"A memoir about a life almost lost and a revealing look at the dark side of hip hop's golden era ... a story of struggle, survival, and hope down the mean streets of New York City" --

"Here is a wealth of gossip level detail about life on the inside at the top in Hanoi--material Hanoi watchers lust after, seldom find." --Indochina Chronology"A rarity. A true North Vietnamese insider speaking candidly." --Book World, 30 April 2000

The true story of the final days of the Vietnam War from the author of Marine Sniper. Culled from extensive interviews and research, Goodnight Saigon is the achingly dramatic story of the end of the Vietnam War as told from both sides of the conflict. Included are never-before-revealed accounts from people of every level involved in the war: NVA and Viet Cong soldiers, U.S. embassy personnel, guerilla commanders, civilians, generals, double agents? and leaders from both sides including former president Gerald Ford and North Vietnamese military commander General Tran Van Tra. From the first hints of the final offensive from the north, to the gut-wrenching hours before the fall of Saigon when a brave pilot defied his orders to return to base and rescued the last five Marines from the rooftop of the U.S. embassy, Goodnight Saigon is an unforgettable narrative of war, and those who live with its aftermath. Winner: American Society of Journalists and Authors Outstanding Book Award, General Nonfiction, 2006

Lieutenant "El Tee" Carroll was drafted into the U.S. Army and thrown into the Vietnam War at a firebase camp on the Cambodian border in 1969. His band of colorful warriors, led by Cajun "Sarnt"Jesse Parrod and Specialist Gordon "Ratman" Withers take the reader into ambush with crawling bugs and the smell of burning bodies. The story examines military doctrine, and the lives of those brave young men who wear our uniforms. Orphaned Heroes are those who have always fought in battle and are ignored by their leaders and countrymen back home. This book will put you into the action of flying bullets, and learn the thoughts and hopes of those desperate to survive their orphaned status.

CBS camera-man Mike Marriott was on the last plane to escape from Danang before it fell in the spring of 1975. The scene was pure chaos: thousands of panic-stricken Vietnamese storming the airliner, soldiers shooting women and children to get aboard first, refugees being trampled to death. Marriott remembers standing at the door of the aft stairway, which was gaping open as the plane took off. "There were five Vietnamese below me on the steps. As the nose of the aircraft came up, because of the force and speed of the aircraft, the Vietnamese began to fall off. One guy managed to hang on for a while, but at about 600 feet he let go and just floated off--just like a skydiver.... What was going through my head was, I've got to survive this, and at the same time, I've got to capture this on film. This is the start of the fall of a country. This country is gone. This is history, right here and now." In Tears Before the Rain, a stunning oral history of the fall of South Vietnam, Larry Engelmann has gathered together the testimony of seventy eyewitnesses (both American and Vietnamese) who, like Mike Marriott, capture the feel of history "right here and now." We hear the voices of nurses, pilots, television and print media figures, the American Ambassador Graham Martin, the CIA station chief Thomas Polgar, Vietnamese generals, Amerasian children, even Vietcong and North Vietnamese soldiers. Through this extraordinary range of perspectives, we experience first-hand the final weeks before Saigon collapsed, from President Thieu's cataclysmic withdrawal from Pleiku and Kontum, (Colonel Le Khac Ly, put in command of the withdrawal, recalls receiving the order: "I opened my eyes large, large, large. I thought I wasn't hearing clearly") to the last-minute airlift of Americans from the embassy courtyard and roof ("I remember when the bird ascended," says Stuart Herrington, who left on one of the last helicopters, "It banked, and there was the Embassy, the parking lot, the street lights. And the silence"). Touching, heroic, harrowing, and utterly unforgettable, these dramatic narratives illuminate one of the central events of modern history. "It was like being at Waterloo," concludes Ed Bradley of 60 Minutes. "It was so important, so historical. And today it is still very obvious that we Americans have not recovered from Vietnam....Nothing else in my lifetime was as important as that--as important as Vietnam."

“Action-packed . . . he brings the reader artfully through the fog of war with clarity” (20th Century Aviation Magazine). Vietnam has often been called our “first helicopter war,” and indeed, the US Marine Corps, as well as Army, had to feel its way forward during the initial combats. But by 1967, the combat was raging across South Vietnam, with confrontational battles against the NVA on a scale comparable to the great campaigns of WWII. In 1968, when the Communists launched their mammoth counteroffensive, the Marines were forced to fight on all sides, with the helicopter giving them the additional dimension that proved decisive in repelling the enemy. The author of this book, a Vietnam veteran and Purple Heart recipient who has also worked at the USMC History Division and National Museum of the Marine Corps in Quantico, uses his experiences as a company commander to bring the story to life by weaving personal accounts, after-action reports, and official documents into a compellingly readable narrative of service and sacrifice by Marine pilots and crewmen. The entire story of the war is depicted through the prism of Marine helicopter operations, from the first deployments to support the Army of the Republic of Vietnam against the Viet Cong through the rapid US buildup to stop the North Vietnamese Army, until the final withdrawal from our Embassy. “Superlative research.” —Leatherneck

Austin Bain liked working for the CIA, especially exercising his intellect to be one step ahead of a challenge. But deviating from his deciphering routine seemed to open another door to reality. Escaping death by minutes in Panama might have been a fluke, but it was enough to remind him of the dangers of his vocation. Resigning from the CIA he returned to civilian life, until a former cohort tracked him down vacationing on a remote Bahamas island. That surprise encounter, catapulted Bain back into the Agency to help track and apprehend one of the most dangerous individuals the Armed Forces and CIA had ever dealt with in Vietnam. the French National and former college roommate of Austin Bain had developed a deadly profile, bent on revenge, as a result of tragic events involving the eventual deaths of a sister and father. Working under a pseudonym, Bain's search took him through numerous provinces in Vietnam when the US military presence was growing by the tens of thousands each month. At one time the fugitive's roommate, Bain was considered the most likely to be able to identify the Saigon Cowboy, the freshman he lived with ten years ago at Syracuse University. Both the bold aggressiveness and clandestine actions of the Cowboy continued to baffle those in pursuit. with his apparent ease of movement in highly secure areas, he continued to meet his objective of eliminating high ranking military and CIA agents.

Drawing upon both archival research and his own military experiences in Vietnam, Willbanks focuses on military operations from 1969 through 1975. He begins by analyzing the events that led to a change in U.S. strategy in 1969 and the subsequent initiation of Vietnamization. He then critiques the implementation of that policy and the combat performance of the South Vietnamese army (ARVN), which finally collapsed in 1975.