This book covers the period leading up to and after the Burmese military's crackdown on the pro-democracy movement in 1988. Thousands were killed when the military suppressed this movement, led by future Nobel Peace Prize winner, Aung San Suu Gyi. The book is illustrated with photos smuggled out of the country, showing the devastation and brutality which the crackdown involved. A must-read for students of Burmese politics

Beautiful photo Essays with photos taken from air. It will give you good idea of the diversity in Indonesia. Some historical photos and illustration. Photos I love are those close up with people on earth are smiling and waving their hands to the plane!

Zalin Grant's "Over The Beach" is an account of fighter squadron 162 from the aircraft carrier USS Oriskany during the Vietnam war. Grant does a masterful job of blending the history, with the real lives of the people who were a part of that history.

The reader feels the palpable emotions of the pilots as they "crossed over the beach" on their way to targets in Hanoi and Haiphong. The squadron was incredibly successful, but with that success came great loss. Many pilots were shot down over North Vietnam where there was almost no chance of rescue. The reader also hears from those pilots who became prisoners.

Grant incorporates the history of the air conflict into the book as well. Johnson, Nixon, McNamara, and Kissinger all weigh heavily into this account. The politics of the conflict led to a war fought on confusing terms. But this doesn't read like some history text.

From the terror of carrier landings to the wild frat boy parties aboard the Oriskany, this book covers it all. From the adulterous behavior of many of the piots to the gut-wrenching roller coaster of emotions suffered by an MIA's wife, this book does not hold any punches. It may be hard to find this book (some libraries may have it) but it is one of the finest (and personal) accounts of carrier warfare in Vietnam I have ever read.

Researched over a 9 year time span using information gleaned from hundreds of interviews from Vietnam war POW's, this extensive saga of captivity is truly outstanding in its depth.

John G. Hubbell not only relates the stories of high profile POW's from North Vietnam, he explores the many aspects and rigors faced by U.S. servicemen in the brutal Southern Vietnamese prison camps. In helping the reader to truly understand the entire experience, this being a cautionary note to everyone, torture methods suffered by our U.S. servicemen are described very graphically throughout the text and may be difficult to read about at times.

Included in the superbly written and well researched narrative are maps of the various prison compounds, photographs of POW's and their captors, and the entire list of repatriated servicemen at Operation Homecoming in 1973.

"P.O.W. - A definitive history of the American Prisoner of War Experience, 1964-1973" is a very comprehensive and powerful study that makes for a lasting, memorable, and emotional reading experience. Upon recommending this book to everyone with interests in POW captivity, I would also like to suggest the brilliant and epic work "Honor Bound - American Prisoners of War in Southeast Asia, 1961-1973".

In Pain and Grace - A Journey Through Vietnam, the outstanding photography of photojournalist Jim Gensheimer illustrate the contrasts that make up modern day Vietnamese life. Gensheimer capture the beauty and quiet intensity of a country in the midst of dramatic change - where the struggles of the past and and hopes of the future are met with courage and pride. Each photograph dramatizes a poignant moment in the lives of the Vietnamese people - a lotus glows in a dusty Koi pond; gentle light on the wise face of an elderly Vietnamese gentleman at tea, children playing in an orphanage in Danang, the meeting of a brother and sister separated for 19 years... These images portray an emotional impact that is familiar to visitors to Vietnam, with a poignancy that is hard to forget.

The Palace File should be number one on Hamid Karzai's reading list! The promises made in secret between one nation's leader and another have little value, it seems. Some would argue that such secret pledges should never be made by the elected leader of a true democracy. "Our" sincere pledges never to abandon an ally and never to waste the blood sacrifices of American troops are well-documented in The Palace File. The documents speak for themselves.

Those who doubt American staying power in the "war on terrorism" will find much ammunition for their arguments in a quick read of this sad tale of failed adventure in Vietnam. Our new but familiarly avid "nation builders" need to study The Palace File before they charge full-speed down the same slippery slope toward ignominy.

Very useful collection of papers and summaries of papers on paleo and early archaic Americans in this region. The thought provoking theories on settlement and hunting practices that evolved along with the changing climate make this well worth reading. I keep my copy handy and refer back to it often.

RAMIREZ HAS BRAVELY WRITTEN AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY PLOTTING HIS LIFE'S PILGRIMAGE FROM CHILDHOOD TO SOBRIETY. AS A TRUE AMERICAN VIETNAM WAR HERO, HIS VERY PERSONAL TALE IS INTERTWINED WITH MOMENTS OF GREAT JOY, CONFUSION ABOUT HIS HERITAGE AND SELF-IDENTITY, DESTRUCTIVE BEHAVIOR AND HIS ULTIMATE SURVIVAL. I FOUND MYSELF ENTHRALLED BY RAMIREZ' WRITING STYLE. ON MORE THAN ONE OCCASSION, RAMIREZ' PROSE AND TIMING, IN THE MIDST OF THE MOST UNUSUAL CIRCUMSTANCES, RIVALS THE BEST. EVEN THOUGH I LAUGHED AND CRIED WITH RAMIREZ, HE NEVER LOOSES SIGHT OF WHO HE IS AND RECOGNIZES MILLIONS OF WAR VETERANS FOR TAKING A SIMILAR JOURNEY.

MY HAT IS OFF TO MR. RAMIREZ FOR WRITING A POIGNANT AND COMPELLING BOOK THAT FREELY EXPOSES HIS INNER FELLINGS. HIS WILLINGNESS TO SHARE HIS LIFE, FOR GOOD AND BAD, IS TRULY STIMULATING AND INSIGHTFUL.

Douglas Pike performed a valuable service to history by capturing the essence of the North Vietnamese strategy for victory in the Vietnam War. His explanation of the various techniques used to win not only victory on the battlefield, but, more importantly, strategic and political victories over both the American and South Vietnamese opponents, should be mandatory reading for anyone interested in how the United States lost this war. Well written and researched, this book is both enjoyable and disturbing.

The preface of Stuart Herrington's first memoir, "Stalking the Vietcong", relates the mood of the country in 1961: exhilarated, optimistic, omnipotent. He quotes Kennedy's inaugural, which included the pledge to "bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty". In "Peace With Honor?", his elegiac second memoir, we see the awful damage such grandiose promises can wreak.

Of course, any of the Cubans stranded without air support at the Bay of Pigs could have told the Vietnamese that some burdens were too heavy for the US to bear. Arthur Schlesinger explains in "A Thousand Days" how JFK didn't want to turn world opinion against his administration by supporting the invasion. That was a quick decision. In Richard Shultz' new book he details JFK's efforts to wage a covert war against Hanoi and still remain within the boundaries of all the international treaties. In other words, he decided to stop the North secretly, so as to maintain his honor--a less quick decision, but a decision all the same.

By the time of the fall of Saigon, the very notion of honor in Vietnam had become a little more than a source of bitter jokes. "Peace With Honor?" refers to President Nixon's version of honor in Vietnam, the Paris Peace Agreement. The question mark is added, I presume, because of the way Hanoi "honored" the agreement, and the way America enforced it. A ceasefire was declared, the Americans withdrew, the North regrouped, and attacked, and overran the South. "Peace With Honor?" is the final chapter of the tale that began with the pledge to "bear any burden". After fifteen long years the burden of Vietnam had become too heavy. A friend had to be betrayed and abandoned.

Herrington is unique in my experience with writers on Vietnam in that he knows the language. The Halberstams and the Karnows and the McNamaras have poured an ocean of words into explanations and perspectives of the war, but it all seems a little abstract next to Herrington's personal accounts. I doubt whether you can understand a culture or its problems, much less solve them, unless you speak to its people, and you can't speak to its people unless you know their language. Imagine trying to liberate France from the Nazis with no French speakers on your team. It could have been done, but would been much harder. Probably half the people in the Roosevelt administration knew some French. I wonder whether there was even one person in the Kennedy or Johnson or Nixon administrations that spoke Vietnamese.

"Peace With Honor?" then, is a portrait of the Vietnamese people, not just the southerners but those from the north as well, people from Hanoi and Saigon as well as peasants from the countryside. There is the heart-rending story of an 18-year-old boy drafted and killed in a few days, because his family elects not to pay off the conscription sergeant. There is the outrage and incomprehension of the South Vietnamese who watch the North violate the ceasefire with impunity and grind ever closer to their home. There is Col. Herrington's personal account of the evacuation airplane full of babies that crashed soon after take-off. He arrived to find the plane's fuselage "twisted and burning in the mud", and in the field around it "mud-covered infants strewn everywhere --some of them ashen-faced and quiet, others screaming in pain or fright". It would take the heart of a communist to view such a scene as a propaganda opportunity, and indeed that's what it became, with Hanoi's representatives claiming that the Americans were taking Vietnamese children to concentration camps.

One gets the impression from his conversations with North Vietnamese that they believed their own propaganda: an NVA Major insists Hanoi was bombed into rubble and that the socialist masses rebuilt the city, employing, according to Herrington, sophisticated aging techniques to make the buildings appear seventy years old. Another NVA Major tries to explain away the mass graves of civilians slaughtered in the city of Hue after it was taken during the Tet Offensive by saying they were caught in a crossfire. Herrington asks him whether he finds it unusual that the civilians had their hands tied behind their backs during the "crossfire".

The final third of the book finds Herrington struggling to evacuate as many people as he can from the collapsing Saigon. As for anyone who has come to know and love a culture, it was extremely painful for him to see it sacked. He spent a lot of time reassuring panic-stricken people that they would not be left behind to be reeducated or murdered. We Americans tend to view conflicts as presenting two options: stay and fight; or turn and run. But for the Saigonese in 1975 there was nowhere to run. In Cambodia, the only nearby country, the communists were arranging an even more efficient solution to the class enemy problem. Running in all other directions brought you to the sea.

So there was extreme terror and desperation. Near the end of the evacuation Herrington receives and obeys orders to leave on the final helicopter, though 420 people who have been assured of safe passage are still waiting on the embassy stairway. For the people of Vietnam this helicopter that never comes is the final betrayal.

I was reminded of the words of a novel that had been written a half a century before the war: "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy--they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made..."