Globe Pequot / Stackpole Books
Pages: 320
Trim: 6 x 9
978-0-8117-3881-1 • Hardback • September 2020 • $29.95 • (£22.95)
978-0-8117-6888-7 • eBook • September 2020 • $28.50 • (£21.95)
Dr. J. Keith Saliba is an associate professor of journalism at Jacksonville (Fla.) University, where he teaches narrative nonfiction and media theory. He has written about military affairs and the Vietnam War for 20 years, first as a reporter and columnist for two daily newspapers, and later as an academic at the University of Florida and JU. His master’s thesis explored Esquire magazine’s coverage of the Vietnam War, and he is a contributing author to the Indochina book series published by Radix Press. In 2018, Saliba presented his research on the psychological effects of the 1968 Tet Offensive to the annual conference of Texas Tech University’s Vietnam Center & Sam Johnson Vietnam Archive. He continues to work closely with members of the Special Forces Association and Vietnam Veterans for Factual History. Saliba lives with his family near Jacksonville, Florida.
Finally, here it is: a detailed, carefully researched book about the siege at Plei Me Camp in October of 1965—the real beginning of America's war in Vietnam. A full regiment of North Vietnamese Army regulars had the 12 American Green Berets and their Montagnard allies in a death grip. This story has it all: the bravery and suffering of men in extreme peril and how they lived and died. Plei Me was the prelude to the bloody battles of the 1st Cavalry Division troopers in the nearby Ia Drang Valley just weeks later. Keith Saliba has done them all proud.
— Joseph L. Galloway, co-author of the New York Times bestseller We Were Soldiers Once...and Young, We Are Soldiers Still, and Triumph Without Victory: A History of the Persian Gulf War
Military history at its best . . . a clear, detailed, and highly readable account of an important but little understood battle of the Vietnam War.
— Col. Andrew R. Finlayson, USMC (Ret.), author of Killer Kane: A Marine Long-Range Recon Team Leader in Vietnam, 1967–1968 and winner of the CIA’s Studies in Intelligence Award