Memoir

Title: Mercenary's Tale: Fighting Fidel Castro
Author:William Heuisler
Genre: Non-Fiction, Memoir
Reviewer: Joyce Gilmour

ISBN (links go to the MWSA Amazon store): 1439211906

A short-timer Marine is recruited from Quantico Marine Base by the CIA into anti-Castro, "Operation Mongoose" to train Cuban refugees on raids into Cuba. The condensed, but true story explores political intrigue and often sinister characters in turbulent, bloody South Florida during the early sixties. Hints of betrayal complicate rescue missions and an unlikely love affair adds further tension. Readers are led through a bizarre world where ambush is only the dawn of misfortune, and where the horrors of combat, shipwreck, starvation and worse become commonplace. The saga of bravery, betrayal, personal heartache and bittersweet retribution is completed as friends give the ultimate sacrifice and the U.S. Government indicts its own mercenaries.

Title: Flight Surgeon: Diary of Medical Detachment, 1943-1944
Author:Ernest Gaillard, Jr.
Genre: Non-Fiction, Memoir
Reviewer: Weymouth Symmes

ISBN (links go to the MWSA Amazon store): 1410746712

The text consists of a World War II war narrative from the perspective of the flight surgeon. The setting is in the European Theatre of Operations on a Fortress base in East Anglia. This deals primarily with an ancillary ground command and with only testimonial reference to any aerial combat. It deals with more in the way of the pertinent day-to-day logistics and emotional anxieties and ordeals of the supportive, ground-based non-combatants when dealing with returning crews. This is a whole other story and rarely, if ever, addressed.

The text comprises a foreword, additional readers' notes, the body of the text, numerous photos and images, secret reports and endnotes, and a contemporary, explanatory glossary of period terms and acronyms.

Title: Cleared to Land: Memoirs of an Army Air Traffic Controller Vietnam--Mar 68-Sep 71
Author: Jeffrey K. Fozard
Genre: Non-Fiction, Memoir
Reviewer: Rob Ballister

ISBN (links go to the MWSA Amazon store): 1438971222

Memoirs of my three years as an air traffic controller in Vietnam. I worked in Soc rang, Can Tho, Bear Cat, Phu Hiep and Phu Bai. Air traffic at the most was over 2000 operations a day in Can Tho. We had one PSP runway of 3000' and two swamps for approaches. On my days off, I flew as a door gunner. I have crewmember time on UH-1D Slicks, UH-1C Gunships, CH-47 Chinooks. O-1 Bird Dogs as an Observer, three missions as a crewmember on the AC-47 Spooky kicking flares out the cargo door. I have a few night missions on Navy PBRs out of Binh Thuy. I have flown around the tip of the Delta up to as far North as Quang Tri and Dong Ha.

Title: Forty Missions and Home
Author: Maurice "Vic" Duvic and Lisa Uzzle Hadden
Genre: Non-Fiction, Memoir
Reviewer: John Cathcart

ISBN (links go to the MWSA Amazon store): 1605940461

It was a gutless, unprovoked attack on the United States and all it stood for. The hatred shattered the early morning calm and moved a nation from a time of peace to years of war and hardship. It prompted young men to offer their service, and many their lives, to defend their country and everything it stood for. It was a time of great uncertainty and fear. It was the original "day that will live in infamy."

Maurice "Vic" Duvic remembers it well. He lived it. He was twenty-two years old, standing on a Florida beach with his buddies the first time he heard the words "Pearl Harbor." He had no idea what those words would come to mean, but the uniform he wore assured him he would get a front row seat.

He went on to become a pilot in the Army Air Corps, traveled across the world and became a part of the Allied forces that would prove too much for Italy and Germany. While the words "Pearl Harbor" had a life-changing meaning for him, there was a number that would prove to be even more important: forty.

That was the number of combat missions he had to complete before he could get back home. While that sounds simple enough, he learned there is much truth to the saying, "It's not about the destination, but the journey." And what a journey it was.

Title: Cash on Delivery: CIA Special Operations During the Secret War in Laos
Author: Thomas Leo Briggs
Genre: Non-Fiction, Memoir
Reviewer: Bill McDonald

ISBN (links go to the MWSA Amazon store): 0984105948

Cash on Delivery: CIA Special Operations During the Secret War in Laos is a detailed accounting of a CIA program directed by a CIA operations officer that sent small teams of irregulars behind enemy lines in Laos to find, fix and destroy North Vietnamese Army units, capture NVA soldiers or encourage them to defect, intercept NVA radio communications, and recruit NVA soldiers to spy and report on their comrades.

It is a unique contribution to the history of the Vietnam War describing valuable experiences using surrogates to conduct intelligence and combat operations that have little or no adverse impact on the United States government's relations with the peoples and governments of other nations. An important lesson in the post 9/11 world of countering terrorism all over the globe where we do not have enough American troops to get the job done without political consequences.

The book also describes the daring and dangerous rescue of Raven 42, a U.S. Air Force forward air controller shot down while supporting Lao irregular surrogate forces fighting NVA main force units in Laos, attempts to infiltrate Cambodia to collect intelligence on the North Vietnamese in early 1970, the effort to uncover information about a missing Air America crewman captured in 1963, the tragic fatal crash of an aircraft carrying four of the author's best Thai operational assistants, and the uncovering of a mole hidden in a Royal Lao government military headquarters.

Here are intimate details that have never before appeared in print, recounting the planning and execution of a variety of special operations, conceived and carried out behind enemy lines by the CIA using only Lao irregular surrogates.

The CIA employed surrogates in southern Laos to force the North Vietnamese Army to keep combat units there to defend their logistical supply line rather than send them to fight U.S. and allied forces in South Vietnam. For the duration of U.S. participation in the Vietnam War the CIA succeeded in that goal.