National Security and Military Law in a Nutshell

From an off-duty officer who was in the wrong place at the right time, this fascinating Gulf War memoir offers readers a rare glimpse of a seldom seen country and its notorious leader. In 1990, U.S. Army major Martin Stanton was a military advisor stationed in Saudi Arabia. Encouraged by the Army to broaden his cultural horizons, and assured by the U.S. embassy that Kuwait was perfectly safe, Stanton took off for a long weekend there. Roused by gunshots his first night in Kuwait City, Stanton looked out the window…and discovered he was in the middle of a full-scale invasion. Iraq’s Gulf War had begun-and in the Kuwait City Sheraton, the United States had an Army officer sitting in the front row. Yet Stanton’s prime ‘position’ was short lived. Rounded up by the enemy, he would spend the next four months deep inside Iraq as one of Saddam’s ‘guests, ‘ being taken to strategic locations as a roving human shield. Continually taking notes and looking for ways to smuggle out information, he made the most of his captivity. Fortunately, Stanton was eventually released

The Vietnam War, perhaps the mast controversial war Americans have ever fought, remains a source of pain and perplexity. Why did Lyndon Johnson commit the United States to fight? Why did he fail to act more decisively once he resolved on war? And why didn’t he take the American public into his confidence? These questions have troubled historians since the end of the war, but the answers have been buried in inaccessible documents. Now Michael H. Hunt uses newly available sources from both American and Vietnamese archives to reevaluate how and why the war started and then escalated. He examines the ideological, strategic, political, and institutional pressures that in the 1950s propelled the Truman and Eisenhower administrations toward intervention in Indochina; the reasons why Kennedy’s and Johnson’s policymakers believed that a limited war could be fought there; Johnson’s early position on Vietnam and his decision to intensify U.S. involvement in the war; and, finally, the tragic consequences of the Vietnam War both at home and abroad. Throughout, he discusses the values, choices, misconceptions, and miscalculations that shaped the long process of American intervention, thus rendering more comprehensible – if no less troubling – the tangled origins of the Vietnam War.

The Nuremberg trials took place from November 1945 to October 1946, and, after nearly 50 years, they remain an extraordinary precedent for judging international atrocities. This extraordinary recreation of the Third Reich’s day of reckoning offers chilling portraits of the Nazi warlords, as it captures the trials in bold strokes and minute detail. 16 pages of photos.

Why did the conventional wisdom – that soldiers become increasingly cynical and disillusioned as war progresses – not hold true in the Civil War?. It is to this question – why did they fight – that James M. McPherson, America’s preeminent Civil War historian, now turns his attention. He shows that, contrary to what many scholars believe, the soldiers of the Civil War remained powerfully convinced of the ideals for which they fought throughout the conflict. McPherson draws on more than 25,000 letters and nearly 250 private diaries from men on both sides. Civil War soldiers were among the most literate soldiers in history, and most of them wrote home frequently, as it was the only way for them to keep in touch with homes that many of them had left for the first time in their lives. Significantly, their letters were also uncensored by military authorities and are uniquely frank in their criticism and detailed in their reports of marches and battles, relations between officers and men, political debates, and morale. For Cause and Comrades lets these soldiers tell their own stories in their own words to create an account that is both deeply moving and far truer than most books on war.

In 1971 former Cold War hard-liner Daniel Ellsberg made history by releasing the Pentagon Papers–a 7,000-page top-secret study of U.S. decision-making in Vietnam–to the New York Times and Washington Post. The document set in motion a chain of events that ended not only the Nixon presidency but the Vietnam War. In this remarkable memoir, Ellsberg describes in dramatic detail the two years he spent in Vietnam as a U.S. State Department observer, and how he came to risk his career and freedom to expose the deceptions and delusions that shaped three decades of American foreign policy. The story of one man’s exploration of conscience, Secrets is also a portrait of America at a perilous crossroad.

A much-decorated soldier who has served with the U.S. Army Special Forces and the CIA recounts his half-century career working against American adversaries, including Russian missile operatives, Caribbean drug runners, the infamous terrorist known as Carlos, and Osama bin Laden. Reprint.

A juvenile delinquent, a world-class NCAA miler, a 1936 Olympian, a World War II bombardier: Louis Zamperini had a life fuller than most when it changed in an instant. On May 27, 1943, his B-24 crashed into the Pacific Ocean. Louis and two other survivors found a raft amid the flaming wreckage and waited for rescue. Instead, they drifted two thousand miles for forty-seven days. Their only food: two shark livers and three raw albatross. Their only water: sporadic rainfall. Their only companions: hope and faith — and the ever-present sharks. On the forty-seventh day, mere skeletons close to death, Zamperini and pilot Russell Phillips finally spotted land — and were captured by the Japanese. Thus began more than two years of torture and humiliation as prisoners of war. Zamperini was threatened with beheading, subjected to medical experiments, routinely beaten, hidden in a secret interrogation facility, starved and forced into slave labor, and was the constant victim of a brutal prison guard nicknamed the Bird — a man so vicious that the other guards feared

A personal account of his experiences as a young officer during the horrors of the Algerian War in the 1950s by a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian details the horrific events of the conflict, which included bombings, assassinations, torture, and other unimaginable barbarities. Reprint. 10,000 first printing.

A personal view of the war in Iraq by an infantryman in the Army National Guard puts a human face on the business of war and the military, offering a day-to-day account of his experiences and capturing the boredom, horrors, fears, and exhilaration of war in the trenches. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.