Frank Carlson Library

What we remember, what we've forgotten, and what we never knew about America's least understood war, revealed in a riveting, richly illustrated volume based on the major ten-part PBS documentary series directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. Historian Geoffrey C. Ward and filmmaker Ken Burns, the authors of the acclaimed and best-selling The Civil War, Jazz, The War, and Baseball, present an intimate history of the Vietnam War. All the major milestones...

How did the Vietnam War change the way we think of ourselves as a people and a nation? Christian G. Appy, author of the widely praised oral history of the Vietnam War Patriots, now examines the relationship between the war’s realities and myths and its impact on our national identity, conscience, pride, shame, popular culture, and postwar foreign policy. Drawing on a vast variety of sources from movies, songs, and novels to official documents,...

When the 160 men of Charlie Company (4th Battalion/47th Infantry/9th ID) were drafted by the US Army in May 1966, they were part of the wave of conscription that would swell the American military to 80,000 combat troops in theater by the height of the war in 1968. In the spring of 1966, the war was still popular and the draftees of Charlie Company saw their service as a rite of passage. But by December 1967, when the company rotated home, only 30...

In November 1965, some 450 men of the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry, under the command of Lt.Col. Hal Moore, were dropped into a small clearing in the la Drang Valley. They were immediately surrounded by two thousand North Vietnamese soldiers. Three days later, only two and a half miles away, a sister battalion was massacred. Together, these actions constitute one of the most savage and significant battles of the Vietnam War. The Americans faced what...