This is one of the best Vietnam books I have read. It is so truthful. Written in a way that made you feel what they (the marines) and all our young men who served in that war must have gone through. Wonderfully written!! ON July 5th, Phil Ball died, he was a wonderfully gifted man. He will be missed for all he was and all he could have been.

Over the past 13 years i have read well over 100 books on ww2 and vietnam, the majority of which were memoirs written by those who were there. Ghosts and Shadows is, one of my favorites. Although a basic description of it would make it sound like one of many books written by vietnam veterans, young man goes off to war then writes about his experiences, Phils book manages to cut several layers deeper than your average in describing the emotional and physical effects combat has on a person. I rank it up there with my other favs like Chickenhawk, Rumor of War, Suicide Charlie and Father,Soldier,Son. A couple chapters are about phil and his platoon defending a hilltop position against a vc night attack and in my opinion its one the best descriptions ive ever read about one of an authors single combat experiences. I highly recomend it and i really feel you will not be disapointed.

This book was written about heroes by a hero. It's a page burner, there is no time to put it down once you start reading.

One of a series of must read books on Vietnam for all who want to enter the field of International Relations and Foreign Policy. The author in a very methodical way details how America's National Security Apparatus of decision-making simply stalemated over Vietnam, not due to blunders but to positions that were well argued from both stand points. One group of advisors recommended no withdraw at any price. The other could not agree on how to win a victory and then exit. In the meantime, four presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon tried to win and escape at the same time as American boys blood reigned on the soaked soil of Vietnam. Although few blame Harry Truman's mistake by forcing a limited war to save South Korea, fewer know Truman started us in Vietnam as well when he first gave $10 million in Military Aid to the French in 1947. However, every president after him escalated the war to win it, only to see all attempts for peace evaporate when trying to stop it. What you find is the explanation in this book on why such outstanding advisors to five presidents could only agree to escalation to prevent withdrawal but develop no victory strategy at the same time. Leslie Gelb answers and details the blunders at the very center of National Security Council points of view. If you want to see how decisions were made back then, this is the book for you! In the end, you will question why so many failed leaving so many to die and few excuses to remember.

This is an excellent, balanced, and well-written study of American foreign policy in Vietnam by two unusually able scholars. It refutes the modern mythology that LBJ and/or Nixon "dragged Congress kicking and screaming" into the conflict, and notes that a plurality of New Hampshire voters who supported McCarthy in Feb. 1968 went on to support George Wallace and Gen. Curtiss ("Bomb Hanoi back to the stone age") LeMay in the November election--that is, they were Hawks protesting a "no-win" policy rather than Doves who wanted to abandon South Vietnam to the Communists. Highly recommended.

Very well-researched book regarding American policy towards Vietnam. The authors explore the constraints of each president, especially LBJ, when they had to deal with Vietnam. Especially incisive is the authors' view of "minimum necessary" vs "maximum feasible" constraints on US presidents w.r.t. Vietnam. This is not a conspiracy book or a first-person account. It is geared towards the academe who wants to learn about how US foreign policy was conceived and implemented wrt Vietnam.

I was a marine at Khe Sanh for the entire siege.The Book is a good accounting of the horror of the siege. I was with the 1st battalion ninth marines at rock quarry at Khe Sanh. It provides a view of what happened to those who endured the siege and for these give their all at Khe Sanh. Semper Fi

THIS BOOK IS SO TOUCHING IT SHOULD BE ON THE MARINE CORPS READING LIST IF YOU ARE OR WERE IN THE MARINE CORPS IT IS A MUST YOU READ THIS BOOK

I have read many books about military history and about the war in Vietnam in particular. This is by far one of the most emotionally wrought and amazing books I have ever read. The tales from the marines own words are amazing. You are given a great insight into the amazing odds they were fighting, and their undaunted spirit and determination to survive and win.

Stella Pope Duarte tells her tale of love, hope, betrayal and tragedy with pure beauty. Her phrasing spoke to my heart, and I became alive in her story. Particularly for people who have memories of the Vietnam War, but also for those who want to gain an understanding of domestic issues at the time, this book will rock your soul. It's a quiet book, but by no means a small one. I hope it will flush your soul with beauty as it did mine.

If we define good literature as telling a great story with skill, respect and insight, then Let Their Spirits Dance does that with flying colors. This story of the Ramirez family's pilgrimage to the Vietnam Memorial is told with presence, suspense, love, and always a search - a search that extends beyond the thirty year span of the story and beyond ethnic traditions to larger questions plaguing humanity itself.

Good literature teaches and Let Their Spirits Dance is no exception. Ms. Duarte is a gutsy writer who can throw a punch with the best of them when it comes to asking hard questions. Coming away from this book many will have learned a whole new perspective and history about millions of people that they knew little about, and maybe, like me, ticked at the system because they didn't know. With television all over everything, how come the press wasn't talking about the Chicanos and Blacks and American Indians that were being drafted and sent to the front lines in outlandishly disproportionate numbers?

Likewise, as daily body counts they fell in disproportionate numbers. And for every dead vet - every Jesse Ramirez - there were dozens of loved ones that had their lives forever ripped and altered. As author Duarte says, the casualties of that war extend far, far beyond those etched on The Wall.

It is time for the voices from The Wall to speak, and it's hard to imagine them having a more eloquent and visionary author than Stella Pope Duarte. This book is destined to be a permanent part of world literature.

Let Their Spirits Dance introduces both a newcomer to fiction writing and the first novel to address the topic of Latin soldiers during the Vietnam War. A Latino son drafted to Vietnam is killed soon after, and his family never quite succeeds in confronting the meaning of his death. Three decades later a mother will seek to understand, setting in motion events which will change the family. A powerful, important novel.

For anyone with the least bit of interest in the Vietnam "police action" and the Gulf War, and honest wartime reporting from someone with an impenetrable sense of integrity, this autobiography is a "must read." Dr. Arnett's autobiography should also be required reading for all jounalism students as a measure of their worth and what it takes to persevere when the "real story," the story on the ground, may not necessarily match that of the "party line."

Want to know what really happened on the battlefield in Vietnam and else where? Read this book. As with most good journalists who stood firm maintaining the freedom of the press, and gave the public a true picture of what was happening abroad, he was railed on by the Pentagon and Whitehouse officials throughout his career. I've just read the book and something especially haunting was the last chapter. He is covering Afghanistan, the year was about 1993 after the 'freedom fighters' got rid of the communists and the entire country is ridden with corruption, violence, and warring factions. While waiting for his plane to Kabul he has a conversation with an influential Pakistani who blamed the chaos on the "mercurial American foreign policy". Saying "all you Americans cared about was destroying communism, and you welcomed extremists to the struggle and trained them to kill. But many of those people don't like you either, and you're the next target". On the very last page, Arnett ends the book as he is leaving Afghanistan, he writes: "The collapse of the Soviet empire, the end of the Cold War, had not brought harmony to Afghanistan, merely conflict and criminality. And the United States would reap a bitter harvest from the seeds of the Islamic revolution it helped sow. I was glad to be leaving Afghanistan but I knew that the story was not over". I would probably have to go back". As usual,the Pentagon and their right-wing pundits who attack people like Arnett as sympathizers, and conspiracy theorists, have been proven wrong by history, and the current events today.

A thrilling account by a master journalist who pursued 'the story' for four decades over four continents. Guided by a determination to write only what he himself saw, Arnett sent out a steady stream of reports about what was actually happening in Vietnam, shrugging off the official military handouts as the "Five O'Clock Follies." His doggedness, bravery and resourcefulness in getting to where the action was resulted in Pulitzer Prize winning reports. He later became famous, if controversial, as one of the few American reporters to cover the Gulf War from inside Baghdad. An exhilarating read.

Marian Novak's story of a wartime bride needed to be told and she is the perfect writer to tell it. Anyone would benefit to hear her story--if you have lived it or not. Those who have been married to a soldier--or had any loved one at war--will feel a bond and comradeship. Anyone who has not had this experience should read this--there is so much we do not know. I am in awe at her ability to share it.

I will be a USMC wife on July 4th, 1999 and so much of what Mrs. Novak writes about is so similar to my own encounters with the USMC. Anyone who has a loved one in the military should read this book. It's time our story was told.

This is a book I have read many times and each time I am touched and reminded of all the men and families who went through so much for the war. I am glad that Mrs. Novak wrote a story from the perspective of someone who suffered at home. I could relate to her and her experiences.

I can't get over how beautiful this book is. I can't wait to share it with my Vietnamese students and those who are war refugees. I would like to see if they can relate to the story.

This story is easy for young children to understand and is good enough for them to ask for repeat readings, again and again. It contains a few factors that make for a great childrens book. It's relatively short, the illustrations are exceptional, it's easy to understand and it's a compelling story.

Follow the life of Ba, a young Veitnamese girl, who collects a lotus seed from the imperial garden of her emperor to serve as a momento of a time in her childhood. She takes the seed with her through her tumultous life, as she grows, and moves to a new country, and to a new life. The seed seems to serve as a symbol of her past and her endurance.

An exceptional story with outstanding illustration. A girl wanting something to remember the Emperor by takes a seed from a lotus pod from the Imperial Garden. Throughout all of the trials and changes in her life she cherishes that seed until one day it is taken and planted by her grandson. Finally it grows to be beautiful and strong, "It is the flower of life and hope, no matter how ugly the mud or how long the seed lies dormant, the bloom will be beautiful. It is the flower of my country." A superb book that looks at families and Vietnamese culture. (explained further in author's note)

How many Americans know that the most revered leaders of our modern military (among them Ridgway, Eisenhower and Marshall) advised against intervening in Vietnam?

How many know that in 1949 the Joint Chiefs of Staff issued a policy paper stating that military involvement in Indochina would be "an anti-historical act likely in the long run to create more problems than it solves and cause more damage than benefit"?

How many know that in 1967 the Joint Chiefs of Staff threatened to walk out on the president if he didn't call off military involvement?

My guess is that most Americans still believe that the majority of military leaders favored intervention and "were not allowed to win."

As Buzzanco makes clear, if that belief prevails in spite of the facts, Americans will have learned nothing from the tragedy that we call the Vietnam War. And given the current political and military situation, what we have, or haven't, learned has never mattered more.

In a masterfully concise and thorough way, Buzzanco assembles the most important but previously scattered findings about America's involvement in Vietnam. He is among the rarest of authors -- a readable scholar, one who can write for the masses. And the fact that he's a scholar is important. Journalists, who usually write the readable stuff, have lost too much credibility with the American public.

Upon finishing this relatively short but remarkably full account, all I could say was, "Finally!" The research and documentation to support Buzzanco's findings have been accumulating for years. As someone with a history degree who has tried to keep up, I applaud his ability to exhume, organize and present the essential and long buried information.

For those who demand more, there are reams of source material. For those who have been looking for a clear and credible synopsis based on what we now know, this is it.

I continue to hope that the publisher and the attending media will place it where the masses can find it.

"Although two decades have passed since US combat soldiers left Indochina, Americans are still telling lies about Vietnam." So begins Robert Buzzanco's invaluable book on the military opposition to the Vietnam war. As Buzzanco points out in his introductory chapter, it is not necessarily true that the military is more hawkish and militarist than its civilian leaders. In fact they were often more open to compromise and negotiation in the early days of the cold war than many American diplomats, and actually suggested non-involvement in the opening days of the Korean war. Some of the officers Buzzanco discusses, such as General Ridgway and Shoup rejected intervention in Vietnam altogether. Most often however a large number of officers realized that plans were flawed and that victory was unlikely, but by playing bureaucratic politics they could foist the blame on the civilians and on their service rivals in the army.

The result was that over and over again officers raised the same unalterable points. You cannot bomb the North into submission, and you cannot defeat the NLF in the South with the corrupt and incompetent Southern regime we possess. Of course, much of this was the army, the navy and the air forces criticizing the other services plans. But as it turned out they were right and Buzzanco shows that the army was not stabbed in the back. A review of America's long involvement should help demonstrate this. In 1947, General George Marshall said that the French "have no prospect" of success in Vietnam. Five years later the Joint Chief of Staff were unanimously opposed to committing any American troops into Vietnam. General Matthew Ridgeway's opposition to assisting the French after Dien Bien Phu was crucial to the Geneva Accords.

Flash forward ten years and Johnson's decision to expand the war. 1964 is a year filled with concerns over the collapse of the South Vietnamese authority, concerns about NLF strength, and strategic dithering. It is important to point out that Westmoreland, along with other officers like Wheeler, Johnson, and MacDonald opposed an all-out air war because they believed the Southern regime was too fragile to survive VC counterattacks. Pacification was dying and in only about 20% of the villages were the residents willing to provide RVN officials with information about the Viet Cong. In 1965 the war escalates. The army Chief of Staff suggests US military involvement will last at least five years, and could go as long as 20. "In I Corps, where the Marines were deployed, `the communist guerrillas enjoyed essentially uncontested dominance over most of the rural population,' they [the Corps] admitted." Conservative critics have blamed LBJ for not supporting an all-out air war. But at the time army leaders were divided about the effectiveness of such a strategy. Westmoreland thought that an air war would be ineffective as long as the situation of the South was on the verge of collapse. Westmoreland and Taylor were surprised at how often the White House took the initiative in demanding the offensive.

1966 and 1967: the officers quarrel about attrition, the air war and reinforcement, each pointing out the flaws in the other's arguments and nobody really very optimistic about a solution. "Admiral Sharp...pointed out that the United States had already caused heavy damage to most of the important military targets in the DRVN by August 1965, yet no American commander was suggesting that such measures had significantly altered the military situation in Vietnam." In response to the full-scale American invasion, the Vietcong and the PAVN were stepping up their recruitment and matching the Americans. Meanwhile Maxwell Taylor pointed out that the ARVN was shirking its duties, when the whole point of intervention was supposedly to stiffen their spine. Various officers called for more reinforcements and more troops. Even though they could make no promise that this would have any real effect, it could give them an alibi after an American defeat. In January 1967 the MACV found that it had underestimated VC and PAVN major unit attacks by a factor of four. Despite much blather about having their hands tied, the air force and the army culpably failed to protect their bases from guerrilla attacks.

Finally, 1968. Supporters of the war have argued that the Tet offensive was in fact a glorious American victory. But an obtuse and biased media convinced the American public the opposite. In fact, as Clark Clifford pointed, at the time many senior military leaders were on the verge of panic. As low morale, drug abuse, and fragging ravaged the American army, Westmoreland partially admitted the obvious: the Communist goal was not to expel the Americans, but to undermine what southern faith remained the RVN's government and army. The average ARVN battalion strength was at 50%, and it had lost one-quarter of its pre-Tet strength. Even hard-line senators such as Stennis and Jackson were beginning to waver, while pacification and counter-insurgency had been ravaged. Vann, Lansdale and others pointed out ARVN Corruption, intense popular opposition to American destructiveness and the culture of euphemism and denial at military headquarters. The one flaw in this book is that more is not said about the post-1968 war, though the government has made sure that primary documents are much less available. Based on 62 sets of private papers and oral histories and firmly well documented, this is a book that will be read for years to come.

Buzzanco's carefully researched and seamlessly written examination of military dissent in pre-Tet Vietnam rocks the boat tactfully--but thoroughly. Buzzanco conclusively lays to rest a great many myths about civil-military relations in the Vietnam era, and about the nature of the military conflict itself. This is not a book about guerilla tactics, comaraderie, or the horrors of war. Buzzanco tacitly accepts the profound emotional impact of Vietnam. His focus is on the high politics of waging a costly and highly unpopular "proxy" war. Many senior officers in Vietnam, including Matthew Ridgeway, John Paul Vann, and others, were tenaciously and vociferously critical of the war. Others were "true believers." Still others cynically hedged their bets in an effort to promote service and personal ambitions.

Following the 1968 Tet offensive, Buzzanco reveals, most civilian and military leaders recognized the futility of the conflict and wanted to get out of Vietnam. Unable to do so, however, they participated in mutual recrimination and propagandizing. The result was a web of myth that pervades U.S. civil-military relations even after Desert Storm; which was, perhaps, reinforced by Desert Storm.

Buzzanco's brilliant scholarship is a compact, unsettling, enlightening exploration of the defining Cold War conflict, and its enduring legacies.