A Stateside Tour of Duty

A Stateside Tour of Duty
Author: Neil Mitchell
Publisher: Page Publishing Inc
Total Pages: 643
Release: 2018-10-12
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1642985740

Nick Moultrie is drafted into the US Army at the height of the Vietnam War. By dumb luck, the new lieutenant avoids being shipped to Vietnam and is assigned to Fort Benjamin McCulloch, Texas. As a pencil pusher for the military police on base, he is safe from the mortal perils of ambushes and booby traps in Southeast Asia, yet he faces other perils almost daily in his mostly desk job stateside. His poorly disciplined unit more resembles the Keystone Cops than professional law enforcement personnel. Lieutenant Moultrie finds himself surrounded by incompetent or corrupt commanding officers, and he never knows when the mind-numbing tedium of his job will suddenly erupt into a crazy, senseless episode in which people are killed and military careers are destroyed. Nick finds refuge and solace in a few friends and honorable commanders whom he can trust. Seeking relief from loneliness, he looks up a buxom girlfriend (Samantha Starr) with whom he had a fling in college, and, while on a few days' leave, proposes to her. Soon he finds himself enjoying the pleasures and tiptoeing through the minefields of matrimony. Gradually his lust for what he first regarded as a sex object turns into genuine love for a peer and an intelligent, intuitive friend. A terrifying dream six months into her first pregnancy convinces Samantha she will die if she gives birth in the ramshackle Army hospital. She goes to live with her parents, where the dream proves prophetic as she narrowly escapes death even in the better-equipped Phoenix hospital. When a callous Red Cross official refuses to inform Nick of these developments, he explodes in anger and retribution, resulting in persecution from his superiors in command. The final insult is his being relieved of duty for a very minor infraction committed while saving the lives of his men in a shootout with an antiwar terrorist group. Nick must somehow find a way to avoid ending his military service in disgrace. As he leaves Fort McCulloch a much wiser-and jaded-man, Nick looks back on the unbelievable events he has endured. His entertaining tale is humorous, eye-opening, and unexpectedly uplifting.

Stateside Tours of Duty

Stateside Tours of Duty
Author: Vickey Robinson
Publisher: Amazon elite publishers
Total Pages: 42
Release: 2024-07-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 1964422116

The Vickey Joins the Military Series is a story of how a call to serve went from two to twenty years. The books depict the journey from the initial decision to join the military through the many stops along the way. In this series of books, you will get a front row seat to how a 30-year-old journalist made a U-turn onto a vastly different career path. The tours of duty would not be a straight path of European tours back-to-back or back-to-back stateside tours. The reader will zigzag across countries and continents with the author, getting a first-hand look at a very interesting and dynamic career. The journey traverses across twelve countries, three continents, and varies other locales. Each book in the eight book series travels through varies duty stations reviewing moments that put a spotlight on how a two-year enlistment led to a twenty-year career.

Lieutenant Dangerous

Lieutenant Dangerous
Author: Jeff Danziger
Publisher: Steerforth
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2021-07-06
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1586422731

"A must-read war memoir… with zero punches pulled, related by one of the most incisive observers of the American political scene." —KIRKUS (starred review) "Funny, biting, thoughtful and wholly original." —Tim O'Brien, author of The Things They Carried Jeff Danziger, one of the leading political cartoonists of his generation, captures the fear, sorrow, absurdity, and unintended but inevitable consequences of war with dark humor and penetrating moral clarity. If there is any discipline at the start of wars it dissipates as the soldiers themselves become aware of the pointlessness of what they are being told to do. A conversation with a group of today’s military age men and women about America’s involvement in Vietnam inspired Jeff Danziger to write about his own wartime experiences: “War is interesting,” he reveals, “if you can avoid getting killed, and don’t mind loud noises.” Fans of his cartooning will recognize his mordant humor applied to his own wartime training and combat experiences: “I learned, and I think most veterans learn, that making people or nations do something by bombing or sending in armed troops usually fails.” Near the end of his telling, Danziger invites his audience—in particular the young friends who inspired him to write this informative and rollicking memoir—to ponder: “What would you do? . . . Could you summon the bravery—or the internal resistance—to simply refuse to be part of the whole idiotic theater of the war? . . . Or would you be like me?”

Steel My Soldiers' Hearts

Steel My Soldiers' Hearts
Author: David H. Hackworth
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 466
Release: 2003-05-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 0743246136

The commanding officer of an infantry battalion in Vietnam in 1969 recounts how he took over a demoralized unit of ordinary draftees and turned it into an elite fighting force, and describes its accomplishments.

Care Under Fire

Care Under Fire
Author: Bill Strusinski
Publisher: Wisdom Editions
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2022-12-14
Genre:
ISBN: 9781959770305

For many surviving military veterans, the Vietnam War is an indelible part of their lives. That they survived is due in many cases to the heroic, life-saving actions of combat medics like Bill "Doc" Strusinski. Being a frontline medic was, and still is, one of the most dangerous jobs in the Army. Medics were targeted by the enemy and often called upon to aid fallen soldiers in the line of fire. In Strusinski's riveting book, Care Under Fire, Strusinski thrusts the reader squarely into moments of terror during firefights, the exhaustion of endless patrols, the anguish of losing buddies despite best efforts to save them, and the intimate bonds created during times of desperate need. This is a book about war, yes, but even more about how one man was transformed by his "sacred duty" to offer care under fire to the young soldiers he fought beside.

Returning Home from Iraq and Afghanistan

Returning Home from Iraq and Afghanistan
Author: Institute of Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2010-03-31
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0309152852

Nearly 1.9 million U.S. troops have been deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq since October 2001. Many service members and veterans face serious challenges in readjusting to normal life after returning home. This initial book presents findings on the most critical challenges, and lays out the blueprint for the second phase of the study to determine how best to meet the needs of returning troops and their families.

Surprise, Kill, Vanish

Surprise, Kill, Vanish
Author: Annie Jacobsen
Publisher: Little, Brown
Total Pages: 586
Release: 2019-05-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 0316441406

From Pulitzer Prize finalist Annie Jacobsen, the untold USA Today bestselling story of the CIA's secret paramilitary units. Surprise . . . your target. Kill . . . your enemy. Vanish . . . without a trace. When diplomacy fails, and war is unwise, the president calls on the CIA's Special Activities Division, a highly-classified branch of the CIA and the most effective, black operations force in the world. Originally known as the president's guerrilla warfare corps, SAD conducts risky and ruthless operations that have evolved over time to defend America from its enemies. Almost every American president since World War II has asked the CIA to conduct sabotage, subversion and, yes, assassination. With unprecedented access to forty-two men and women who proudly and secretly worked on CIA covert operations from the dawn of the Cold War to the present day, along with declassified documents and deep historical research, Pulitzer Prize finalist Annie Jacobsen unveils -- like never before -- a complex world of individuals working in treacherous environments populated with killers, connivers, and saboteurs. Despite Hollywood notions of off-book operations and external secret hires, covert action is actually one piece in a colossal foreign policy machine. Written with the pacing of a thriller, Surprise, Kill, Vanish brings to vivid life the sheer pandemonium and chaos, as well as the unforgettable human will to survive and the intellectual challenge of not giving up hope that define paramilitary and intelligence work. Jacobsen's exclusive interviews -- with members of the CIA's Senior Intelligence Service (equivalent to the Pentagon's generals), its counterterrorism chiefs, targeting officers, and Special Activities Division's Ground Branch operators who conduct today's close-quarters killing operations around the world -- reveal, for the first time, the enormity of this shocking, controversial, and morally complex terrain. Is the CIA's paramilitary army America's weaponized strength, or a liability to its principled standing in the world? Every operation reported in this book, however unsettling, is legal.

Boots on the ground: Troop Density in Contingency Operations

Boots on the ground: Troop Density in Contingency Operations
Author: John J. McGrath
Publisher: Government Printing Office
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2006
Genre:
ISBN: 9780160869501

This paper clearly shows the immediate relevancy of historical study to current events. One of the most common criticisms of the U.S. plan to invade Iraq in 2003 is that too few troops were used. The argument often fails to satisfy anyone for there is no standard against which to judge. A figure of 20 troops per 1000 of the local population is often mentioned as the standard, but as McGrath shows, that figure was arrived at with some questionable assumptions. By analyzing seven military operations from the last 100 years, he arrives at an average number of military forces per 1000 of the population that have been employed in what would generally be considered successful military campaigns. He also points out a variety of important factors affecting those numbers-from geography to local forces employed to supplement soldiers on the battlefield, to the use of contractors-among others.

Walking Wounded (Vietnam #5)

Walking Wounded (Vietnam #5)
Author: Chris Lynch
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
Total Pages: 167
Release: 2014-10-21
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 0545640172

"The best Vietnam War novels yet for this age range." -- Kirkus Reviews Morris, Rudi, Ivan, and Beck were best friends. So when one of them was drafted into the Vietnam War, the others signed up, too. They promised to watch out for one another. They pledged to come home together.Now, that pledge has been broken. One of the four has been killed in action. And the remaining three are the only men alive who know the awful truth about their friend's death.Each is left to deal with their secret in his own way. One of them will accompany his friend's body home to Boston. One of them will defy orders in an act of protest. And one of them will decide it's up to him to single-handedly win the war.In the end, Vietnam may claim more than their lives. As the war grinds on, their very souls are at stake. And their shattered friendship will prove either their salvation... or their ruin.