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In April 1969, Linda Moore-Lanning watched her husband, Lt. Michael Lee Lanning, board a Greyhound bus that would take him to a military flight scheduled to deposit him in Vietnam. As he boarded the bus, Lee told her, \"It’s only for a year.\" Moore-Lanning struggled to believe her husband’s words.

Bruce Dancis arrived at Cornell University in 1965 as a youth who was no stranger to political action. He grew up in a radical household and took part in the 1963 March on Washington as a fifteen-year-old. He became the first student at Cornell to defy the draft by tearing up his draft card and soon became a leader of the draft resistance movement. He also turned down a student deferment and refused induction into the armed services. He was the principal organizer of the first mass draft card burning during the Vietnam War, an activist in the Resistance (a nationwide organization against the draft), and a cofounder and president of the Cornell chapter of Students for a Democratic Society. Dancis spent nineteen months in federal prison in Ashland, Kentucky, for his actions against the draft. In Resister, Dancis not only gives readers an insider's account of the antiwar and student protest movements of the sixties but also provides a rare look at the prison experiences of Vietnam-era draft resisters. Intertwining memory, reflection, and history, Dancis offers an engaging firsthand account of some of the era's most iconic events, including the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the Abbie Hoffman-led \"hippie invasion\" of the New York Stock Exchange, the antiwar confrontation at the Pentagon in 1967, and the dangerous controversy that erupted at Cornell in 1969 involving African American students, their SDS allies, and the administration and faculty. Along the way, Dancis also explores the relationship between the topical folk and rock music of the era and the political and cultural rebels who sought to change American society.

Jon Hovde's journey begins with despair and the struggle to stay alive and ends with hope and the inspiration to live. Left for Dead is a gripping memoir that not only recounts Hovde's recovery from injuries sustained in the Vietnam War, but recognizes the people who aided him—including the courageous medic who rescued him, a caring army nurse, and army chaplains.

Born in rural Illinois, Ken Kays was a country boy who flunked out of college and wound up serving as a medic in the Vietnam War. On May 7, 1970, after only 17 days in Vietnam and one day after joining a new platoon, the young medic found himself in a ferocious battle. As a conscientious objector, Kays did not carry any weapons, but his actions during that engagement would earn him the Congressional Medal of Honor. Yet Kays' valor came during just another unheralded fire fight near the end of a long and seemingly fruitless war. He returned home and, with other vets, struggled to reconcile his anti-war beliefs with what he and others had done in Vietnam. This dramatic and tragic story is a timely reminder of the price of war and the fragile comforts of peace.

How important is presidential personality and leadership style in foreign policy decisions? To answer this question, Thomas Preston takes readers inside the Bush administration’s decision-making process and use of intelligence to better understand how administration officials justified the Iraq War—and how they sought to avoid blame for the consequences of their actions. Based on extensive interviews with key Bush and Johnson administration officials, Preston offers students of American foreign policy, presidential decision making, the dynamics of blame avoidance, and future practitioners with an in depth examination of how presidential personality and leadership style impacted Bush’s central foreign policy failure. In addition, Preston looks critically at the oft-cited comparisons of Iraq to Lyndon Johnson’s leadership during the Vietnam War, exploring where the analogy fits and a number of important differences. He shows how both presidents’ styles exacerbated their managerial weaknesses in these cases and the limits of blame avoidance strategies. Importantly, the book provides a cautionary tale for future leaders to consider more carefully the long-term consequences of satisfying their short term policy desires by lifting the lid to any new Pandora’s trap.

As the ground war in Vietnam escalated in the late 1960s, the US government leveraged the so-called doctor draft to secure adequate numbers of medical personnel in the armed forces. Among newly minted physicians’ few alternatives to military service was the Clinical Associate Training Program at the National Institutes of Health. Though only a small percentage of applicants were accepted, the elite program launched an unprecedented number of remarkable scientific careers that would revolutionize medicine at the end of the twentieth century. Medal Winners recounts this overlooked chapter and unforeseen byproduct of the Vietnam War through the lives of four former NIH clinical associates who would go on to become Nobel laureates. Raymond S. Greenberg traces their stories from their pre-NIH years and apprenticeships through their subsequent Nobel Prize–winning work, which transformed treatment of heart disease, cancer, and other diseases. Greenberg shows how the Vietnam draft unintentionally ushered in a golden era of research by bringing talented young physicians under the tutelage of leading scientists and offers a lesson in what it may take to replicate such a towering center of scientific innovation as the NIH in the 1960s and 1970s.

Even as Lyndon Johnson celebrated his electoral triumph in November, 1964, he and his advisers began the process that led to eight years of war and the destruction of his administration. This vivid, fast-paced narrative describes the critical nine months in which Johnson committed the nation to supporting a government in South Vietnam which almost no one believed could survive. Amid a sharp debate among his advisers, LBJ almost avoided the catastrophic decision, until a determination to stand tall (and to outflank his conservative domestic opposition) led him--and the U.S.--into the quagmire.

The result of five years of research, First Heroes untangles an intricate web of information and ultimately concludes that the prisoners of war that were held captive in Southeast Asia were forgotten or ignored by their own country. Author Rod Colvin crisscrossed the country interviewing military and government officials, veterans, returned POWs, political figures, journalists, and members of the National League of Families and the National Forget-Me-Not Association and balances hard facts with the dramatic personal accounts of parents, wives, brothers, sisters, and children who have waged a difficult battle for the truth about their loved ones. This chronicle is as much a testament to the faith and unending hope of the family members as it is the story of the men themselves.

A US Naval Aviator's odyssey through pivotal moments in 20th-century history The rise of Adolf Hitler, America's Great Depression in the heartland, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, American life following World War II, the Korean War, America's development of atomic weapons in the Cold War age, the Bay of Pigs Invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War, and the Mariel boatlift. Captain Allen Brady not only witnessed all of these events but actually participated in them, in many instances as a US Naval Aviator. So many Americans and global citizens alike are not even aware of the importance of these pivotal moments; as generations age and pass on, without important accounts like this one, much is forgotten. More than just a memoir, Brady's book is an important document from one of the last of his generation, reminding us of the pivotal moments that should not be lost to history. Witnessing the American Century is Captain Brady's firsthand account of his incredible life, and his memories elucidate America's role in the most significant world events from the previous century. Capt. Allen Colby Brady is a retired Naval Aviator. Throughout his thirty-plus years of service, Capt. Brady found himself in the front row to all of the major events surrounding the emerging Cold War, nuclear proliferation, America's fight to defeat the Communists in Cuba, and, most notably, his long stint as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. Following his retirement, Capt. Brady lived for over six years aboard a sailboat, even using his sailing expertise to liberate exiled communities of Cubans in the early 1980s.

Growing up during the Second World War, H. Bruce Franklin believed what he was told: that America's victory would lead to a new era of world peace. Like most Americans, he was soon led to believe in a world-wide Communist conspiracy that menaced the United States, forcing the nation into a disastrous war in Korea. But once he joined the U.S. Air Force and began flying top-secret missions as a navigator and intelligence officer, what he learned was eye-opening. He saw that even as the U.S. preached about peace and freedom, it was engaging in an endless cycle of warfare, bringing devastation and oppression to fledgling democracies across the globe.Now, after fifty years as a renowned cultural historian, Franklin offers a set of hard-learned lessons about modern American history. Crash Course is essential reading for anyone who wonders how America ended up where it is today: with a deeply divided and disillusioned populace, led by a dysfunctional government, and mired in unwinnable wars. It also finds startling parallels between America's foreign military exploits and the equally brutal tactics used on the home front to crush organized labor, antiwar, and civil rights movements.More than just a memoir or a history book, Crash Course gives readers a unique firsthand look at the building of the American empire and the damage it has wrought. Shocking and gripping as any thriller, it exposes the endless deception of the American public, and reveals from inside how and why many millions of Americans have been struggling for decades against our own government in a fight for peace and justice.