This manual, TRADOC Pamphlet TP 600-4 The Soldier's Blue Book: The Guide for Initial Entry Soldiers August 2019, is the guide for all Initial Entry Training (IET) Soldiers who join our Army Profession. It provides an introduction to being a Soldier and Trusted Army Professional, certified in character, competence, and commitment to the Army. The pamphlet introduces Solders to the Army Ethic, Values, Culture of Trust, History, Organizations, and Training. It provides information on pay, leave, Thrift Saving Plans (TSPs), and organizations that will be available to assist you and your Families. The Soldier's Blue Book is mandated reading and will be maintained and available during BCT/OSUT and AIT.This pamphlet applies to all active Army, U.S. Army Reserve, and the Army National Guard enlisted IET conducted at service schools, Army Training Centers, and other training activities under the control of Headquarters, TRADOC.

From the bestselling author of Dress Gray. “Part-war story, part-family saga . . . zeroes in on the men of the Blue family, three generations of soldiers” (The Washington Post). In the eagerly anticipated follow-up to his first novel, Dress Gray, Truscott turns his attention to the Vietnam War and delivers a suspenseful, sprawling court-martial drama set in Saigon in 1969. At twenty-three, platoon leader Lt. Matthew Nelson Blue is the youngest member of an army family; his father is a colonel and his grandfather a profane, cantankerous retired general. Shortly after one of his men is killed by friendly fire while on routine patrol, Blue is arrested and charged with desertion in the face of the enemy. Arriving in Vietnam, his father and grandfather end their long estrangement and join forces to clear the young soldier’s name. Truscott’s plot offers less than initially meets the eye; the nature of the conspiracy and cover-up that nearly destroy Blue is fairly easy to predict, as is the disillusionment about Vietnam that eventually befalls his seniors. The author’s intimate portrayal of the texture of army life gives his narrative a more deeply felt sense of anger and regret than others in its genre, and makes its final revelations more powerful than they might otherwise have been.

Between 1864 and 1877, during the height of the Plains Indian wars, Pawnee Indian scouts rendered invaluable service to the United States Army. They led missions deep into contested territory, tracked resisting bands, spearheaded attacks against enemy camps, and on more than one occasion saved American troops from disaster on the field of battle. In War Party in Blue, Mark van de Logt tells the story of the Pawnee scouts from their perspective, detailing the battles in which they served and recounting hitherto neglected episodes. Employing military records, archival sources, and contemporary interviews with current Pawnee tribal members—some of them descendants of the scouts—Van de Logt presents the Pawnee scouts as central players in some of the army's most notable campaigns. He argues that military service allowed the Pawnees to fight their tribal enemies with weapons furnished by the United States as well as to resist pressures from the federal government to assimilate them into white society. According to the author, it was the tribe's martial traditions, deeply embedded in their culture, that made them successful and allowed them to retain these time-honored traditions. The Pawnee style of warfare, based on stealth and surprise, was so effective that the scouts' commanding officers did little to discourage their methods. Although the scouts proudly wore the blue uniform of the U.S. Cavalry, they never ceased to be Pawnees. The Pawnee Battalion was truly a war party in blue.

In this new book, the development of an altogether new uniform for troops of the United States Army, a few years after the Civil War, has never been told so well or so comprehensively. In this volume, the sequel to the authors highly praised Army Blue: The Uniform of Uncle Sams Regulars, 1848-1873, John Langellier continues the story of the evolution of American army uniforms during a critical period that saw experimentation and innovation finally surmount conservatism to produce some of the more practically functional and aesthetically appealing martial clothing in American history. The breadth of Langelliers research, coupled with his years of accumulated expertise in the study of historical army uniforms, is evident throughout, and together make this book the most thorough and precise accounting the topic has ever received.

In this new, extensively researched volume, U.S. Army uniforms - including enlisted soldiers, officers, insignia, and headgear - from the years 1848-1873 are examined in exacting detail. For the first time, original accounts from official reports, diaries, and other primary sources will be combined with color photographs of extraordinary surviving specimens, hundreds of important black and white images, as well as artwork from the period to tell the story of what the American soldier wore during these years. Army Blue represents more than twenty years of research in major institutions and private collections throughout the United States, and offers a concise overview of a topic which promises to be must reading for collectors, modelers, and curators alike.

Frontiersmen in Blue is a comprehensive history of the achievements and failures of the United States Regular and Volunteer Armies that confronted the Indian tribes of the West in the two decades between the Mexican War and the close of the Civil War. Between 1848 and 1865 the men in blue fought nearly all of the western tribes. Robert Utley describes many of these skirmishes in consummate detail, including descriptions of garrison life that was sometimes agonizingly isolated, sometimes caught in the lightning moments of desperate battle.