This book consists of letters written by American soldiers during the Vietnam War. It's extremely heart-breaking to read these letters as they gives "voices" instead of a mere figure. A lot of times, the figure of how many were killed, wounded, missing, etc but it does not portray any "emotions" the soldiers felt. At the end of each letter, the editor includes a few sentences on what happened to the author. It's extremely sad to read how many of those killed were just 19 year-olds, 20 year-olds, and these soldiers were just kids! It makes you think how wasteful, stupid, unnecessary wars are, and the sacrifices that has to be made.

The last chapter of this book speaks a lot. It is chronologically listed and you can see the evolving sentiments of the soldiers. At the beginning of the war, the soldiers were proud to fight against the Communists, how they think the war will be over soon. Towards the end of that chapter, most soldiers were scared, depressed and just wanted to get out of the war... alive! This shows why many Vietnam War veterans suffered from postwar depression as the horror of the war, how their friends, buddies were killed or wounded in front of their own eyes and how many could not possibly forget these horrifying images.

I highly recommend this book as this book speaks a lot. To me, the important message that it is trying to convey is the unnecessary sacrifices that these soldiers have to make, to fight a war that is not theirs, and the horror and bloodiness of the war is vividly described by these soldiers.

I have seen the movie in class last week and my teacher was in the war, but only as an engineer controller down in a ship. When my eighth grade class saw it, it was very good only some parts my teacher cut out because of nudity. I would suggest this boook or movie to anyone that has ever wondered about the Vietnam thing. This "war" that some people like to call it was not a war at all, it was just a police action and the soldiers were the police and we were just looking and were going to arrest the V.C.'s. If you have any problem with what I am saying then you can contact me at my address below. Thank You!

Sarah Quartuccio 14yrs. old

I still remember the day I walked into my college's library back in the late 1980s and saw this publication sitting on the table of new releases. I picked it up and headed for a couch. About six hours, many tears, mixed emotions, and several missed classes later I emerged from that couch and put the completed book back on the table. In those six hours my view about the Vietnam experience and those who fought it changed. The words of those soldiers in their letters are powerful evidence of the collision between innocence and experience that takes place when young men are thrust into battle.

This book should be required reading for all students of that war and required reading for every President who ever contemplates sending soldiers into battle.

I found this book from a HISTORY TV channel story featuring the author. As a baby-boomer I saw the movie WAKE ISLAND several times, but didn't realize it was made before any of the actual participants had returned from the POW camps. There is more Hollywood fiction in the movie than historical fact. But that's show business. The author covers in great detail the actions by major commands, individuals and everybody in-between. Considering how badly Wake was prepared to defend itself, the Marines did a great job for two weeks holding off superior forces. If only there had been more construction effort put into beach defense and airplane protection before Dec 7th. The Japanese underestimated the resistance in their first landing attempt. I was also surprised how close US forces came to rescuing the defenders, but were called off at the last moment. This a great book for Marine fans of WWII.

This book is an instant classic! I enjoyed reading this massive book cover to cover. The title "facing fearful odds" is an apt title. The quick change from peace to war trapped these brave men on an island that would become a symbol for the war in the pacific. The book reads well, and tells the tales of the civilians who stayed behind to defend Wake. The fact that they were so close to relief, and held out for so long is a testament to the warrior spirit. A must read!!!!

Since my father was a .50 captain on the island and I was with the 5th Marines in VN, I have read every work out on Wake Island. This author not only interviewed survivors but did massive research work tying in the Japanese situation and strategy with the situation on Wake Island and the strategies and reactions of Washington and Pearl Harbor, where Wake Island received its orders. He covers the air, naval,artillery and infantry actions and the personalities and historical disagreements of the participants. He speculates on alternative possibilities thoughtfully. I doubt, with the participants dying off so quickly now, that this book will ever be topped as the definitive work on the battle for wake island and he does a good job on the captivity time as well.

I'm a new student of military history and I'm particularly interested in the Vietnam War. This book came highly recommended and I'm glad that I have read it. It is by far, one of the best Vietnam books I have ever read. I have recommended it to my fellow students. Major Norton has done a great job of telling the story of his Force Recon Marines!

I've read both '69 and '70. This is by far one of the best books about real experiences in Vietnam that I have read. I was on the edge of my seat the whole way through. At one point I felt as if I was the one hiding in the bush just 10' feet from the NVA as they passed by! A real heart pounder!

A friend of mine turned me on to Major "Doc" Norton's books about the Marine Corps, and I must agree, this Major can tell a great story! I served in the Marine Corps for 22 years and had just one tour in Vietnam. No one else can "bring in home" like this guy can. You feel as though you are out on patrol with Doc and his recon team in 3rd Force Recon Co. The best part is that he writes a sequel about his time in 1st Force Recon Company. If Spielburg had half a brain he'd make Norton's books come alive on sreen. It would be the Vietnam version of Saving Private Ryan. If readers are interesetd in "credibility" than here is a story of heroic young men in combat. Truth is better than fiction and this book proves it. Any Marines I know would be proud to have guys like Norton and his teammates, Bishop, Silva, Keaveney and Furhman, in their team. Where do guys like these come from? The are the legends of the Corps. A GREAT Book! Go out a buy it. That's an order!

Sir, Your accounting of the abilities of our teams brought back so many memories. The price we had to pay is still so unknown to so many. I carry the memory of my friend and teammate Sgt.A.Garcia with me every day. I am proud that I had the honor to serve under you and with men like him. For those who fought for it freedom has a taste the protected will never know.
Doc Parrish 3rd. Force Recon 1969-1970

I believe this is a very balanced work, and sets forth a compelling remembrance of the good and great men who served under unspeakable conditions, and gained little by it for themselves but silent honor.

I bought and read this book, after returning from the funeral of my friend's father, Lt. Col. Buck Coffman, this past weekend (1 Sept., '01). Col. Coffman was a fascinating, remarkable man who served his nation well. Sometimes, perhaps, better than it's people deserved. I knew him apart from his role as warrior (though ALWAYS a Marine), and he set a standard to aspire to, as a man and as Man. He was loved truly by his family and friends.

At his memorial service, I had the privelege of meeting the author, Col. Lee, as well as Maj. Norton, Col. Morris, Gen. Gray and several of the other courageous men who served with them in the Marines; men written of in this book. Each and every one of them impressed me with their intelligence, decency and honor, and for the love they so obviously share for one another.

I am now starting on Doc Norton's Force Recon Diaries. I am very grateful to the men who write these books. We should always remember that giants DO walk the earth. I'm honored to have spent a time, even but a moment, in the shadow of one.

It seems that all of these Force Recon books are concerned with the war after 1969, during the downsizing of Americas involvement. dont they realize that the worst of the war was prior to that ,in 67-68. Also, i dont care for the way col. Lee is critical of the unit prior to his arrival. This very company was the first into the DMZ in 1967, it patrolled Con Thien in the bad days and patrolled the Khe Sanh area with 4 man teams. the company had a Medal of Honor winner and a number of Navy Crosses prior to his arrival. Regardless it is still an excellent book and the views above are mine alone.

As always Palin has produced a great travel book and series... this I found better than his "80 Days". The other thing people might find interesting about this travel book is that it takes us to some places which are hard to reach even in this day and age, so this is the only way we can know them.

Also suggested- "Hemingway Adventure"

Full Circle is just as good, if not better then his othertravel/comedy books. It is simply magnificent.

Michael Palin does it again with Full Circle. Starting in Alaska Michael travels anti-clockwise around the rim of the Pacific Ocean visiting countries as diverse as Russia, Korea, Viet Nam, New Zealand, Colombia and the west coast of North American. He tells of his adventures getting to and exploring some fantastic natural wonders, visiting a Russian gulag with a former inmate, the relief of Japan, the Vietnamese reactions to a westerner, the biggness of Australia and the hardworking people of South America. The section on the United States is short and not always sweet. Palin is taken aback by the physical bigness of Americans, and rush, and loudness. By the time he reaches Canada and attends a "lumberjack" fair (no singing Mounties included!) he really "wants to go home". We also learn a bit about how the series and book were produced, his wife Helen and their children, and that being on a job for the BBC doesn't always mean smooth sailing! Michael's friend Basil Pao took the photographs - he also joined Michael on "Around the World in Eighty Days". I can highly recommend this book and not only to fans of Monty Python - it doesn't end how you might expect!

I read this book aloud to my sixth grade reading class. They loved it, and always wanted to hear more. Its also a great way to introduce students to some of the history of China, Japan and US involvement in the war there.

Boys can be picky readers, so I always take notes if they actually love a book. My 8 year old carried this book everywhere and told be about it every night for a week. Besides Redwall or Harry Potter, this is the first book he has raved about.

I told my young son about what a good book this was when I read it growing up, encouraging him to read it as well. He too enjoyed it, and I read it again in my fifties. Excellent book, would certainly encourage children to read it. Now in his teens, we still use a memorable quote from the book, "the heart understands without words".

This is an engrossing story of a young fighter pilot's experiences flying P-40s and P-51s in mid to late World War Two with the 75th Fighter Squadron in China. Donald Lopez writes excellent flying sequences and conveys the essence of the people he flew and fought with. A good read if you have any interest in military history or aviation.

Haven't read a pilot's memoirs for quite a while, although doing much more of it now. Into the Teeth of the Tiger was the first of a long line of new purchases that I need to read and it was well worth the purchase. Mr Lopez, while an excellent flier and leader, is also a wonderful writer. He writes with modesty and is not afraid to describe his errors in addition to his successes. The action sequences are superb and the humour used by the pilots and crews to lighten things up a bit is guaranteed to generate a smile and even a chuckle. Of course, this is war and the deaths of friends and the treatment of the civilian population was no doubt shattering for all involved. I get the impression that this book has become somewhat of a classic and justly so. It is a well-written account of a less publicised theatre of the war by a (then) very young pilot. What these guys did at 20-25 really puts things into perspective. A bloody good read!

Don Lopez was a 23-year-old fighter pilot in the 14th Air Force Flying Tigers, flying a war-weary P-40 against the Japanese army air force in such close combat that he once took a wing off a Nakajima Ki-43 Hayabusa ("Oscar"). Good pilots are easy to find, and so are good writers, but Don is that exceptional individual: a pilot who can write well and to the heart. This book is a keeper.

This book is an awesome collection of great photos. Larry Burrows did a fabulous job at capturing real life experiences in Vietnam. I commend him and David Halberstam for their professionalism and commitment to those soldiers who fought and died for our country. I only wish the descriptive captions were listed near the large photos in the book, not the back of the book. I'm sure the author had a reason for this. I strongly recommend this book.

The Vietnam war was defined as the first total media war, television was in the ascendancy but it was through newspapers and magazines that most people got there view of the suffering. The three greatest war photographers of all time (Robert Capa is the forth) brought the war to the breakfast tables of the world, Phillip Jones Griffiths, Donald McCullin and Larry Burrows produced pictures which showed the true horror and futility of the Vietnam conflict. McCullin through the pages of the Sunday Times Magazine, Jones Griffiths with his book "Vietnam Inc" and Burrows in the pages of "Life" magazine. Larry Burrows was given the massive task of showing the war in colour. Colour was regarded as being too pretty for the hard hitting task of showing war, also the actual technical limitations of the colour film of the time made Burrows task even more difficult. The sensitivity was very slow and getting the exposure absolutely spot on was imperitive. The steadyness and consideration needed to get the pictures are not condusive to the nerves in the midst of combat but Burrows had the metal to get the job done. This book brings together his work from 1963 till his death in 1971 in a way that shows not only his skill as a photographer but also as a journalist who could visualise the images and create the difinitive "picture story" The reproduction and layout are excellent and to see the images virtually as they would have appeared in Life are a credit to Larry's son Russell. This is a must for anyone interested in photography and photojournalism.

I couldn't pass this book up. As this country prepares for the next war we should be mindful of the lessons of the one we lost. Larry Burrows appears to have gone everywhere in Vietnam carrying his Leicas and Nikons. His images are gritty, sad, shocking, poignant, and, yes beautiful. He is at his best when he captures the mind bending reactions in the faces of the men who fought the enemy and fought to stay alive. I don't think color has ever been used so well in combat photos. An artist and historian with a camera. This book is the legacy of a man whose compassion brought him too close to his subject. He died in a helicopter crash in an incursion into Laos in 1971. His images show his feeling for nuance, composition, storytelling and empathy. Only David Duncan's photographs of the Marines retreat in Korea compare with Burrows' combat sequences. And David Duncan was with his unit for a few days. Larry Burrows spend nine years, off and on, covering the Vietnam debacle and its impact on soldiers, civilians and country.

National security is a term we're used to hearing in the United States, but with rare exception "security threats" are in fact threats to America's vast informal empire abroad (military bases, troop deployments, the security of client regimes and business interests). As Ross and Nathan ably show, this is emphatically not the case for China. Even though "China is stronger today and its borders more secure than at any other time in the last 150 years", it continues to face a bewildering array of vulnerabilities -- from internal unrest to border insecurity to economic instability.

This book is a good corrective to the growing right-wing trend of playing up the "China threat". Ross and Nathan make clear that China's goals are not particularly ambitious and their capabilities so limited that even if the sinister cabal of Communists plotting against America's beneficent reign were real, it would be hard pressed to act out its evil intentions. Chapter 8, in particular, demolishes the idea that China's military will any time soon provide a real challenge to Japan, much less the USA.

Despite the great service Ross and Nathan provide in refuting the containment school's arguments, this book also has basic problems. Because it is a survey, the authors can only superficially treat each of the many issues raised. They do a good job of integrating history and current events, and the book should be quite useful for those mostly unfamiliar with its topics, but for those with more detailed knowledge it will often by unsatisfying.

Second, the authors use the national security paradigm to orient their analysis, but seem unaware of the drawbacks to such an approach. "National" security indulges the false idea that all groups and individuals within a nation can share the same interests and that national leaders act, fundamentally, on behalf of the whole population. In reality security policies generally hurt the interests of some groups while advancing those of others, and China's leaders act to perpetuate their own power and the power of the Communist Party, and to protect the interests of the increasingly influential business elite. The authors' inability to consider such matters leads them to seriously downplay the ruling class's increasing economic exploitation of workers and its violent domination of ethnically non-Han peoples in East Turkestan/Xinjiang, Tibet/Xizang, and Inner Mongolia.

And finally, the authors approach the subject from the perspective of the engagement school, which has both strengths (discussed above) and very serious weaknesses. Proponents of engagement are ideologically incapable of seeing that the current global economic system is based on inequality, exploitation, and the denial of people's basic needs (food, health care, shelter) and that it is upheld by American military domination of other people. Ross and Nathan's ultimate recommendation, then, is that China be safely integrated into this system -- not because doing so will help the Chinese people, but because doing so removes a threat to the safe operation of a fundamentally unjust world order.

Nathan and Ross have constructed an excellent book discussing the vulnerability of China. The book goes into great depth discussing issues such as: Taiwanese independence, nuclear proliferation, the strength of the chinese military, the necessity of U.S. intervention in Asia, the relationships existing between China and Japan or the two Koreas, Tibetan freedom, technological exchange with Pakistan. Ultimately, Nathan and Ross conclude that China is a weak and vulnerable country that is more concerned with maintaining its borders and internal stability than initiated a policy of imperialism. This book is a great edition for any student of Asian Politics. Easy to read.

Andrew J. Nathan and Robert S. Ross's THE GREAT WALL AND THE EMPTY FORTRESS is a clearly and tightly written presentation of Chinese foreign policy and defense issues. It is as reliable in its treatment of aspects of the pre-modern Chinese state and society that impinged on the course of modern Chinese affairs as it is authoritative (and well documented) in its analysis of the contemporary Chinese situation. With books on contemporary Chinese affairs, one must be concerned with material becoming dated, but though this book is some four years old in content, nearly its entirety is nevertheless very relevant. Its treatment of Chinese-Taiwan relations, for instance, is still on the mark. Since the book was written before the restoration of Hong Kong to China, the reader will not be able to glean anything new about that situation here. However that may be, this book remains as "must reading" for any student of contemporary China. The reader will happily discover that the style is eminently readable.

This is one of the short-list finest English translations of this indispensable work of cosmic insight and practical wisdom (the two are, as Lao Tzu repeatedly points out, identical in effect). Like Jonathan Star's translation (in his wonderful verbatim text), Pine's work is the rendering of a person with a scholarly background who clearly has made a heart-connection with his subject; in short, this is the work of man who loves the Tao and refuses to hide behind a cloak of academic pretence in his translation. The only distraction to the book is its inclusion of commentary from various sources directly on the page with the poems: I much prefer having the translator's or others' commentary in the back of the text, so that the reader can fully experience the poems in the main part of the text independently, without the distraction of "expert insight." These are poems that should be read and re-read, time and again, year after year, for this is a work that always refreshes itself and its readers. In other respects, however, Pine's translation is well worth a spot on the shelf of any lover of the Tao.

This is the best translation of the Tao Te Ching that I've seen. I'm confident that I will not live to see a better translation. This is the only translation I have found that conveys the profound clarity and simplicity of the Tao.

I will go one step further: This is the greatest holy book I have read.

I plan on reading every book by Red Pine/Bill Porter.

The TAO TE CHING is one of the most translated books in the world, surpassed only by the BIBLE and the BHAGAVAD-GITA. In his reflective verse, Lao-tzu speaks to those searching for a meaningful way of mastering one's life in a society degraded by economic, militaristic and modern values. More than one hundred translations of Lao-tzu's "Book of the Way" have been published in Western languages, including more than forty versions in English alone. This translation is notable for two reasons. First, Red Pine (aka Bill Porter) draws from the recently discovered Ma-wang-tui texts of the TAO TE CHING to successfully convey the Tao essence of Lao-tzu. Those texts were discovered in 1973 preserved in the tomb of an official's son; that tomb has been dated to 168 BC. Second, although it takes only an hour to read the TAO TE CHING, it requires a lifetime to understand it. Red Pine's book includes selected commentaries from the past 2000 years that provide line-by-line insights into Lao-tzu's difficult verse.

Red Pine's bare-verse translation follows the classic two-part, eighty-one verse format of the TAO TE CHING. It is less scholarly than Robert Henrick's translation, more literal than Stephen Mitchell's poetic rendering of the TAO TE CHING, and as readable as Robert Moss's translation. Red Pine's translations of THE DIAMOND SUTRA and THE COLLECTED SONGS OF COLD MOUNTAIN demonstrate a deep understanding of his subjects, and his translation of Lao-tzu is no exception. Red Pine's TAOTECHING is a well-travelled path to the Tao on my bookshelf, and a recommended translation of "The Old Master."

G. Merritt