Rattler One-Seven puts you in the helicopter seat, to see the war in Vietnam through the eyes of an inexperienced pilot as he transforms himself into a seasoned combat veteran.

When Chuck Gross left for Vietnam in 1970, he was a nineteen-year-old Army helicopter pilot fresh out of flight school. He spent his entire Vietnam tour with the 71st Assault Helicopter Company flying UH-1 Huey helicopters. Soon after the war he wrote down his adventures, while his memory was still fresh with the events. Rattler One-Seven (his call sign) is written as Gross experienced it, using these notes along with letters written home to accurately preserve the mindset he had while in Vietnam.

During his tour Gross flew Special Operations for the MACV-SOG, inserting secret teams into Laos. He notes that Americans were left behind alive in Laos, when official policy at home stated that U.S. forces were never there.

He also participated in Lam Son 719, a misbegotten attempt by the ARVN to assault and cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail with U.S. Army helicopter support. It was the largest airmobile campaign of the war and marked the first time that the helicopter was used in mid-intensity combat, with disastrous results. Pilots in their early twenties, with young gunners and a Huey full of ARVN soldiers, took on experienced North Vietnamese antiaircraft artillery gunners, with no meaningful intelligence briefings or a rational plan on how to cut the Trail. More than one hundred helicopters were lost and more than six hundred aircraft sustained combat damage. Gross himself was shot down and left in the field during one assault.

A Selection of the Military Book Club

For Victor Hugo, the nineteenth century could be remembered by only its first two years, which established peace in Europe and France's supremacy on the continent. For General Lam Quang Thi, the twentieth century had only twenty-five years: from 1950 to 1975, during which the Republic of Vietnam and its Army grew up and collapsed with the fall of Saigon. This is the story of those twenty-five years.

General Thi fought in the Indochina War as a battery commander on the side of the French. When Viet Minh aggression began after the Geneva Accords, he served in the nascent Vietnamese National Army, and his career covers this army's entire lifespan. He was deputy commander of the 7th Infantry Division, and in 1965 he assumed command of the 9th Infantry Division. In 1966, at the age of thirty-three, he became one of the youngest generals in the Vietnamese Army. He participated in the Tet Offensive before being removed from the front lines for political reasons. When North Vietnam launched the 1972 Great Offensive, he was brought back to the field and eventually promoted to commander of an Army Corps Task Force along the Demilitarized Zone. With the fall of Saigon, he left Vietnam and emigrated to the United States.

Like his tactics during battle, General Thi pulls no punches in his denunciation of the various regimes of the Republic, and complacency and arrogance toward Vietnam in the policies of both France and the United States. Without lapsing into bitterness, this is finally a tribute to the soldiers who fell on behalf of a good cause.

"General Lam Quang Thi is respected among his countrymen, his soldiers, and his American counterparts. The Twenty-five Year Century reflects the experience of the brave men and women who served in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam. It is the genuine voice of those who fought for freedom."—Yung Krall, author of A Thousand Tears Falling

"Readers will find in this book a new perspective on the War in Vietnam from one who helped to create and shape the history. His story—the story of the Republic of Vietnam from the eyes of those in the Republic—has been long neglected by historians of the period."—Ron Frankum, The Vietnam Archive, Texas Tech University

"The Twenty-five Year Century is extremely interesting and most professionally written. It provides a rare and most valuable insight into the war from the perspective of a senior field commander fighting it. It is a major contribution to the literature of the Vietnam conflict, and fills a void in the war's recorded history that can only be filled by the experiences of someone of Thi's rank and stature."—Col. Edward P. Metzner, U.S. Army (ret.), author of More Than a Soldier's War.

"[Thi] strongly counters the prevailing 'American' view that the Republic of Vietnam's government and military were hopelessly corrupt and ineffective. Not everyone will agree with General Thi's viewpoint, but everyone will have to factor it into his own analysis of the Vietnam War."—John Carroll, Regents Professor of History, Lamar University

Lam Quang Thi was born in the South Vietnamese province of Bac Lieu. Correctly predicting that his country would be in a perennial state of war after the French left, he decided to pursue a career in the army. He was awarded the Vietnamese National Order, 3rd Degree, the Vietnamese Gallantry Cross with seventeen combat citations, the U.S. Legion of Merit, and the Korean Order of Chung Mu. He holds a French Baccalaureate Degree in Philosophy and an MBA from Golden Gate University in San Francisco. He currently lives in Milpitas, California.
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OTHER SOURCES OF HELP FOR PTSD

Chaplain James D. Johnson broke all the rules to be with his men. He chose to accompany them, unarmed, on their daily combat operations, a decision made against the recommendations of his superiors. During what would be the final days for some, he offered his ministry not from a pulpit but on the battlefields -- in hot landing zones and rice paddies, in hospitals, aboard ship, and knee-deep in mud. He even found time for baptisms in the muddy Mekong River.

"You've never really lived until you've almost died," writes Johnson, one of the youngest army chaplains at the time. Through his compelling narration, he takes us into the hearts of frightened young boys and the minds of experienced men. In Combat Chaplain, we live for eight and one-half months with Johnson as he serves in the field with a small unit numbering 350 men. The physical price can be counted with numbers -- ninety-six killed and over nine hundred wounded. Only those who paid it can understand the spiritual and psychological price, in a war that raised many difficult moral issues. "It placed my soul in the lost and found department for awhile," Johnson writes.

Also provided here is an in-depth look at the "Mobile Riverine Operations," a rare joint effort in which the U.S. Army and Navy combined forces. Johnson describes the workings of the flotilla and the complexity of having these two military branches in combat operations.

This is one man's chronicle of Vietnam and the aftermath of war, of his coming to terms with his posttraumatic "demons," and his need for healing and cleansing which led him to revisit Vietnam twenty-eight years later. Veterans of the Vietnam war and other wars, their family members, pastors, chaplains, mental health workers, and anyone who has experienced trauma will find this story of interest.

Reviews

"This work . . . has raw insights into the visceral experience of combat and the psychic damage it does which are rarely seen, and almost never from this particular point of view."-- Ted Gittinger, Director, Special Projects, Lyndon B. Johnson Library and coeditor of International Perspectives on Vietnam

"This is a very powerful true story, unique in its personal close-up of infantry and Riverine warfare, and the terrible human price paid by one battalion during eight months of the controversial Vietnam War. He shows that even men of God can come to despise the enemy for the evil that they do, while acknowledging that they, too, are God's creations. Chaplain Johnson's book should be required reading by national leaders before they consider whether to commit our troops to combat."-- James P. Maloney, Major General, USA, Retired

"A dynamic true story of love, anxiety, fear, and the pathos of war. This is a superlative work and one which ought to rivet the minds and hearts of all who read it."-- Patrick J. Hessian, Major General, USA (Ret) Former Chief of Chaplains