Military Police are typically hard-core and very disciplined. However, after nearly a year in Vietnam, even the most dedicated began to show signs of wavering. Follow one soldier's experience down the rabbit hole of war. Another argument over the war. We see more conflict in the hooch lately than outside the wire. “I’m with Luke,” Sergeant Kaminsky declared. John insisted, “This isn’t your fight.” The Sergeant stepped closer. “People like you are undermining our government.” “I don’t believe that ‘my country right or wrong’ crap!” Tucker scoffed. “Anybody in uniform who doesn’t support this war is a traitor. You’re worse than those anti-war assholes back home,” the Sergeant countered. “It’s a free country. I have the right to free speech." “You don’t have any rights. You follow orders – period!” the Sergeant bellowed. “You’re lucky that bullshit letter from the commie-loving Senator hasn’t been ripped up, Ben,” Luke interjected. Ben cringed. “That's private. It’s inside my footlocker.” Sergeant Kaminski pointed. “THAT isn’t private property. It belongs to the U.S. Government.” “Well, I still have the right to my opinion.” "Only if you keep it to yourself. We don’t want to hear it!”

Military Police serving in the Vietnam War faced danger and challenges from not only the Viet Cong but also from an unexpected enemy. 13 Moons: Anticipation reveals the inner war encountered by one policeman and the moral and emotional turmoil because of his responses. Ben Thieu Long struggled with intense, conflicted emotions in the final month of his tour. Anxiously anticipating his return home, he reacted erratically to threats to his safety. When he crossed the line, his actions left him with a weight of rage and guilt that he would carry long after his tour ended.

This remarkable and timely ethnography explores how fishing communities living on the fringe of the South China Sea in central Vietnam interact with state and religious authorities as well as their farmer neighbors—even while handling new geopolitical challenges. The focus is mainly on marginal people and their navigation between competing forces over the decades of massive change since their incorporation into the Socialist Republic of Vietnam in 1975. The sea, however, plays a major role in this study as does the location: a once-peripheral area now at the center of a global struggle for sovereignty, influence and control in the South China Sea. The coastal fishing communities at the heart of this study are peripheral not so much because of geographical remoteness as their presumed social “awkwardness”; they only partially fit into the social imaginary of Vietnam’s territory and nation. The state thus tries to incorporate them through various cultural agendas while religious reformers seek to purify their religious practices. Yet, recently, these communities have also come to be seen as guardians of an ancient fishing culture, important in Vietnam’s resistance to Chinese claims over the South China Sea. The fishers have responded to their situation with a blend of conformity, co-option and subtle indiscipline. A complex, triadic relationship is at play here. Within it are various shifting binaries—for example, secular/religious, fishers/farmers, local ritual/Buddhist doctrine, and so forth—and different protagonists (state officials, religious figures, fishermen and women) who construct, enact, and deconstruct these relations in shifting alliances and changing contexts. Fishers, Monks and Cadres is a significant new work. Its vivid portrait of local beliefs and practices makes a powerful argument for looking beyond monolithic religious traditions. Its triadic analysis and subtle use of binaries offer startlingly fresh ways to view Vietnamese society and local political power. The book demonstrates Vietnam is more than urban and agrarian society in the Red River Basin and Mekong Delta. Finally, the author builds on intensive, long-term research to portray a region at the forefront of geopolitical struggle, offering insights that will be fascinating and revealing to a much broader readership.

Good Strategy/Bad Strategy clarifies the muddled thinking underlying too many strategies and provides a clear way to create and implement a powerful action-oriented strategy for the real world. Developing and implementing a strategy is the central task of a leader. A good strategy is a specific and coherent response to—and approach for—overcoming the obstacles to progress. A good strategy works by harnessing and applying power where it will have the greatest effect. Yet, Rumelt shows that there has been a growing and unfortunate tendency to equate Mom-and-apple-pie values, fluffy packages of buzzwords, motivational slogans, and financial goals with “strategy.” In Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, he debunks these elements of “bad strategy” and awakens an understanding of the power of a “good strategy.” He introduces nine sources of power—ranging from using leverage to effectively focusing on growth—that are eye-opening yet pragmatic tools that can easily be put to work on Monday morning, and uses fascinating examples from business, nonprofit, and military affairs to bring its original and pragmatic ideas to life. The detailed examples range from Apple to General Motors, from the two Iraq wars to Afghanistan, from a small local market to Wal-Mart, from Nvidia to Silicon Graphics, from the Getty Trust to the Los Angeles Unified School District, from Cisco Systems to Paccar, and from Global Crossing to the 2007–08 financial crisis. Reflecting an astonishing grasp and integration of economics, finance, technology, history, and the brilliance and foibles of the human character, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy stems from Rumelt’s decades of digging beyond the superficial to address hard questions with honesty and integrity.

In On Their Own Terms, Benjamin A. Elman offers a much-needed synthesis of early Chinese science during the Jesuit period (1600-1800) and the modern sciences as they evolved in China under Protestant influence (1840s-1900). By 1600 Europe was ahead of Asia in producing basic machines, such as clocks, levers, and pulleys, that would be necessary for the mechanization of agriculture and industry. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Elman shows, Europeans still sought from the Chinese their secrets of producing silk, fine textiles, and porcelain, as well as large-scale tea cultivation. Chinese literati borrowed in turn new algebraic notations of Hindu-Arabic origin, Tychonic cosmology, Euclidian geometry, and various computational advances. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, imperial reformers, early Republicans, Guomindang party cadres, and Chinese Communists have all prioritized science and technology. In this book, Elman gives a nuanced account of the ways in which native Chinese science evolved over four centuries, under the influence of both Jesuit and Protestant missionaries. In the end, he argues, the Chinese produced modern science on their own terms.

What's it like to start a revolution? How do you build the biggest tech company in the world? And why do you walk away from it all? Paul Allen co-founded Microsoft. Together he and Bill Gates turned an idea - writing software - into a company and then an entire industry. This is the story of how it came about: two young mavericks who turned technology on its head, the bitter battles as each tried to stamp his vision on the future and the ruthless brilliance and fierce commitment.