"Dick" Meadows is renowned in military circles as a key figure in the development of the U.S. Army Special Operations. A highly decorated war veteran of the engagements in Korea and Vietnam, Meadows was instrumental in the founding of the U.S. Delta Force and hostage rescue force. Although he officially retired in 1977, Meadows could never leave the army behind, and he went undercover in the clandestine operations to free American hostages from Iran in 1980.The Quiet Professional: Major Richard J. Meadows of the U.S. Army Special Forces is the only biography of this exemplary soldier's life. Military historian Alan Hoe offers unique insight into Meadows, having served alongside him in 1960. The Quiet Professional is an insider's account that gives a human face to U.S. military strategy during the cold war. Major Meadows often claimed that he never achieved anything significant; The Quiet Professional proves otherwise, showcasing one of the great military minds of twentieth-century America.

    This standard edition of his poems was edited and arranged by his great friend Geoffrey Keynes. It includes a considerable number of early pieces, among them two of his longest poems, "The Pyramids" and "The Bastille".

    Multilayered, plaintive, and provocative, the poems in A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure are alive with archive and inhabit histories. In turns lyrical and unsettling, her poetry sings of language and loss; dialogues with time, myth and place; and communes with past and future ghosts.

    What was it like to face these odds day after day? We learn that men sustained by faith in each other and joined by the unique bonds of combat can overcome anxiety, fear, and even terror to achieve common goals.

    Only the Few and the Proud know what fun Hell can be.Here it is, folks: "How the cow ate the cabbage" in the CLASSIFIED words of the President hisself [sic]. TOP SECRET stuff. EYES ONLY. If you want to know the real story (and you know you do)-Nam-A-Rama is Catch 22 meets "Apocalypse Now." It's the wildest, wackiest, saddest and truest war story ever told, because it's all made-up, which means it's all real-from the oatmeal dropped on the VC (the Marines won't eat it) to the naked movie star parachuting into Hanoi; from the jarhead who calls in air strikes from a Bangkok brothel to the "Sky-Kyke" who fills out the Marine Corps' diversity quota; from the businessmen demanding a long inventory-reducing war to the Pentagon brass hoping for a glorious medal-worthy one; from the locals who'll do anything for a Yankee dollar to the grunts nobody ever asked and never will. It starts and ends, like all the best adventures, in the air. Almost-Captain Gearheardt and his buddy, Almost-Captain Armstrong, are ferrying bodies (live in, dead out) for the CIA's Air America, but they have never forgotten their TOP SECRET orders, given when Gearheardt was delivering pizzas to the Oval Office for the CIA: Chopper into Hanoi and buy Uncle Ho a beer. Then either shoot his ass or shake his hand (the instructions get vague at this point). And so they do, Semper Fi, pausing only to get an aircraft carrier black-flagged for bubonic plague, have an affair with Mickey Mouse, cleverly decode the message sewn into a lusty spy's black panties, commandeer a Russian truck complete with a midget Chinese 'Uncle Sam,' avenge themselves on a Cuban torturer, and dutifully experience all the Honor and Glory of the next-to-the-next-to-last war that never (God forbid) made the Nightly News.And they do it all for laughs. Because if they were to stop laughing, where would the heartache end?Phillip Jennings' unpredictable novel of Vietnam is an American classic in the making, a not-so-longing look at the absurdity of a war in which the damned and the innocent share the same hootch, the same Commander-in-Chief, and sometimes even the same body-bag. You won't stop laughing, or thinking.

    The first to set the record straight concerning the outcome of that conflict” (H. Norman Schwarzkopf, General, US Army, Retired).Neglected by scholars and journalists alike, the years of conflict in Vietnam from 1968 to 1975 offer surprises not only about how the war was fought, but about what was achieved. Drawing from thousands of hours of previously unavailable (and still classified) tape-recorded meetings between the highest levels of the American military command in Vietnam, A Better War is an insightful, factual, and superbly documented history of these final years. Through his exclusive access to authoritative materials, Lewis Sorley highlights the dramatic differences in conception, conduct, and??—??at least for a time??—??results between the early and later years of the war. Among his most important findings is that while the war was being lost at the peace table and in the US Congress, the soldiers were winning on the ground. Meticulously researched and movingly told, A Better War sheds new light on the Vietnam War.

    Later he fought in the Vietnamese jungle and emerged as one of the major figures in the "fight for liberation" -- and one of the most determined adversaries of the United States. He became the Vietcong's Minister of Justice, but at the end of the war he fled the country in disillusionment and despair. He now lives in exile in Paris, the highest level official to have defected from Vietnam to the West. This is his candid, revealing and unforgettable autobiography.

    The translators of this volume have endeavored not only to convey the spirit of the original Romanian, but to find an English equivalent for its sound. The English verse, printed facing the Romanian, conveys the distilled, metaphorical nature of a poetry that expresses a strong sense of ancestral continuity and apocalyptic visions of the world.Originally published in 1976.

     Through thirteen wildly imaginative short stories and a passional essay on colonialism and Southeast Asia, Cambodia: A Book for People Who Find Television Too Slow startles, amuses, and infuriates its readers with juxtaposed images and penetrating insights into the media jungle. Like subtitles read in a foreign film, the pace of Brian Fawcett’s intoxicating prose accelerates quickly and unfolds right before the readers eyes until it is moving more swiftly than the imagines on the evening moves. Passion stirs in the pages of Fawcett’s book, urging readers to resist the annihilation of memory and imagination in our society.

    A tour de force." — KIRKUS REVIEWS (starred review)When the six-year-old narrator of this lyric novel watches her father march off to serve a year in the U.S. Army Medical Corps, a year seems like a very long time. A year is a long time when you’re waiting for letters, waiting for word. A year is almost forever when you’re wondering . . .and forgetting. Maria Testa has written a taut and tender American ballad of one family’s experience in the year 1968 — an ultimately heartening novel that has much to say to a new generation of readers.

    A machine gunner deep in the Vietnam bush, Shawn fought and won battles with no names, and watched brave friends give the ultimate sacrifice. Death chased him. Rain, leeches, and malaria sapped his strength. And back home in an ungrateful country, right and wrong were decided by what was easiest. Prayer was his last refuge, but it was hardest of all.

    She takes him in and cares for him, not knowing that he is Leo Kavan, a physicist who has fled Los Alamos after a deadly radiation accident. Eleanor herself has left New York to escape a stifling marriage and to renew her painting in the pure desert light. As the two reveal themselves to each other, their pasts and the present unfold in tandem, taking us from the heady New York art world to Einstein’s Berlin, from English bomb labs to the hidden city of Los Alamos. As their enemies close in, they find temporary solace together, connected and changed in unexpected ways by the brutal radiance of the war and their fierce love.From the Trade Paperback edition.

    By juxtaposing fragments of her poems with short pieces of prose, we begin to know her as poet, friend, enemy, woman, lover, and revolutionary.From "Poems for Moscow (2)":From my hands—take this city not made by hands,my strange, my beautiful brother.Take it, church by church—all forty times forty churches,and flying up over them, the small pigeons;And Spassky Gates—in their flower—where the Orthodox take off their hats;And the Chapel of Stars—refuge chapel—where the floor is—polished by tears;Take the circle of the five cathedrals,my soul, my holy friend.Marina Tsvetaeva was born in Moscow in 1892 and died in 1941. Her poetry stands among the greatest works of twentieth century Russian writers.Ilya Kaminsky is the author of Dancing in Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004) which won the Whiting Writers' Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Metcalf Award, the Dorset Prize, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship awarded annually by Poetry magazine.Jean Valentine won the Yale Younger Poets award for Dream Barker in 1965. Her eleventh book of poetry is Break the Glass, from Copper Canyon Press. Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965–2003 was the winner of the 2004 National Book Award for Poetry.

     Founded in 1831 to fight France’s colonial wars without spilling French blood, this mysterious army is today a world-class fighting force. Training is so tough that five recruits out of six are rejected, never to wear the coveted white kepi. This is a world where fact exceeds the wildest fiction: men fighting literally to the last bullet at Camarón in Mexico in 1863; cooks and clerks with no parachute training volunteering to be dropped into beleaguered Dien Bien Phu in 1954 with the intention of dying beside their comrades; the paras who mutinied in Algeria to bring down the government of France; the heroes who dropped on Kolwezi to rescue thousands of European hostages. Praise for Douglas Boyd 'A tight and fascinating history of the nearly two centuries of the Legion's activities.' - Brig Anthony Hunter-Choat, the UK's senior ex-legionnaire Perhaps the greatest praise of the book is the fact that legionnaires liked this history of their incredible army so much that they elected author Douglas Boyd an honorary ex-legionnaire. RAF Russian linguist, international businessman, music impresario, BBC Television Producer/Director, Douglas Boyd has been writing full-time since setting up home in a medieval farmhouse in south-west France thirty-five years ago. His published fiction and non-fiction, translated into many languages, includes three novels set against a Legion background: The Eagle and the Snake, The Truth and the Lies, The Honour and the Glory.

    Poems: Stevens contains a selection, chosen by Helen Vendler, of over sixty of Stevens's poems, revealing with renewed force his status as our supreme acrobat of the imagination.