Keith Nolan (1964–2009)
Auteur de Death Valley: The Summer Offensive, I Corps, August 1969
A propos de l'auteur
Keith W. Nolan's Search and Destroy immerses the reader in two years of combat with 1-1 Cav as officers and soldiers trained in black-and-white conventional warfare encounter Viet Nam's many shades of gray. Through personal interviews with the men who served there, as well as extensive use of afficher plus official and personal documents from the war, Nolan brings the highs and lows to life. This is not the Viet Nam War whitewashed or demonized, this is the complicated reality of what happened to these men in that place and time. Stories of great compassion, heroism under fire, tragic accidents, and brutal payback illuminate the daily existence of frontline soldiers in Viet Nam as they struggle to survive and make it home. afficher moins
Œuvres de Keith Nolan
Étiqueté
Partage des connaissances
- Autres noms
- Nolan, Keith William (birth name)
- Date de naissance
- 1964-05-07
- Date de décès
- 2009-02-19
- Sexe
- male
- Nationalité
- USA
- Lieu de naissance
- Webster Groves, Missouri, USA
- Lieu du décès
- St. Charles, Missouri, USA
- Cause du décès
- lung cancer
- Études
- Webster University
- Professions
- historian
- Courte biographie
- Keith William Nolan was an American military historian, focusing on the various campaigns of the Vietnam War. Nolan obtained a history degree from Webster University. Nolan pioneered and excelled at his own special brand of military history: the excellent combining of in-depth interviews with those who took part in the fighting and deep research into the official records. That, along with a fluid writing style, added up to ten (eleven, counting one he co-authored) of the best books on Vietnam War military history. Keith Nolan died of lung cancer in February 2009 at the age of 44.
Membres
Critiques
Prix et récompenses
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Statistiques
- Œuvres
- 12
- Membres
- 700
- Popularité
- #36,173
- Évaluation
- 4.0
- Critiques
- 8
- ISBN
- 37
- Favoris
- 2
Keith William Nolan, a military historian, does an excellent job setting the scene for the American disaster. He starts with a brief description of the event itself, and then goes back several weeks to describe individual patrols that the solders of this division had undertaken in the leadup to the battle. Often the soldiers performed admirably, but it was not unusual for soldiers to refuse orders they thought were inordinately foolhardy. Usually, threats of court martial would get them moving.
The battle, especially when word of the lax security came out, became a scandal within and without of the Army. The Army conducted a thorough investigation of the battle (which Nolan describes in the book's final chapters) and the failings that led up to it, interviewing every surviving soldier in depth, and Nolan was able to access these testimonies. He also conducted phone interviews with dozens of soldiers will to talk to him. The book was written in the 1990s, and Nolan reports that many of the soldiers told him a version of, "We've been waiting 20 years for somebody to tell this story." Between the official testimonies and these interviews, Nolan was able to construct a minute-by-minute account of the terrifying action, and he does so. It is, not surprisingly, very hard reading.
I read this book now, I guess, to remind myself how horrible and tragic this war was, and all war is. Sappers in the Wire certainly accomplishes that. The only flaws in the writing are 1) the fact that he seems to me to identify too closely with and/or wishes to glorify the soldiers themselves. He commonly uses their own slang, referring to the soldiers as "grunts" and speaking of shooting someone as "firing them up" (but only when a U.S. soldier shoots a Vietnamese soldier); and 2) for some reason, Nolan insists on specifying when soldiers he's referring to are black. Having described the racial tensions running through the Army at this point, especially in the rear, perhaps Nolan was trying to stress the fact that these tensions more or less evaporated when it was time for everybody to go into action. I hope there was some such logic, anyway.
At any rate, this is mostly a very good book, for anyone interested in revisiting, or learning about, the daily crazy hell of the Vietnam War. By now, I would assume that's a very small subset of my LT friends.… (plus d'informations)