Much of the history written about the Vietnam War overlooks the U.S. Marine Corps Combined Action Platoons. These CAPs lived in the Vietnamese villages, with the difficult and dangerous mission of defending the villages from both the National Liberation Front guerrillas and the soldiers of the North Vietnamese Army. The CAPs also worked to improve living conditions by helping the people with projects, such as building schools, bridges, and irrigation systems for their fields. In War in the Villages, Ted Easterling examines how well the CAPs performed as a counterinsurgency method, how the Marines adjusted to life in the Vietnamese villages, and how they worked to accomplish their mission. The CAPs generally performed their counterinsurgency role well, but they were hampered by factors beyond their control. Most important was the conflict between the Army and the Marine Corps over an appropriate strategy for the Vietnam War, along with weakness of the government of the Republic of South Vietnam and the strategic and the tactical ability of the North Vietnamese Army. War in the Villages helps to explain how and why this potential was realized and squandered. Marines who served in the CAPs served honorably in difficult circumstances. Most of these Marines believed they were helping the people of South Vietnam, and they served superbly. The failure to end the war more favorably was no fault of theirs.

Much of the history written about the Vietnam War overlooks the U.S. Marine Corps Combined Action Platoons. These CAPs lived in the Vietnamese villages, with the difficult and dangerous mission of defending the villages from both the National Liberation Front guerrillas and the soldiers of the North Vietnamese Army. The CAPs also worked to improve living conditions by helping the people with projects, such as building schools, bridges, and irrigation systems for their fields. In War in the Villages, Ted Easterling examines how well the CAPs performed as a counterinsurgency method, how the Marines adjusted to life in the Vietnamese villages, and how they worked to accomplish their mission. The CAPs generally performed their counterinsurgency role well, but they were hampered by factors beyond their control. Most important was the conflict between the Army and the Marine Corps over an appropriate strategy for the Vietnam War, along with weakness of the government of the Republic of South Vietnam and the strategic and the tactical ability of the North Vietnamese Army. War in the Villages helps to explain how and why this potential was realized and squandered. Marines who served in the CAPs served honorably in difficult circumstances. Most of these Marines believed they were helping the people of South Vietnam, and they served superbly. The failure to end the war more favorably was no fault of theirs.

"Seldom does a book take readers so powerfully inside war crimes--both into the pain of the victims and, even more chilling, into the minds of the perpetrators. In a Washington so timid about supporting the international institutions designed to prevent such horrors, this book should be mandatory reading."--Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold's Ghost: a Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa "This searing documentary takes those large abstractions--ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity--and confronts us with the anguishing reality: the faces of the alleged killers and their victims, stories of shattered families, desolation of a ruined community. The book is also a stunning example of careful, determined pursuit of evidence by frontline human rights workers, our best hope for accountability and justice in the wake of systematic evil. This unparalleled account thus records the worst--and the best--of human capacities."--H. Jack Geiger, M.D., founding member and past president of Physicians for Human Rights "Marshalling precision in the face of obfuscation, clarity in the face of desolation, and lucidity in the face of oblivion, the authors and creators of A Village Destroyed have somehow managed to meld witness and majesty. Truth is beauty--sometimes the only solace left to us--and this is a harrowingly beautiful book."--Lawrence Weschler, author of A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers "Gilles Peress's photographs take us where we have never gone before: into the killing zones of Kosovo where ethnic Albanians were tortured, executed, robbed, and driven from the land. Here is an astounding record that will make it impossible for us to say that we never knew what happened in Kosovo or how."--Gloria Emerson, author of Gaza: A Year in the Intifada "A Village Destroyed is a very important book, offering a revealing examination of how contemporary human rights investigations and international efforts to do justice are transforming the context in which great crimes are committed."--Aryeh Neier, President of the Open Society Institute "By some of the best investigators and reporters in the human rights movement, A Village Destroyed helps comfort the afflicted by letting them speak in their own voices. Let us hope it also serves to afflict the comforted."--Juan E. Mendez, Vice-President, Inter-American Commission on Human Rights "This is a groundbreaking work. It is the anatomy of a crime: the destruction of a village. The photographs and witness accounts are of astounding power. The book is crucial for anyone who wants to know what happened in Kosovo."--Laura Silber, co-author of Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation

For two years, U.S. Intelligence advisor Stuart Herrington's job was to root out the Viet Cong from the villages of rural Hau Nghia province. Here is a riveting account of what he remembers of that reality.

When American forces arrived in Vietnam, they found themselves embedded in historic village and frontier spaces already shaped by many past conflicts. American bases and bombing targets followed spatial and political logics influenced by the footprints of past wars in central Vietnam. The militarized landscapes here, like many in the world�s historic conflict zones, continue to shape post-war land-use politics. Footprints of War traces the long history of conflict-produced spaces in Vietnam, beginning with early modern wars and the French colonial invasion in 1885 and continuing through the collapse of the Saigon government in 1975. The result is a richly textured history of militarized landscapes that reveals the spatial logic of key battles such as the Tet Offensive. Drawing on extensive archival work and years of interviews and fieldwork in the hills and villages around the city of Hue to illuminate war�s footprints, David Biggs also integrates historical Geographic Information Systems (GIS) data, using aerial, high-altitude, and satellite imagery to render otherwise placeless sites into living, multidimensional spaces. This personal and multilayered approach yields an innovative history of the lasting traces of war in Vietnam and a model for understanding other militarized landscapes.

This dramatic story of land and power from twentieth-century Eastern Europe is set in two extraordinary villages: a rebel village, where peasants fought the advent of Communism and became its first martyrs, and a model village turned forcibly into a town, Dictator Ceauşescu’s birthplace. The two villages capture among themselves nearly a century of dramatic transformation and social engineering, ending up with their charged heritage in the present European Union. "One of Romania’s foremost social critics, Alina Mungiu-Pippidi offers a valuable look at several decades of policy that marginalized that country’s rural population, from the 1918 land reform to the post-1989 property restitution. Illustrating her arguments with a close comparison of two contrasting villages, she describes the actions of a long series of “predatory elites,” from feudal landowners through the Communist Party through post-communist leaders, all of whom maintained the rural population’s dependency. A forceful concluding chapter shows that its prospects for improvement are scarcely better within the EU. Romania’s villagers have an eminent and spirited advocate in the author.”