Vietnam: A View from the Front Lines

Description

From Andrew Wiest, the bestselling author of The Boys of '67: Charlie Company's War in Vietnam and one of the leading scholars in the study of the Vietnam War, comes a frank exploration of the human experience during the conflict. Vietnam allows the reader a grunt's-eye-view of the conflict - from the steaming rice paddies and swamps of the Mekong Delta, to the triple-canopy rainforest of the Central Highlands and the forlorn Marine bases that dotted the DMZ. It is the definitive oral history of the Vietnam War told in the uncompromising, no-holds barred language of the soldiers themselves.

Dr Andrew Wiest is Professor of History at the University of Southern Mississippi and is also the founding director of the Center for the Study of War and Society. Specializing in the study of World War I and Vietnam, Dr Wiest has served as a Visiting Senior Lecturer at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst and as a Visiting Professor in the Department of Warfighting Strategy in the United States Air Force Air War College. Since 1992 Dr Wiest has been active in international education, developing the award-winning Vietnam Study Abroad Program. A widely published author, Wiest's titles include Vietnam's Forgotten Army: Heroism and Betrayal in the ARVN (New York University), which won the Society for Military History's Distinguished Book Award; America and the Vietnam War (Routledge); Rolling Thunder in a Gentle Land (Osprey); and Passchendaele and the Royal Navy (Greenwood Press). Additionally Dr Wiest has appeared in and consulted on several historical documentaries for the History Channel, Granada Television, PBS, the BBC, and for Lucasfilm.

"Wiest has put together a creditable oral history of soldiers and Marines who saw combat in the Vietnam War." --Veteran Magazine "Wiest has a good feel for the human side of the Vietnam War...[he] asserts that there 'was no single, generic military experience for infantrymen and Marines in Vietnam, ' but he still provides a good sampling of what the war was like for American men fighting at the ground level." --Publishers Weekly "Unlike many books about the Vietnam War, Vietnam: A View from the Frontlines doesn't attempt to explain why the United States failed in Vietnam. Instead it aims to give the reader a grunt's-eye view of what happened on the battlefields of that tiny, Third World nation a generation ago." --Failure Magazine "From the testimony of combat veterans and their families, a military historian assembles a unique oral history of America's most controversial war...A smartly composed, affecting memory album of the draftees and volunteers whose service and sacrifice for so long went unacknowledged." --Kirkus Reviews "...powerful and revealing." --The Midwest Book Review