Vietnam War
How to define the Vietnam War? U.S. involvement from 1955-1975, sometimes justly labeled as the Second Indochina War? French attempting to retain its colonial empire post-WWII, 1945-1954, sometimes called the First Indochina War? Japan had occupied Southeast Asia during World War II. The literature is vast and complex. For the purpose of highlighting what I have here in the store, however, you will find this page’s parameters include the end of the French, the twenty years of the U.S. presence, and some fiction and other retrospective literature to the present day.
The Year of the Hawk: America's Descent into Vietnam, 1965
The Year of the Hawk: America's Descent into Vietnam, 1965
From a celebrated military historian, a powerful account of the most pivotal year of the Vietnam War—the cataclysm that forever changed America.
The Vietnam War was the greatest disaster in the history of American foreign policy. The conflict shook the nation to its foundations, exacerbating already deep cleavages in American society, and left the country baffled and ambivalent about its role in the world. Year of the Hawk is a military and political history of the war in Vietnam during 1965—the pivotal first year of the American conflict, when the United States decided to intervene directly with combat units in a struggle between communist and pro-Western forces in South Vietnam that had raged on and off for twenty years.
By December 1965, a powerful communist offensive had been turned back, and the US Army had prevailed in one of the most dramatic battles in American military history, but nonetheless there were many signs and portents that US involvement would soon slide toward the tipping point of tragedy. Vividly interweaving events in the US capital with action in Southeast Asia, historian James A. Warren explores the mindsets and strategies of the adversaries and concludes that, in the end, Washington was not so much outfought in Vietnam as outthought by revolutionaries pursuing a brilliant protracted war strategy. Based on new research, Year of the Hawk offers fresh insight into how a nationalist movement led by communists in a small country defeated the most powerful nation on earth.
James A. Warren is a historian and foreign policy analyst. A regular contributor to The Daily Beast, he is the author of God, War, and Providence: The Epic Struggle of Roger Williams and the Narragansett Indians against the Puritans of New England; American Spartans: The US Marines: A Combat History from Iwo Jima to Iraq; and The Lions of Iwo Jima: The Story of Combat Team 28 and the Bloodiest Battle in Marine Corps History (with Major General Fred Haynes, USMC-RET), among other books. For many years, Warren was an acquisitions editor at Columbia University Press, and more recently a visiting scholar in American Studies at Brown University. He lives in Saunderstown, Rhode Island