It is commonly thought that the U.S. Army in Vietnam, thrust into a war in which territory occupied was meaningless, depended on body counts as its sole measure of military progress. In No Sure Victory, Army officer and historian Gregory A. Daddis uncovers the truth behind this gross simplification of the historical record. Daddis shows that, confronted by an unfamiliar enemy and an even more unfamiliar form of warfare, the U.S. Army adopted a massive, and eventually unmanageable, system of measurements and formulas to track the progress of military operations that ranged from pacification efforts to search-and-destroy missions. Concentrating more on data collection and less on data analysis, these indiscriminate attempts to gauge success may actually have hindered the army's ability to evaluate the true outcome of the fight at hand--a roadblock that Daddis believes significantly contributed to the multitude of failures that American forces in Vietnam faced. Filled with incisive analysis and rich historical detail, No Sure Victory is a valuable case study in unconventional warfare, a cautionary tale that offers important perspectives on how to measure performance in current and future armed conflict.

Commonly mistaken for the locally raised Viet Cong, the NVA was an entirely different force, conducting large-scale operations in a conventional war. Despite limited armour, artillery and air support, the NVA were an extremely politicized and professional force with strict control measures and leadership concepts. Gordon Rottman follows the fascinating life of the highly motivated infantryman from conscription and induction through training to real combat experiences. Covering the evolution of the forces from 1958 onwards, this book takes an in-depth look at the civilian and military lives of the soldiers, whilst accompanying artwork details the uniforms, weapons and equipment used by the NVA in their clash against America and her allies.

On April 16, 1972 at 15,000 feet in the skies near Hanoi, North Vietnam Major Dan Cherry first met Lieutenant Nguyen Hong My. In an intense five minute aerial battle Dan shot down the MiG-21 piloted by Hong My. Major Cherry returned safely to base. Lieutenant Hong My lived but was severely injured during the ejection. Both men returned to the cockpit to fly aerial combat again. Thirty-six years later Dan Cherry and Hong My met face to face in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), Vietnam for the first time since that fateful day.

The first comprehensive study of the massacre's reception in the United States and its place in American memory Contrary to common interpretations of the Vietnam conflict as an unhealed national wound or trauma, it argues that, if anything, Americans have assimilated the war and its violence rather too well and that they were able to do so even when the war was at its height Incorporates a wealth of different source materials - government papers, military records and legal papers, newspapers and television, opinion polls, memoirs, psychological studies and philosophical reflections, interviews, film, art, novels, poetry and popular song, as well as a visit to the site of the massacre itself Attempts to restore the perspectives of the Vietnamese victims, neglected in most American accounts, to the written record of the massacre.

Drawing on a wealth of new evidence from all sides, Triumph Forsaken overturns most of the historical orthodoxy on the Vietnam War. Through the analysis of international perceptions and power, it shows that South Vietnam was a vital interest of the United States. The book provides many new insights into the overthrow of Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963 and demonstrates that the coup negated the South Vietnamese government's tremendous, and hitherto unappreciated, military and political gains between 1954 and 1963. After Diem's assassination, President Lyndon Johnson had at his disposal several aggressive policy options that could have enabled South Vietnam to continue the war without a massive US troop infusion, but he ruled out these options because of faulty assumptions and inadequate intelligence, making such an infusion the only means of saving the country.