Dirty Little Secrets of the Vietnam War: Military Information You're Not Supposed to Know

by James F. Dunnigan, Albert A. Nofi

Overview

James F. Dunnigan and Albert A Nofi's Dirty Little Secrets of the Vietnam War allows us to see what really happened to American forces in Southeast Asia, separating popular myth from explosive reality in a clear, concise manner.

Containing more than two hundred examinations of different aspects of the war, the book questions why the American military ignored the lessons taught by previous encounters with insurgency forces; probes the use of group think and mind control by the North Vietnamese; and explores the role technology played in shaping the way the war was fought. Of course, the book also reveals the "dirty little secrets," the truth behind such aspects of the conflict as the rise of the Montagnard mercenaries-the most feared group of soldiers participating in the secret war in Laos-and the details of the hidden struggle for the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

With its unique and perceptive examination of the conflict, Dirty Little Secrets of the Vietnam War offers a critical addition to the library of Vietnam War history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780312252823
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	05/05/2000
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	400
Sales rank:	646,338
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.89(d)

About the Author

James F. Dunnigan and Albert A. Nofi are the authors of hundreds of books and articles on military affairs. Dunnigan has been a consultant to the State Department, the CIA, and the Army War College. Nofi is the editor of the series The Great Campaigns of Military History.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

A Word on Usage

Abbreviations

Chapter 1. The Enduring Myths of the Vietnam War
-America Suffered a Military Defeat
-The American Soldier Was "Different" in Vietnam
-Vietnam Was a War of Communist Aggression
-It Was Just Another War
-The Vietnam War Was Not as Intense as World War II
-Who Served and Who Got Hurt?
-Those Traumatized Vietnam Vets

Chapter 2: The Forty-Year War
-What is Vietnam?
-Where the French Came In
-Uncle Ho, General Giap, the Red Menace, and Power Politics
-The French Campaigns
-The Viet Minh-Japanese Alliance
-The Viet Minh's Foreign Legion
-Lessons Forgotten: The American Military and Insurgency
-Communist Insurgencies, 1945-1965
-The Official American Army Campaigns in Vietnam, and the Unofficial Ones at Home
-A Strategy of Uncertainty

Chapter 3: In the Bush (Ground Combat)
-First Impressions
-The Nature of Combat
-Air Assault
-Trashing the Battlefield
-Allied Forces in Vietnam
-A Plague of Radios and the "Flying CP"
-Infantry Weapons
-The Big Guns
-Armor in Vietnam
-Body Counts
-Thunder Run
-FNGs, Getting Short, and Staying Alive
-LRRPs and Rangers
-LRRP Rules
-Creating ARVN
-Republic of Vietnam Marine Corps
-The ARVN Rangers
-The Popular Forces
-Marine Combined Action Platoons
-General Monsoon
-Ground Radar
-Plastic on Fire
-Road Warriors
-Some Useful Field Expedients
-Tigers, Elephants, Poisonous Reptiles, and Determined Vermin
-Tunnels and Tunneling

Chapter 4: Slicks, Puffs, and Fast Movers (War in the Air)
-The Largest Bombing Campaign in History
-U.S. Combat Aircraft Losses in Southeast Asia
-Helicopters Everywhere
-Helicopter Operations and Losses
-Helicopter Sorties are Different
-Those Daring Young Men in their Flying Machines
-Air Combat
-Antiaircraft Defense
-Light Airplanes in Vietnam
-"Puff the Magic Dragon"
-The B-52 and Arc Light Missions
-Principal Combat Aircraft of the Vietnam War
-RVN Air Force
-Aces of the Vietnam War
-Assault Helicopter Units
-Napalm
-Agent Orange and "Operation RANCH HAND"
-The Kingbee

Chapter 5: Blue Water, Green Water, Brown Water (The Naval War)
-Aircraft Carriers in the War
-The Battleship Returns
-The Green Water Navy
-The Brown Water Navy
-The Coast Guard

Chapter 6: Base Camp Follies
-Uncle Sam's Way of War
-Let's Make a Deal
-Good Morning, Vietnam
-"Bloomin' Good Play"
-American Women at War
-The Chaplaincy
-The Class of '66
-VD and Vietnam
-Pacific Idylls

Chapter 7: War in the Shadows
-The Special Forces
-The Secret War in Laos
-SOG's War Against the Ho Chi Minh Trail
-Undercover for Uncle Ho
-SOG Recon Teams
-The Montagnards
-The Hmong
-The Cambodian Connection
-The North Vietnam Counter-Recon Program
-Playing on Paranoia
-Sniff This, Fido
-The Problem of Moles
-Flight of the Phoenix
-Paper Paratroopers
-STRATA
-The Lifeline from Above
-The Religious Factor
-The Ultimate Killing Machine
-Bright Light
-Dead Plants and Bitter Rice
-The Real Rambo

Chapter 8: Leadership
-"Follow Me!" Leadership Problems in Vietnam
-The Mismanagement of ARVN
-The ARVN Officer Corps
-The First "Hollow Army"
-"They Also Serve Who Only Stand and Wait"
-The Communist Advantage
-Fragging
-The Medal of Honor and other Decorations
-The Drug Problem
-Looting
-The My Lai Massacre
-American War Crimes Trials
-Some Questionable Weapons of the Vietnam War

Chapter 9: Numbers and Losses
-American Casualties
-Casualties Compared
-Allied Combat Battalions in Vietnam
-Eye Injuries in Vietnam
-Psychoneurotic Casualties
-Prisoners of the North Vietnamese
-The Garwood Case
-Treating the Wounded
-Blood
-Hospital Ships

Chapter 10: The Home Front
-Getting In and Getting Ready
-The Media
-Some Notable Blunders of the Peace Movement
-Things Are Not Always at They Seem--Nor Are People
-The Conspiracy of the Moment
-Kent State
-Jackson State
-Peace with Honor

Chapter 11: The Other Side
-Born in the North to Die in the South
-A Day in the Life of Uncle Ho's Nephews
-Group Think and Mind Control
-The Other Side's Draft Dodgers
-Training
-Bad Medicine
-The Sappers
-Electronics
-The Well-Clad Guerrilla
-North Vietnam's Allies in the War
-The Pathet Lao
-Enemy Atrocities
-The Declaration of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam

Chapter 12: Logistics
-Creating the Infrastructure for War
-Merchant Shipping
-Revolutionary Logistics
-The Ho Chi Minh Trail
-The Cost of War

Chapter 13: The Combat Units
-The Principal American Ground Combat Units in Vietnam
-ROK Forces in Vietnam
-Australia and New Zealand in the War
-Thai Forces
-The Philippine Contingent
-South Vietnamese

Editorial Reviews

Informative and entertaining but sobering.” —The New York Times Book Review on Dirty Little Secrets

“Dirty Little Secrets is full of surprises about the inner workings of war-making machinery around the world. and, with war and rumors of war no more distant than the front page of today's newspaper, Dirty Little Secrets is a useful briefing...A handbook for our times.” —Los Angeles Times on Dirty Little Secrets

From the Publisher

Precious few secrets are revealed in this densely scattershot look at multiple aspects of the Vietnam War. Perhaps a better title for this wide-ranging book might be "An Enormous Number of Vietnam War Facts and Figures Covering Many Different Aspects of the War, Some of Which Are Not Widely Known, and Many of Which Are Readily Available in Dozens of Books." Among the few facts that conceivably fit the title's sensational promise are that 30 percent of the Americans who died in the war were Roman Catholics; that "underage boys" enlisted in the US military to fight in the war; that some renegade Japanese troops and Nazi Germans fought briefly with the Viet Minh against the French in the years following WWII; and that the communist side suffered from desertion and draft-dodging. Almost none of the other myriad facts on dozens of subjects, marshaled by the prolific military historians Dunnigan and Nofi (Victory at Sea: World War II in the Pacific, 1995, etc.), are bona fide secrets. The information given is either merely not widely known, fairly well known, or very well known to nearly anyone. In the latter category belong sundry authorial proclamations: that during the war "territory was commonly taken, lost, and retaken repeatedly, a particularly disheartening experience for the troops who got shot up doing it"; that there "was no hero's welcome for the returning [American] soldiers"; and that "Americans held prisoner by the enemy had a rough time." Aside from such banalities, the authors include a blizzard of statistical information on military hardware and personnel matters, much of it interesting and much of it seemingly accurate, although Dunnigan and Nofi provide only aminimal amount of supporting documentation.

Kirkus Reviews