Easy-to-follow patterns, beautiful photographs, and colorful step-by-step drawings help the projects come together quickly----many in less than an hour. Whether they are created in kimono silks or in contemporary cottons, these tiny boxes, purses, decorative toys, incense pouches, and good luck charms all make delightful gifts.

    Christensen's experience as a military policeman (MP) in a city of millions at a time when chaos and fear reigned. As a 23-year-old from a small town in Washington State, the author was plunged into a chaotic city of brawling servicemen, prostitutes, racial violence, enemy rockets, riots, and death. It was a place that would give him a unique opportunity to see up close a different side of the Vietnam War and its effect on the human condition. Nearly 80 stories collectively convey the author’s experiences and his arc—from naive to jaded, angry, confused, anxious, and bone-weary exhausted—that is representative of so many GIs who served in the Vietnam War as well as those veterans of today’s conflicts around the globe. * “A true warrior and a gifted and prolific author, Loren gives the reader a deep and illuminating insight into his experience that changed his life and subsequently led him toward helping others through his writing. Policing Saigon is a powerful book.” Lt. Col. Dave Grossman * Military Policeman Loren Christensen takes the reader on a gritty, moving, and intense ride-a-along in Saigon, Vietnam. K.F., Afghanistan War veteran Table of Contents Introduction PART ONE: THE FIRST FEW DAYS Chap 1: Flying there Chap 2: Door gunners and policing for cigarette butts Chap 3: Welcome to Saigon Chap 4: Python Chap 5: Culture shock Chap 6: Dead men’s gear PART TWO: "ROUTINE DAYS" Chap 7: Day after day Chap 8: EOD Chap 9: Skylight Chap 10: Cobra Chap 11: Bob Hope Chap 12: Papa-san and the ammo truck Chap 13: Dead mama-san Chap 14: Jail window Chap 15: “Karate number one” Chap 16: Sampson Chap 17: 100-P alley Chap 18: 200-P alley Chap 19: The swimming pool Chap 20: “Dance to the Music” Chap 21: Drugs Chap 22: Tracer rounds Chap 23: Puff the magic dragon Chap 24: Almost a coup Chap 25: Vietnam blues Chap 26: Tension Chap 27: A shaky fork Chap 28: Illusions of relief Chap 29: Korean Marines Chap 30: AFVN radio: “Goooooood morning, Vietnaaaaaam” Chap 31: “I’m not a crook” Chap 32: Running Code 3 Chap 33: Fire Chap 34: Riot Chap 35: Power and rank: a deadly mix Chap 36: The vision Chap 37: Screams Chap 38: Meyerkord Hotel Chap 39: Resisting arrest Chap 40: Letters Chap 41: One GI who went home and came right back PART THREE: LOSING IT Chap 42: Silencer Chap 43: Hangman Chap 44: Johnny Walker Black Chap 45: Escaped prisoner Chap 46: The punch Chap 47: Death of the spirit Chap 48: Grenade PART FOUR: PROSTITUTES Chap 49: “Boom-boom number one” Chap 50: Clap Chap 51: Peter PART FIVE: THE INDIGENOUS Chap 52: A fellow martial artist Chap 53: A most excellent shot Chap 54: “Everybody’s talkin’ ‘bout me” Chap 55: China girl Chap 56: Date night Chap 57: The old gravedigger Chap 58: Altered states: the Buddhist temple Chap 59: Dog sex and an alligator baby PART SIX: STREET CHILDREN Chap 60: A Tu Do paperboy Chap 61: Cemetery k

    This work also covers various political and social subtexts of the movies.

    On a snowy winter's night in Vermont, eleven-year-old Adam Fifield and his family awaited the arrival of his new foster brother, Soeuth, a fourteen-year-old refugee from the killing fields of Cambodia.  Scrawny and terrified, Soeuth was mute for days, warily retreating into his room despite the Fifields' numerous attempts to make him feel welcome.  But for Soeuth, whose young life had been plagued with fear and violence, it would be months before any place could feel like home.In this rewarding memoir, Adam Fifield recalls the months and years that followed his first meeting with Soeuth.  He describes the boy's amazing physical prowess, his sense of humor, and, juxtaposed against his own typically American coming of age, the horrific details of Soeuth's early years.  But even more compelling is the story of Adam and his brother's journey to Cambodia to meet the family Soeuth once thought dead.  What awaits them on the side of the globe will both reunite Soeuth with his lost family and cement the relationship he has forced with his new one.

    After more than fifty years of national pacifism and isolation including the "lost decade" of the 1990s, Japan is quietly, stealthily awakening. As Japan prepares to become a major player in the strategic struggles of the 21st century, critical questions arise about its motivations. What are the driving forces that influence how Japan will act in the international system? Are there recurrent patterns that will help explain how Japan will respond to the emerging environment of world politics? American understanding of Japanese character and purpose has been tenuous at best. We have repeatedly underestimated Japan in the realm of foreign policy. Now as Japan shows signs of vitality and international engagement, it is more important than ever that we understand the forces that drive Japan. In Japan Rising, renowned expert Kenneth Pyle identities the common threads that bind the divergent strategies of modern Japan, providing essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how Japan arrived at this moment--and what to expect in the future.

    Join Grace and Ryosuke in their exciting, strange, and kind of awkward life together - smack in the middle of rice fields and mountains.

    Now, as the Party's 18th National Congress oversees the biggest leadership transition in decades, and installs the Bo family's long-time rival Xi Jinping as president, China's rulers are finding it increasingly difficult to keep their poisonous internal divisions behind closed doors.Bo Xilai's breathtaking fall from grace is an extraordinary tale of excess, murder, defection, political purges and ideological clashes going back to Mao himself, as the princeling sons of the revolutionary heroes ascend to control of the Party. China watcher John Garnaut examines how Bo's stellar rise through the ranks troubled his more reformist peers, as he revived anti-'capitalist roader' sentiment, even while his family and associates enjoyed the more open economy's opportunities. Amid fears his imminent elevation to the powerful Standing Committee was leading China towards another destructive Cultural Revolution, have his opponents seized their chance now to destroy Bo and what he stands for? The trigger was his wife Gu Kailai's apparently paranoid murder of an English family friend, which exposed the corruption and brutality of Bo's outwardly successful administration of the massive city of Chongqing. It also led to the one of the highest-level attempted defections in Communist China's history when Bo's right-hand man, police chief Wang Lijun, tried to escape the ruins of his sponsor's reputation.Garnaut explains how this incredible glimpse into the very personal power struggles within the CCP exposes the myth of the unified one-party state. With China approaching super-power status, today's leadership shuffle may set the tone for international relations for decades. Here, Garnaut reveals a particularly Chinese spin on the old adage that the personal is political.

    Unable to confide in anyone or seek counselling for the abuse, he started drinking in his teenage years and became an alcoholic who sold his body for money. The author now feels that it is time to tell his heartbreaking story.

    

    Helen shares her own roller coaster journey from the initial shock of a surprise separation, the messy months hanging out in her PJs through to the highs of rediscovering online dating, tiny pants, rock-solid female friendships and the glorious joy of just being by herself.With the help of relationship experts and an army of women "who know", Get Divorced, Be Happy will show you that going it alone isn't the end, it is just the beginning, and you will come out the other side, stronger, happier and goddamn sassier than ever before.

    

    Harrowing and heroic, the events of D-Day were recorded in the personal writings of those who were there. Here, Francis Crosby has compiled a comprehensive collection of previously unpublished letters, diaries, photographs, and reminiscences that tell the story of D-Day as it has never been told before.With the use of new international archives, Crosby has culled vivid and detailed eye-witness accounts from each beach, as well as perspectives from land, sea, and air. This fascinating collection includes entries from American, British, and Canadian troops, the Merchant Navy and the Royal Air Force, and newly available German materials. Also included are contemporary and retrospective reactions of women "in the know" and those whom knew from "unofficial sources" of the immediate imminence of the assault.

    a remarkable story—Leeza Gibbons, NBC-TV • Grippingly told ... a wonderful, powerful book—David Berner, Radio CKNW Vancouver • Reads with the pace of a taut thriller—George Henderson, Gloucestershire Citizen • Mesmerizing—Bob Stall, Vancouver Province. Now revised and updated. The amazing, true story of how medical authorities allow a family doctor to continue practising even after he begins living with a 15-year-old patient—and allegedly has sex with another girl in exchange for giving drugs to her father. The notorious doctor still carries on as before and a third patient complains about infamous conduct—until he silences her by putting out a contract for murder.

    In this compelling study of true crime, Liverpool's most popular author Tom Slemen recounts some of the most intriguing and baffling murders of Merseyside such as:• The baffling case of the Victorian canned corpse• The magistrate's beautiful granddaughter who was killed by a crazed admirer• The condemned man who was hanged twice• Frederick Deeming - the Rainhill psychopath who wiped out his own family and danced on their grave with his next victim• The bizarre link between a South Seas cult and the housewife who was stabbed fourteen times in her Knotty Ash home by a killer who struck under the cover of a fog• The unsolved case of the superintendent and his son who died of gunshot wounds under mysterious circumstances - in a police station• The enigmatic murder of Julia Wallace - and a very credible solution• The only assassination of a British prime minister - by a Liverpool businessman Plus many more fascinating murder cases.This fascinating book is a must for all readers of true crime in general and Liverpudlians and Merseysiders in particular.

    Should they follow cautionary guidelines to return to a major city or take a chance by continuing north through the back country?Thru-hiking from Georgia to Maine on any given year has its own enormous obstacles. What do you eat? Where do you sleep and can you reach your family? In 2020, during a worldwide shutdown these challenges became nearly impossible to overcome. See how rural trail town communities were affected by the pandemic and understand an untold perspective of pursuing your dreams at all costs.Avoiding law enforcement, entering into "closed" federal land and even overcoming death - all while attempting the impossible. With a wife and two daughters at home, the outside world against him and seemingly unreliable information, this epic tale follows Ryan Michael Beck's journey 2,193 miles in pursuit of a dream to thru-hike the entire Appalachian Trail against all odds.