From Chicago To Vietnam

My experience in Vietnam

In the early hours of January 31, 1968, eighty-thousand North Vietnamese and Vietcong combat troops attacked every major city and military base in South Vietnam. The perimeter of the massive Saigon Airbase, Tan Son Nhut, was breached, and fighting raged all morning. Both gritty and intimate, From Chicago to Vietnam tells the powerful story of the ensuing epic battle, the Tet Offensive, from the perspective of one brave American soldier, Michael Duffy, whose life, like so many others, would forever be changed. Duffy's war experience begins when he exits a C-130 cargo plane onto the Tan Son Nhut tarmac-a chaotic scene of blasts, explosions, and small arms fire. Sprinting to a waiting helicopter, he is lifted up and over the city, where he gets a bird's-eye view of Saigon under attack. The helicopter lands on a road outside Bien Hoa Base Camp, and Duffy crawls in under enemy fire, tumbling into a fox-hole under cover of two GIs. Later, he meets up with his younger brother, Danny Duffy, in an ammunition convoy driving up Highway 1 to the village of Xuan Loc. After his brutal one-year tour in Vietnam, Duffy returns to Chicago, where he enjoys a Christmas dinner with his family before enrolling as a freshman at Colorado College. Like many vets, his return from the war would be met with curiosity, indifference, and, at times, scorn. This harrowing memoir was thirty years in the making.

Learn of his struggles to adjust as a U.S. Marine during a time when it wasn't fashionable to be African-American in a predominately white corps. Learn how Rob Hardy was befriended by a squad leader who changed his life forever.

A Bend in the River is #5 in the Revolution Sagas. IS THERE A WARNING MOMENT BEFORE LIFE SHATTERS INTO PIECES? In 1968 two young Vietnamese sisters flee to Saigon after their village on the Mekong River is attacked by American forces and burned to the ground. The sole survivors of the brutal massacre that killed their family, the sisters struggle to survive but become estranged, separated by sharply different choices and ideologies. Mai ekes out a living as a GI bar girl, but Tam’s anger festers, and she heads into jungle terrain to fight with the Viet Cong. "A polished segue into historical fiction…simple but elegant prose… offers nuance and depth to a war we thought we knew but did not entirely understand.” A.E. Feldman, BookTrib For nearly ten years, neither sister knows if the other is alive. Do they both survive the war? And if they do, can they mend their fractured relationship? Or are the wounds from their journeys too deep to heal "This is a beautifully done depiction of two very real young women living through incredible hardships and challenges. It's the Vietnam war, from not an anti-American, but from simply a Vietnamese perspective--the viewpoint of ordinary people trying to survive, not a particular ideological perspective. It's very moving, and I'm finding it staying in my head, actively." Elizabeth Carey, Reviewer If you enjoy historical novels of Ken Follett, Kristin Hannah, and Kate Quinn, you'll love Libby Hellmann's Compulsively Readable Thrillers. Scroll down and make sure to read them all!

Text and black-and-white photographs describe the efforts of a Vietnamese refugee family to adjust to life in Chicago.

Since the 1980s, thousands of American and Australian veterans have returned to Việt Nam. This oral history tells their story.

Fifty documents, including Vietnam's declaration of independence in 1945, the final declaration of the 1954 Geneva Conference, CIA reports, US presidential addresses, anti-war leaflets, thoughts by Vietnamese and American intellectuals, and statements by the Vietnamese government and NLF. Paper edit

Now in its 7th edition, Vietnam: An American Ordeal continues to provide a thorough account of the failed American effort to create a viable, non-Communist state in Southern Vietnam. Unlike most general histories of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, which are either conventional diplomatic or military histories, this volume synthesizes the perspectives to explore both dimensions of the struggle in greater depth, elucidating more of the complexities of the U.S.-Vietnam entanglement. It explains why Americans tried so hard for so long to stop the spread of Communism into Indochina and why they failed. In this new edition, George Donelson Moss expands and refines key moments of the Vietnam War and its aftermath, including the strategic and diplomatic background for United States’ involvement in Indochina during World War II; how the French, with British and American support, regained control in southern Vietnam, Saigon, and the vicinity, in the fall, 1945; the account for the formation of SEATO; and the account of the Sino-Vietnamese War of 1979. The text has also been revised and updated to align with recently published monographic literature on the time period. The accessible writing will enable students to gain a solid understanding of how and why the United States went to war against The Democratic Republic of Vietnam, and why it lost the long, bitter conflict. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of American history, the history of foreign relations, and the Vietnam War itself.