It was at Wounded Knee, huddled under a night sky lit by military flares and the searchlights of armored personnel carriers, that Vietnam vet Woody Kipp realized that he, as an American Indian, had become the enemy, the Viet Cong, to a country that he had defended at the risk of his life. With candor, bitter humor, and biting insight, this book tells the story of the long and tortuous trail that led Kipp from the Blackfeet Reservation of his birth to a terrible moment of reckoning on the plains of South Dakota. Kipp?s is a story of Native values and practices uneasily intersected by cowboy culture, teenage angst, and quintessentially American temptations and excesses. ø As a boy, Kipp was a passionate reader and basketball player, always ready to brawl and already struggling with discrimination and alcoholism in his teens. From his tour of duty in Vietnam as a Marine to his troubled return, from his hell-raising as a violent, womanizing, hard-drinking horse breaker to his consciousness-raising experiences as a college student and foot soldier in the American Indian Movement, Kipp?s memoir offers a unique, firsthand view of the enduring power?and the vulnerability?of Blackfeet culture, of the difficulties inherent in cross-cultural understanding, and of the urgent necessity of overcoming these difficulties if the essential heritage of Native America is to survive.

Holm describes how Native American motives for going to war, experiences of combat, and readjustment to civilian ways differ from those of other ethnic groups. He explores Native American traditions of warfare and the role of the warrior to explain why many young Indian men chose to fight in Vietnam. He shows how Native Americans drew on tribal customs and religion to sustain them during combat.

A historical analysis of the transatlantic relations of the American Indian radical sovereignty movement of the late Cold War. From Wounded Knee to Checkpoint Charlie examines the history of the transatlantic alliance between American Indian sovereignty activists and Central European solidarity groups, and their entry into the United Nations in the 1970s and 1980s. In the late Cold War, Native American activists engaged in transnational diplomacy for nation building by putting outside pressure on the US government for a more progressive Indian policy that reached for the full decolonization of Native American communities into independence. By using extensive multinational archival research complemented by interviews, György Ferenc Tóth investigates how older transatlantic images of American Indians influenced the alliance between Native activists and Central European groups, how this coalition developed and functioned, and how the US government and the regimes of the Eastern Bloc responded to this transatlantic alliance. This book not only places the American Indian radical sovereignty movement in an international context, but also recasts it as a transnational struggle, thus connecting domestic US social and political history to the history of Cold War transatlantic relations and global movements.

Based on official army records, these eyewitness accounts of seven hellacious battles serve as a brief history of the Vietnam conflict. From a fierce fight on the banks of the Ia Drang River in 1965 to a 1968 gunship mission, this illustrated report conveys the heroism and horror of warfare.