Vietnam’s Prodigal Heroes examines the critical role of desertion in the international Vietnam War debate. Paul Benedikt Glatz traces American deserters’ odyssey of exile and activism in Europe, Japan, and North America to demonstrate how their speaking out and unprecedented levels of desertion in the US military changed the traditional image of the deserter.

In 1971, antiwar activists Michael Uhl and Tod Ensign founded the Safe Return Committee in New York City, seeking amnesty for those who resisted the Vietnam War. While thousands of young Americans chose exile in Canada and Europe to avoid the draft, Safe Return worked on behalf of those who had come to oppose the war after entering the armed forces. Once in uniform, many ran afoul of a draconian system of military justice and institutionalized racism. They deserted in epidemic numbers, some to foreign exile. This book tells the story of the Committee's sponsored return of deserters and draft evaders, in a series of actions widely publicized to build public support for their acts of resistance.

Traces the lives of officers through three decades. Reveals how their experiences as young men in Vietnam changed forever their ideas about how wars should be fought & what is worth dying for. In the dark aftermath of Vietnam marked by racial tension, drug abuse, & insubordination, each of the services confronted a demoralization within the ranks that threatened far more than the outcome of a single war. Social upheavals, including the end of the draft, increased reliance on the reserves, & integration of women into the ranks, also pulled the military into new & uncertain directions in the 1970s. A stirring tale of the Amer. military's renewal & redemption.

Colonel Pat Proctor’s long overdue critique of the Army’s preparation and outlook in the all-volunteer era focuses on a national security issue that continues to vex in the twenty-first century: Has the Army lost its ability to win strategically by focusing on fighting conventional battles against peer enemies? Or can it adapt to deal with the greater complexity of counterinsurgent and information-age warfare? In this blunt critique of the senior leadership of the U.S. Army, Proctor contends that after the fall of the Soviet Union, the U.S. Army stubbornly refused to reshape itself in response to the new strategic reality, a decision that saw it struggle through one low-intensity conflict after another—some inconclusive, some tragic—in the 1980s and 1990s, and leaving it largely unprepared when it found itself engaged—seemingly forever—in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The first book-length study to connect the failures of these wars to America’s disastrous performance in the war on terror, Proctor’s work serves as an attempt to convince Army leaders to avoid repeating the same mistakes.