 2016
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Aug 17, 2016 04:34
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- Waroduce
- Aug 5, 2008
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Achilles in Vietnam is an interesting look at PTSD in Vietnam vets btw written by a VA doctor
https://www.cwu.edu/~garrison/Achilles_in_Vietnam.pdf
quote:
Every instance of severe traumatic psychological injury is a standing challenge to the rightness of
the social order.
— Judith Lewis Herman, 1990 Harvard Trauma Conference
We begin in the moral world of the soldier — what his culture understands to be right — and
betrayal of that moral order by a commander. This is how Homer opens the Iliad. Agamémnon,
Achilles' commander, wrongfully seizes the prize of honor voted to Achilles by the troops.
Achilles' experience of betrayal of "what's right," and his reactions to it, are identical to those of
American soldiers in Vietnam. I shall describe some of the many violations of what American
soldiers understood to be right by holders of responsibility and trust.
=Now, there was a LURP [Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol] team from the First Brigade
off of Highway One that looked over the South China Sea. There was a bay there. . . .
Now, they saw boats come in. And they suspected, now, uh — the word came down
[that] they were unloading weapons off them. Three boats.
At that time we moved. It was about ten o'clock at night. We moved down, across
Highway One along the beach line, and it took us [until] about three or four o'clock in the
morning to get on line while these people are unloading their boats. And we opened up
on them — aaah.
And the loving firepower was unreal, the firepower that we put into them boats. It was
just a constant, constant firepower. It seemed like no one ever ran out of ammo.
Daylight came [long pause], and we found out we killed a lot of fishermen and kids.
What got us thoroughly loving confused is, at that time you turn to the team and you
say to the team, "Don't worry about it. Everything's loving fine." Because that's what
you're getting from upstairs.
The loving colonel says, "Don't worry about it. We'll take care of it." Y'know, uh, "We
got body count!" "We have body count!" So it starts working on your head.
So you know in your heart it's wrong, but at the time, here's your superiors telling you
that it was okay. So, I mean, that's okay then, right? This is part of war. Y'know? GungHO!
Y'know? "AirBORNE! AirBORNE! Let's go!"
So we packed up and we moved out.
They wanted to give us a loving Unit Citation — them loving maggots. A lot of medals
came down from it. The lieutenants got medals, and I know the colonel got his loving
medal. And they would have award ceremonies, y'know, I'd be standing like a loving
jerk and they'd be handing out loving medals for killing civilians.=
This veteran received his Combat Infantry Badge for participating in this action. The CIB was one
of the most prized U.S. Army awards, supposed to be awarded for actual engagement in ground
combat. He subsequently earned his CIB a thousand times over in four combat tours.
Nonetheless, he still feels deeply dishonored by the circumstances of its official award for killing
unarmed civilians on an intelligence error. He declares that the day it happened, Christmas Eve,
should be stricken from the calendar.
We shall hear this man's voice and the voices of other combat veterans many times in these
pages. I shall argue throughout this book that healing from trauma depends upon
communalization of the trauma — being able safely to tell the story to someone who is listening
and who can be trusted to retell it truthfully to others in the community. So before analyzing,
before classifying, before thinking, before trying to do anything — we should listen. Categories
and classifications play a large role in the institutions of mental health care for veterans, in the
education of mental health professionals, and as tentative guides to perception. All too often,
however, our mode of listening deteriorates into intellectual sorting, with the professional
grabbing the veterans' words from the air and sticking them in mental bins. To some degree that
is institutionally and educationally necessary, but listening this way destroys trust. At its worst
our educational system produces counselors, psychiatrists, psychologists, and therapists who
resemble museum-goers whose whole experience consists of mentally saying, "That's cubist! . . .
That's El Greco!" and who never see anything they've looked at. "Just listen!" say the veterans
when telling mental health professionals what they need to know to work with them, and I
believe that is their wish for the general public as well. Passages of narrative here contain the
particularity of individual men's experiences, bearing a different order of meaningfulness than
any categories they might be put into. In the words of one veteran, these stories are "sacred
stuff."
The mortal dependence of the modern soldier on the military organization for everything he
needs to survive is as great as that of a small child on his or her parents. One Vietnam combat
veteran said, "The U.S. Army [in Vietnam] was like a mother who sold out her kids to be raped
by [their] father to protect her own interests."
No single English word takes in the whole sweep of a culture's definition of right and wrong; we
use terms such as moral order, convention, normative expectations, ethics, and commonly
understood social values. The ancient Greek word that Homer used, thémis, encompasses all
these meanings. A word of this scope is needed for the betrayals experienced by Vietnam
combat veterans. In this book I shall use the phrase "what's right" as an equivalent of thémis.
The specific content of the Homeric warriors' thémis was often quite different from that of
American soldiers in Vietnam, but what has not changed in three millennia are violent rage and
social withdrawal when deep assumptions of "what's right" are violated. The vulnerability of the
soldier's moral world has increased in three thousand years because of the vast number and
physical distance of people in a position to betray "what's right" in ways that threaten the
survival of soldiers in battle. Homeric soldiers actually saw their commander in chief, perhaps
daily.
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Aug 17, 2016 04:43
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- Waroduce
- Aug 5, 2008
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The Corner by David Simon
I'm working through The Corner now and it is really good. I would highly recommend it if you're into crime or drugs at all. It's truly amazing and thorough in scope. It's also the basis for the wire. seriously check it out!
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Sep 22, 2016 04:04
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- Waroduce
- Aug 5, 2008
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I'd forgotten about Going After Cacciato, going to have to reread that one.
Did anyone ever read Walter Dean Myers' book "Fallen Angels" when they were a kid? It's frequently billed as a young adults novel, but it had some really graphic descriptions of combat and racism in Vietnam.
I read this in seventh grade and thought it was pretty good. I wanst blown away by the racism or anything but I read alot as a kid cause my parents didn't let me watch TV except for sat and Sunday so I had gone through some fairly adult books that I didn't really grasp by 6th/7th grade but i had been exposed to that kind of poo poo in other books (To Kill a Mockingbird) t
I probably would wait till maybe 8th to have a kid read it but it'd still probably go over there heads or they wouldn't understand it....I recall this book cause I read it on the way home from a baseball showcase in Savanna GA and I read it immediately after Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.
Thanks mom.
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Aug 1, 2017 21:48
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Aug 17, 2016 04:34
